In War-Time

1 Troopship
(s.s. Baltic: Mid-Atlantic: July, 1917)

Dark waters into crystalline brilliance break
About the keel, as through the moonless night
The dark ship moves in its own moving lake
Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light;
And to the clear horizon, all around
Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright
As though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and white,
A million moons in the dark green waters drowned.

And staring at the magic with eyes adream,
That never till now have looked upon the sea,
Boys from the Middle-West lounge listlessly
In the unlanterned darkness, boys who go
Beckoned by some unchallengeable gleam
To unknown lands to fight an unknown foe.

2 The Conscript

Indifferent, flippant, earnest, but all bored,
The doctors sit in the glare of electric light
Watching the endless stream of naked white
Bodies of men for whom their hasty award
Means life or death, maybe, or the living death
Of mangled limbs, blind eyes or darkened brain:
And the chairman, as his monocle falls again,
Pronounces each doom with easy, indifferent breath.

Then suddenly they all shudder as they see
A young man move before them wearily,
Pallid and gaunt as one already dead;
And they are strangely troubled as he stands
With arms outstretched and drooping, thorn-crowned head,
The nail-marks glowing in his feet and hands.

3 Air-Raid

Night shatters in mid-heaven: the bark of guns,
The roar of planes, the crash of bombs, and all
The unshackled skiey pandemonium stuns
The senses to indifference, when a fall
Of masonry near by startles awake,
Tingling wide-eyed, prick-eared, with bristling hair,
Each sense within the body crouched aware
Like some sore-hunted creature in the brake.

Yet side by side we lie in the little room,
Just touching hands, with eyes and ears that strain
Keenly, yet dream-bewildered, through tense gloom,
Listening in helpless stupor of insane
Drugged nightmare panic fantastically wild,
To the quiet breathing of our sleeping child.

4 In War-Time

As gaudy flies across a pewter plate,
On the grey disk of the unrippling sea,
Beneath an airless, sullen sky of slate
Dazzled destroyers zig-zag restlessly,
While underneath the sleek and livid tide,
Blind monsters nosing through the soundless deep,
Lean submarines among blind fishes glide
And through primeval weedy forests sweep.

Over the hot grey surface of my mind
Glib, motley rumours zig-zag without rest,
While deep within the darkness of my breast
Monstrous desires, lean, sinister and blind,
Slink through unsounded night and stir the slime
And ooze of oceans of forgotten time.

5 Ragtime

A minx in khaki struts the limelit boards:
With false moustache, set smirk and ogling eyes
And straddling legs and swinging hips she tries
To swagger it like a soldier, while the chords
Of rampant ragtime jangle, clash, and clatter;
And over the brassy blare and drumming din
She strains to squirt her squeaky notes and thin
Spirtle of sniggering lascivious patter.

Then out into the jostling Strand I turn,
And down a dark lane to the quiet river,
One stream of silver under the full moon,
And think of how cold searchlights flare and burn
Over dank trenches where men crouch and shiver.
Humming, to keep their hearts up, that same tune.

6 Leave

Crouched on the crowded deck, we watch the sun
In naked gold leap out of a cold sea
Of shivering silver; and stretching drowsily
Crampt legs and arms, relieved that night is done
And the slinking, deep-sea peril past, we turn
Westward to see the chilly, sparkling light
Quicken the Wicklow Hills, till jewel-bright
In their Spring freshness of dewy green they burn.

And silent on the deck beside me stands
A soldier, lean and brown, with restless hands,
And eyes that stare unkindling on the life
And rapture of green hills and glistening morn:
He comes from Flanders home to his dead wife,
And I, from England, to my son newborn.

7 Bacchanal
(November, 1918)

Into the twilight of Trafalgar Square
They pour from every quarter, banging drums
And tootling penny trumpets: to a blare
Of tin mouth-organs, while a sailor strums
A solitary banjo, lads and girls,
Locked in embraces, in a wild dishevel
Of flags and streaming hair, with curdling skirls
Surge in a frenzied, reeling, panic revel.

Lads who so long have looked death in the face,
Girls who so long have tended death’s machines,
Released from the long terror shriek and prance:
And watching them, I see the outrageous dance,
The frantic torches and the tambourines
Tumultuous on the midnight hills of Thrace.