Collected Poems Francis Webb

EARLY POEMS

1940–47

The Hero of the Plain

The night is coming quickly,

The watchmen leave their piles,

The plain is now deserted,

Alone for many a mile.

A little child was looking,

For his home again,

A rifle shot comes ringing,

O’er the dusty plain.

The child stands rooted to the spot,

He hears it fire again,

He must! but can he do it?

And try to save the plain?

He seized a left match from the ground

And lights its tiny frame,

He drops it on the signal pile,

It bursts into a flame.

A bullet rings in sudden rush,

He never stirred again,

The trees lift mourning branches

O’er the hero of the plain.

A Sunrise

Dawning’s faint, seraphic banner,

Soft unfurling in the sky

Flushes faint the vault of heaven,

Calls upon the night to die.

See the purple shadows flying

From the bedside of the dying,

With the wind a requiem sighing,

Ere he bid the stars good-bye.

Misty clouds are swift assembling,

Chords from Eve’s forgotten lyre,

Ere the sun in rampant glory,

Plunge them deep in living fire.

And the birds, ’mid splendour soaring,

Pour their matins forth, adoring,

Blessings for a day imploring,

Peace and love—the heart’s desire.

Now the fiery king, arising,

From his burnished disc has rolled

Radiant waves of trembling colour,

Dancing flecks of red and gold.

Pure in spotless beauty burning,

One more leaf is softly turning,

One more goal for human yearning,

One more page of life to fold.

Australian Night

The sober shades of eventide,

Creep westward o’er the sky,

And slanting rays of golden dust,

Across the valleys lie.

While, through the stillness overhead,

In black relief ’gainst flaming red,

Like spirits who pursue the dead,

The birds go stringing by.

Agleam, the dusky purple shades

Steal out from forest gloom,

An aureole of heliotrope,

Spun out from hidden loom.

And, free from daytime’s heat and glare,

The flowers exotic scents prepare,

To loose them on the freshened air,

And render night a bloom.

At length, upon the velvet skies,

As on a dusky deep,

Another galleon yet is launched,

Her lonely watch to keep.

Soft rays of purest, filtered light,

Dilute the inky depths of night,

—A landscape bathed in silver white—

—A smiling world, asleep.

Retreat

I know a solitude, where pointed trees

Half-baffle the rife sunlight, chequering

The bush with softly waving lights; and bees

Keep up a monotone, a murmuring.

Pulsing the pause ’twixt dream and dream, these chimes

A silvery lapse of water; birds sing there,

The magpie’s carol spells the heavy air,

The lorn coachwhip calls there, oftentimes.

A Lost wind whispers, wraith-like, in the leaves,

And gently wimples the fern’s flowing fronds,

Plays with the halcyon water-drops, and leaves

A myrrhed musk in the swaying wattle-wands,

Opiate-charged for sleep. No colours bright

Dazzle the eye; a sarsenet stream of mist

Sobers and tames; and serried heaven-light

Breaks through in shadowed sheens of amethyst.

This is true Silence, silked and strung with sound,

And pang-fired with a myriad lutany;

And ’tis the only rest my heart has found,

Vexed with earth’s cymbals, tinkling emptily.

O, for such quietude my eyes are faint

And my ears, stunned with swelling gyres of noise,

For the peaceful frenzy of one sweet soul-plaint,

One hazed vision—and one answering Voice.

Palace of Dreams

When death-dewed night is all a-swoon,

Haunted by the driving moon,

Haunted by long sweeps of shade,

Monolith and colonnade

Writhe fantastic arms in air;

Echoing flag and hollow stair

Chequered are by deep, black bars;

Far from grace of winds and stars,

Enmeshed in immortality,

I tread these stairs, and none but I.

Darkly yawns the looming portal,

Solid-hewn, deep-grained, immortal,

Where the stony griffins keep

Station, sunk in lidless sleep;

Earth-plots, where no flower blooms;

Cloisters, lost in mazing glooms;

Warded locks of mystery,

Oblivion the only key.

I have sensed, remote in dreams,

Thick musk, fuming censer-steams,

And heard a distant organ pour

Wild cadence down each corridor;

Traced the crusted wall-outline,

Hieroglyphed with secret sign,

Lingering o’er each storied scroll,

With nameless knowledge in my soul.

Alone, in one night’s spacious years,

Beset by crowding hopes and fears,

I have yearned and thought to see,

Through the moon-starts, fitfully,

Another wanderer slowly climb

These worn steps of Loss and Time—

No voice-music, hand-caress,

Spans my silent loneliness:

Enmeshed in immortality,

I tread these stairs—and none but I.

Moonlight

Moonlight comes quietly dreaming into my room;

The spells of midnight are potent, deep,

Dissolving my sleep.

And now fine filigree patterns in trail and sweep

Spin out on the wall, as spun from a secret loom.

Where lately the white-faced clock stammered, mesmerised,

There is light; pale gleamings play on the polished stone

Of the hearth, like sun-glints on water crystallised

By a necromancer; enchanted, alone,

The pinchbeck vase is all a-glimmer, and glowing

In snowy streams through the open window flowing.

What living thing could sleep on such a night?

Winds haunt the trees;

In the spacious skies there are white

Stars spinning; and the late walker sees

Pale ghosts of roses, swimming in ecstasy

Of dews; poinsettias springing

Forth like the painted flames of a dusky pyre;

And hosts of keen leaves flinging,

Like nomad spears, their sharp, green arrow-glints of fire.

Outside, the thickset hedges are rife with sounds

Of industrious little teeth and nibbling beaks;

Sometimes into my taut ear breaks

The distant bark of a dog; through the city-bounds

Are far enough, I can catch a chime of bells,

As the light wind eddies or swells,

Twice . . . thrice . . . and all is quiet again,

While the crystal wells of the moon beat down over houses and men.

I could lie for hours, long hours, in this love-light, dreaming

The dreams of night, that are waking dreams,

With these long mote-myriad streams,

And the shine on the vase and the fireplace, glowing and gleaming:

But the restless shuffle of tides on the wet sands

Breaks into the quietude of evening shores,

And the glooms of sleep are as haunted corridors

Where Life, like a wall at the end of Illusion, stands.

The fine-spun patterns of Fancy fade, must fade

Into the shade

Of a restless slumber.

. . . see how the wan moon spills

One last, lingering levin of Peace, and sinks in the chaliced hills.

Night Swimming

Look at that silver water shimmering for you,

Waiting to cradle you in a sudden, cool embrace;

To set your sleeping sinews a-ripple in all their grace;

To revolve your gritted brain on the oiled bands of the shadow—

This is the place.

You, with all your thoughts paralleled into blueprints;

You, with destruction’s statistics; you, with your guns;

You pitiful—you brilliant, furious ones—

Off with it, doff it all! Then, on with this motley,

Make this living magic yours, once.

No deep growl in the warm, black throat of night;

The searchlight dreams on a ripple. Lithe bodies, dashing,

Knife the clear moonlight. Like columns crashing,

The whipped sprays crumble to a powdery froth.

Bare arms gleam in the air like swords flashing.

Smoke lifting; the strong fire writhing in its wooden fetters

—All this is not the animation, the breath

Of another existence. It is the current beneath

War, rumours of war. Grip fast this minute; treasure it,

This minute. In a shellburst you will laugh at the idiot, death.

To a Poet

Wayfarer, glorious one,

Heart fiery as a sun, lips stammering prophecies—

That you should pity me is credible, conceivable;

But it is unbelievable that I should pity you.

Yet don’t you think, great one, in all your splendid journeys,

Your combats, your tourneys with this gangrened world of ours,

That there are some vignettes you may have overlooked, have lost,

Since you do not melt your mind’s frost with any red-hot pennies?

Can those stern eyes, where beauty enters throbbing,

Have missed the conductor bobbing like a monkey on the tram?

Have your alert brain’s sentinels been out setting pickets

Against the child chewing tickets, change rolling on the floor;

And factory-girls on the early trains, rough badinage and chaff;

The ceremonial photograph, like a bottle circulating;

And the hordes of relatives, virago-tongued and vicious

(Irony most delicious!) over a ghost’s furniture?

Now yours is the grand power, great for good or evil:

The schoolboy (poor devil!) will be told off to study you.

On hills over the sky you have set your plinths of stone;

You have crushed yourself, alone, in unscented, unstarred valleys.

You have fixed, fired a cresset that will always be alive;

I toil, delve, drive at my ballad-blocks of roughness—

That you should pity me is credible, conceivable;

Exquisitely unbelievable that I should pity you!

Cap and Bells

Tonight the stars are yellow sparks

Dashed out from the moon’s hot steel;

And for me, now, no menace lurks

In this darkness crannied by lights; nor do I feel

A trace of the old loneliness here in this crowded train;

While, far below me, each naked light trails a sabre

Of blue steel over the grave great peace of the harbour.

To know this peace is to have outgrown

Thoughts of despair, of some driving crank of fate,

Of corroded tissues in the bleak shell of a town:

Darkness, lights, happiness—all are right,

All bear messages of the hidden heart;

And for me always the grave great peace is stronger

In flaring colours, and a laugh, and a careless singer.

Die in the blood and salt of your thoughts; and die

When the columns of your sun are thrust aside and broken;

But I have chosen the little, obscure way

In the dim, shouting vortex; I have taken

A fool’s power in his cap and bells

And know that in my time the haggard Prince will discover

A blunt shell of Yorick, that laughs for ever and ever.

Idyll

At noon the sun puffed up, outsize.

We saw a township on the rise;

Jack croaked ‘A pub’, then filed his throat,

Spat out an encroaching horde of flies.

One-headed Cerberus near the door

Bit off the fag-end of a snore,

Allowed us a red eye’s filmy grace

And veiled the awful sight once more.

Sad barman showed a yellow fang;

Sweat was dirt-cheap, the whole place rang

As six-foot told a ten-foot yarn;

One chap was under, and one sang.

I’d bottle up that song without

A licence, just to serve it out,

A ballad, long and cool for days

Of epics, dry canteens, and drought.

We shouldered through the cork-tipped fog,

Paid several zacks and downed the grog;

Then like the brown fox of copperplate

Made exit over the lazy dog.

A Tip for Saturday

I met Jack on a Friday night,

Headway was medium, in spite

Of lurching walls in the spinning town,

Taxis that sought to mow him down,

Strange girls that dashed into his arms,

Then cursed him in no uncertain terms.

The air was still, the sky was grey.

I thought of tips for Saturday.

The navigator’s task affords

Small safety from a spate of words.

He pointed me to starry skies

On stilts of queer philosophies,

While oaths made rapid cubic gain,

Like roly-poly on the plain.

I quote one mighty thought on wars:

There’d be some friction if the stars

Were like us, macrocosms jammed

Edgeways like sardines on this damned

Insignificant little planet:

Figuratively, literally, he spat on it.

Meekly surrendering to the shocks

Of war, religion, politics,

My voice could not attempt a breach.

Jack filled the road with noisy speech,

With gusto, verve, and animation

From Windsor pub to Town Hall station.

The air was still, the sky was grey.

Reluctantly I turned away

Without a tip for Saturday.

Compliments of the Audience

(To certain contemporary poets)

Before the show starts, a calling of nerves to order.

For the few fortunate reviewers a walk-over; for many

Of us two-and-sixpenny seats, a good view, but harder

Than the gold and morocco for opulent half a guinea.

Lights out—we are ready, so many gaping wounds

For the crude application of salt, or a malted morphine.

The conductor fools with his baton; appropriate sounds

Like zigzag titles flicker over our screen.

Point one—well taken! we furnish no riposte,

Admit we are animals gutted out with the flame

Of lust and savagery—maggots happily lost

In our gangrened cities. We wriggle with the maggot’s shame.

No God, you say? Good!—pass us our largest axe,

Plummet the steeples, storm the confessional!

To be moulded in hands of ignorance like so much wax

When the future’s locked up, the present open to all!

How’s this: we are giant things trapped in an endless mural,

Sad rebels oiled into timeless agony,

Fixed by the artist Fate to gestures of peril?

We dress up in silent suffering and dignity.

All over—pray, pardon the yawn we cannot hide;

Be indulgent with us, the lost ones, as back we go

To the old faiths, philosophies, oysters and beer outside,

Yet never forgetting your most impressive show.

Images in Winter

(From a longer poem)

They were no ‘hollow men’ who saw with me

The sleepy, rolling andante of still water,

Spun tissues of green and purple; and after

Sluggish spirals of darkness dusted the sky,

The squat bluffs sliding chainwise into pits

Troubled by floating colour. Each slow morning

Was the slim beauty around a corner of sleep.

Vaulting the moss-pocked wharves, a fog laid nets

Scarving the gullets of slouching, cynical streets.

A stray word fell like a stoned bird from the lips.

The street lamps quivered in a jellied iris of gold;

And someone wading through the tumbling whiteness

Wore mystery with the air of an ancient ship;

A thousand petty sirens skirled and filled

The muffled air with a symphony’s completeness.

Out in the bay, fantastic hulls lay rotting

(Long since burnt out, pared down for their iron thoughts),

At grips with the pulling mud, and still awaiting

The legend of yellow maps, the challenge of ports.

And so I make the secret yours, my friend

Of long-winded endurance! This is why

(In an era of free-verse, poor company)

I pin my faith on slipping images

Twisting like smoke or a fish caught in the hand.

These are some company for the crumbling galleries,

The brain of this, our black synthetic dusk.

I keep a record of the whip of seas;

My candle clasps blue fingers on the desk;

That tattered swagman, Death on a Friday night

May pop in with the appropriate metaphor,

And then our talk is of momentous things:

A broken harp smouldering from the brush of wings;

A ship’s brown wooden wheel that brings the spar,

The gull in a green storm clear as the maker’s name;

Such huge conceits as these, while the dodging flame

Of the candle writes cunning shadows on the air.

The desert edges out its blunt grey sands;

Our household gods are the clock, the broken mirror,

And through the seven lean visions of this terror

I keep my faith with you, my vanished friends.

Middle Harbour

The hour’s a graven depth; all images gather

To a giant balance, a level climax and height.

You speak of colour—here’s where all colour sleeps

Misted by the breathing of wedded dimness and light.

Each poised oar trails its phosphorescent feather,

The curving brilliance leaps

And shivers back to the dark lungs of the water.

The scales are even and tremble; the glass trembles;

The image ripens, shudders away and tumbles

Down long furrows of perspective to the eye.

Perfect impact of peace, and one fool apart.

O fingers of thought, not captive to the heart,

Why jangle these chords of loveliness for a theme,

With a bird, a quiet fisher, a twitching gleam,

So many swaying lyrics to cry

You have been well paid: take up your purse and go?

Surely in hopelessness I will cast down

The Jacob’s coat of a few jaded colours, be plan

Of the etching, not a shadow of discord thrown

By the wiry hands of a mumbling moralist;

Be one with the cormorant, or the fisherman,

Nothing for the head but a haul, a line for the wrist,

Everything positive and past concern—

Speechless with flight, to leave all thought crumpled there,

Motley cast down beside the marble stair.

An Old Record

The books have devised a setting fit for us.

Some documented stage-convention claims

Its candle—a tangle of shadows laid thus and thus,

Stapled with tricks of colour as in our vague dreams;

The metronome like that inquiring clock

Niched in a heart’s grey tower, as I might say

Allotting its due of panic to each day,

Huge traffic of life and death, the lapse and shock

Of derelict thought, event.

And on fresh tack

I thread spent hulls, reefs of the future, and danger,

Pirate of peace, to a port of drift and slack,

I ring you with mountain-minutes, dead, silver singer.

For properties—I am the shadow and glimmer;

My clean-poised thought like an otter will strike after

Some warped glint in the depths, a silver tremor,

Still careless if all it finds be a stone in the water.

In this powdering light on the shaken yellow beach

I finger a salvage-shred, bleached waxen shell

Still shivering with fugitive passion of a bell,

Epic of drama and storm passed out of reach—

Yet death, hungry for fragments, switches back a long

Tentacle from that storm: the bell swept out so far

Is quarry for the throttling wind; so your fading song

Swings out in cadence like a falling star.

This jaded earth props and staggers—give me meaning

For spur, or a call from the garbled scrub of the night;

Beauty, I tell you, seems almost past sustaining;

Baffled by maniac hands that bluff the light

So few, like Roland at the crumbling wall

Circling God knows what perils, will wind out

A rusted note of challenge, and jauntily wait

For an echo—so much as a simple flint to fall.

And now that leit-motif, that last note curls

Out to the thronged ditches and valour fills the sky.

Hear how that whippet oboe snarls—

A yellow streak of defiance—at the crowding hills!

Bridgehead

A chain of footprints over the sand that night,

Emphatic and in one direction headed from the sea;

None marked the stealthy bridgehead—there was no light

For the confusion of such an enemy;

No steady candle-power, but we all remember

How lightning laid weals on the rigid arch of the sky.

Not being fools that the crooked hands of the rain

Might beckon to witness a final grating and flare,

Giant vision of the earth surrendered again

Down splintered glass perspectives of each crashed year;

We caressed our failing fires, played halting chess

With ghostly pawns on the darkened plots of despair.

Stirred up the planets into a whirling flux,

Wound out the spattering gullies of the thunder!

We crouched in our beauty, waiting for the stacks

To topple, pinning our sullen bodies under

The frozen flanks of death on a broken world,

Sprawling over the flattened smudge of the cinder.

Yet did we not hear some alien arc of sound

Swinging against the battering leagues of sea?

That quaking light played zigzag tricks around

Our starting bridges of sight and sanity;

Often the twitching eyes of the nearly-dead

Grope back for the smile of the sun in a twisted tree.

Out there again—surely the lifted muzzle

Of laughter wedging into the snarling skies,

Besieging our shuttered windows with the dazzle

Of anti-climax playing on reddened eyes?

Over the wheeling mist of settling cities

Flashed the ironic laughter of sunrise.

The Mountains

Stumbling through channels of silence, we send out

That wild note of our onset to twist along

Paths of the wounded light, and veer about

The mountains with blunted mumblings of a gong.

And lean, grey, avid angels of the mist

Flap past us for a moment in sullen flight;

Sink back to another æon of unrest,

Chained by the iron chasms about their feet.

This is where Time died centuries ago,

His huge, white, rigid body broken over

The giant wheel of the sky to a flux of snow,

And mist still wandering near him, like a lover.

Vancouver by Rail

A scrap of hill on a grey sky;

Huge claws of distance powdering up

A mass of naked, dead-white plains;

And bare posts keeping decent step—

Here’s gold for memory’s rusted bins,

Rich purple for her floating floors,

Queer treasure to sift up behind

A brain’s uneasily-guarded doors.

Someone claims silver rivers soon:

All beauty’s down the line, I know—

Blunt trees and mountains staggering

Under a dazzling drag of snow;

And there the silly fish of thought

Will not find twitching-space for a fin.

As for this cold, thin element,

They gulp it quickly, deeply, in.

The Hulks at Noumea

Traveller, pocketed in running whorls,

Fooling at hide-and-seek with dogged Time,

You may find peace here when the sky unfurls

And war’s a spread tornado, leaving calm;

Find satiation for those whittling hungers

Plunging you into the dust for curios

When your heart’s Helen, with failing guns, surrenders

To a tattered photograph as the light goes.

Perhaps, when desires and bitterness have subsided,

Stumbling down future gangways, you’ll give thanks

For the grand Comedy that has provided

Legions of snapped-off masks and bleaching planks

Wanting your Midas-thought, your heart’s full play,

More spiritual than wind that claws and pulls

Like a wharf-labourer striving to drag away

The little pillage of seas, these unnamed hulls.

The sun’s for youth and harshness, a flung stone

Echoing around the four iron walls of the brain,

Sharp to expose and batter the fractured bone.

The dry, yellow throat of dawn is eager to drain

Draughts of legend and kindness that night spills.

But now night’s mystery links me as I stand

To the preposterous little hunchbacked hills,

With darkness clamping over us, like a hand.

That listing schooner seems almost to move

Through the pinched memories of its sea-going,

Like a dead princess in a glass alcove,

Still lovely when the lamp’s fluttering;

Now, as the drifting moon quietly dips down

A silver killick turning in still air,

I hear the chant of the sounder, a curved knife thrown

Through papery distances over water and shore.

And this is the hope of ships that arc the spray,

Take fine lines of tension through storm—are left to rot,

Ticked off and herded into some blind bay;

Darkness may fall and bring an errant thought.

This is our hope who leave dry hulls behind:

When life that is shrouding, purpose, navigator,

Quits fused-out bones for the screaming gull of the wind,

There’ll be moonlight, perhaps a traveller.

Poem for Easter

In our time’s Passion the world rattled with stress

Wind-staggered planks pronging the buckled hide—

Like a spent craft whose sweep hangs listless and empty

Twitching in each aimless current, without a guide.

And it was easy enough then to drift about like the sweep

Under a bare pole for totem and a languid star

Sagging with its own battles; our kind of peace

Dozed over Time and Death and eternal war.

This was the season of Death, his ultimate lantern

Splitting our cone of darkness, his gaping colour

Marking our path beneath rising weather and water.

Well, we would drown quietly—no hand clutched the tiller.

The blaze lit Death, Death only—we can swear this—

That racked Figure above us like a transfixed gull

Hung dead with a slack, dead mouth, yet whence he came the Voice

Downwind, a lonely thunderclap, crying: ‘Be still’?

Whose hand pinched out the lightning, crushed the storm,

We wondered, drifting on in our dull fashion

Soon forgetting the question; but a few hours later

Dawn came to some of us in the manner of a vision.

Disaster Bay

Seventy-six lives foundered on this corner of the coast,

The lucky ones pulped on the rocks, the others pushing

At the soft clinging