Lesbia Harford: Verses about Nature

Child Sun
Why will you play Peep Bo
Now in, now out
The workroom window so?
True 'tis
That there are children here;
But they've no time
To play Peep Bo, my dear.

Somebody brought in lilac,
Lilac after rain.
Isn't it strange, belovéd of mine
You'll not see it again?
Lilac glad with the sun on it
Flagrant fair from birth,
Mourns in colour, belovéd of mine,
You laid in the earth.

O little plum tree in the garden, you're
Aflower again,
With memories of a million springs and my
Brief years of pain.
O little tree, you have the power to find
Your youth again,
Grow young, while I grow old in tenderness
And wise in pain.

Frolic mountain winds
Innocent and shy,
Kiss my darling's cheek
As they scurry by.
Little fragrant leaves
With the dawn astir,
Make a million songs
Full of love for her.
Will she wake or sleep
These two nights she'll spend
Up the mountain-side,
My dear truant friend?

When I was a child,
I felt the fairies' power.
Of a sudden my dry life
Would burst into flower.
The skies were my path,
The sun my comrade fair,
And the night was a dark rose
I wore in my hair.
But thou camest, love,
Who madest me unfree.
I will dig myself a grave
And hide there from thee.

Cherry plum blossom in an old tin jug —
Oh, it is lovely, beautiful and fair,
With sun on it and little shadows mixed
All in among the fragrant wonder there.
Cherry plum blossom on the workroom bench
Where we can see it all our working hours.
In all my garden days of ladyhood,
I never met girls who so loved sweet flowers.

When I go up to work the young blue sea
Has not awaked from dreams:
It fades to meet the blue sky mistily:
It gleams.
I say,
'All day
It will not wake from dreams.'
And yet, when I come back from work, the sea
Has a green sombreness;
As if the hours between were somehow hours
Of stress.
I read
Its need
Of dim forgetfulness.

Now all the lovely days are past,
The hours of sun and leagues of sea,
And starry nights that lay between
Yourself and me.
Our boat has left the sea behind.
She lies beside the friendly dock.
And soon the gangway will go down,
And lips will meet, and hands will lock,
And carriers will come climbing up
To take my things and leave us free.
There's trams and streets and home at last
For you and me.

My window pane is broken
Just a bit
Where the small curtain doesn't
Cover it.
And in the afternoon
I like to lie
And watch the pepper tree
Against the sky.
Pink berries and blue sky
And leaves and sun
Are very fair to rest
One's eyes upon.
And my tired feet are resting
On the bed
And there's a pillow under
My tired head.
Parties and balls and books
I know are best
But when I've finished work
I like to rest.

Today
I'd like to be a nun
And go and say
My rosary beneath the trees out there.
In this shy sun
The raindrops look like silver beads of prayer.
So blest
Am I, I'd like to tell
God and the rest
Of heaven-dwellers in the garden there
All that befell
Last week. Such gossip is as good as prayer.
Ah well!
I have, since I'm no nun,
No beads to tell,
And being happy must be all my prayer.
Yet 'twould be fun
To walk with God 'neath the wet trees out there.

They are so glad of a young companion,
They hail and bless me, these boys of mine,
And I whose pathway was dark and lonely
Have no more need of the sun to shine.
We'll walk in darkness, obscure, despised,
We'll mourn each other at prison gates.
These boys are splendid as mountain eagles,
But mountain eagles have eagle mates.
The girls who prattle of work and pleasure,
Of last week's picnic and this week's joys,
Of past and present, nor heed the future,
Are lagging comrades for dawnstruck boys.

This year I have seen autumn with new eyes,
Glimpsed hitherto undreamt of mysteries
In the slow ripening of the town-bred trees;
Horse-chestnut lifting wide hands to the skies;
And silver beech turned gold now winter's near;
And elm, whose leaves like little suns appear
Scattering light — all, all have made me wise
And writ me lectures in earth's loveliness,
Whether they laugh through the grey morning mist,
Or by the loving sun at noon are kissed
Or seek at night the high-swung lamp's caress.
Does autumn such a novel splendour wear
Simply because my love has yellow hair?

Green and blue
First-named of colours believe these two.
They first of colours by men were seen
This grass colour, tree colour,
Sky colour, sea colour,
Magic-named, mystic-souled, blue and green.
Later came
Small subtle colours like tongues of flame,
Small jewel colours for treasure trove,
Not fruit colour, flower colour,
Cloud colour, shower colour,
But purple, amethyst, violet and mauve.
These remain,
Two broad fair colours for our larger gain
Stretched underfoot or spreading wide on high,
Green beech colour, vine colour,
Gum colour, pine colour,
Blue of the noonday and the moonlit sky.

There's a big park just close to where we live —
Trees in a row
And shaggy grass whereon the dead leaves blow.
And in the middle round a great lagoon
The fair yachts sail
In loveliness that makes the water pale.
Last night I went to walk along the road
Beside the park
And feel the kisses of the wintry dark.
It's the best place to watch the evening come
For mists are there
And lights and shadows and the lake is fair
And last night looking up I saw two swans
Fly overhead
With long black necks and their white wings outspread.
Above the houses citywards they went,
An arrowy pair
In secret — white and black and dark and fair.

When my lover put the sea between us
And went wandering in Italy
My poor silly heart miscalled his journey—
'Leaving me'.
Towns of Spain and Italy he stayed in,
Each and all of them to me unknown;
How could he find pleasure being a lover,
Being alone!
Truly I was not as fair as Venice,
Noble as Siena, strange as Rome.
Certainly he loved Milan and Florence
More than home.
I believed his absence had estranged us
And across the heart-dividing sea
Sent him word that I no longer loved him.
Foolish me!
Came his answer after months of waiting
Echoing my letter, lie for lie.
Truth or lies I know not. Which unfaithful,
He or I.

He has picked grapes in the sun. Oh it seems
Like a fairy tale,
Like a tale of dreams.
'He in his slender youth, with vines, with sun,
Under a blazing sky'—
The tale might run.
There's beauty for eye and mind, for sight and thought,
Here on the surface.
Plunge. This beauty's nought.
Vision succeeds to dream. Deep in his heart
Fierier beauty lives
Than this surface art.
He has no song to sing of fragrant soil
Who in his heart revolts
At unlovely toil.
He has known the real, the truth of it. It seems
Misery eats the heart
Out of fairest dreams.
He in his slender youth, at strife, in vain
Offers his life to set
The world right again.

This morning I got up before the sun
Had seized the hill,
And scrambled heart-hot, noisy, past each one
In sleep laid still.
There they lay helpless under the gold stars,
Good folk and kind,
By sleep the robber spoiled of heavenly wares,
Made deaf and blind.
The leaves cracked, the grass rustled as I passed.
I might have been
Myself the thief. Each minute seemed the last
Of freedom's teen.
But lonely down the hill in Levite's guise
Or priest's, I ran.
I had not proved myself, true loverwise,
Samaritan.
The wind went by me, pulling at my hair.
I left the track.
My last night's purpose terrible and fair
Came sweeping back.
Among the bracken under a white tree
I sat me down,
And slipped my shoulders very stealthily
From out my gown.
One minute I lay naked on the grass,
Then sat upright.
The hot wind had its will with me, and kissed
My bosom white.
The stars gleamed in the grey before the rose.
Were they not eyes
That peered and leered, and seemed about to close
In shocked surprise?
With the whole sky at gaze, there had I lain.
Had dared thus much.
I ran on frightened down the hill again,
With gown to clutch.
Down by the creek the blackberries grew thick,
And as I passed
They stretched long arms to hinder me and prick,
Make me shamefast?
Nay, they laughed, pulling at my slipping gown,
Would have laid bare
To chance men on the hillside looking down
The whiteness there.
Close by the blackwoods is the bathing pool
The men have made.
I was no sport for stars, no bramble's fool
In the trees' shade.
But when I stood with limbs and body free
And gleaming fair,
The little kind ferns screened and covered me
Like Agnes' hair.
I slipped into the shallow water, felt
The fine brown sand
Of the creek bottom, shuddered, splashed and knelt
Too cold to stand.
Happy and shivering, with trees overhead,
Fern walls around,
I listened to the water talking, led
To praise by sound.
So I have felt the wind and water's kiss,
Though I'm a maid.
Better be man than be a girl, and miss
Feeling afraid.

We climbed that hill,
The road flushed red in pride
At being beauty's boundary. Either side
Stretched beauty, beauty ever, beauty still.
For on the left
Rose sandhills bound together by the deft
Long fingers of sea-grass,
Humped like the Punch and Judy of a farce,
Comical, cleft
With gaps for wind to pass,
Spotted
With dark
Clumped tea-tree, stark
With rushes, fierce with burrs,
Blotted
With purple earth,
Stains, remnants, marks of birth
On too-exuberant beauty.
On the right
Long paddocks stooped under a cloudy sky.
'They're lovely paddocks. Look at them,' you said.
I turned my head.
What I'd thought gray
Was seen
To be the young beginning of live green
Under a spray
Of ghostly weed-stalks—lilacs, mauves and blues
At interplay—
A delicate tracery of shadow hues.
'There's colour,' I began
And straightway knew
I saw what you
Saw not, and yet your vision was not mine.
Your eyes were on the line
The sweep and curve of the fields against the sky.
You'd heard
My poor beginning of a word.
I had no more to praise
An unfamiliar loveliness. To gaze
Was all my praise.
At the hilltop it was your turn to say
'There's colour.' You had found
Silver and gold on my Tom Tiddler's ground.
At the roadside
A clump of grasses, all
Caught round a little bush and tangled, tied
With unimagined colours people call
Green when they see them. This was treasure spied
By your eyes with my soul.
You'd liked the whole
Broad sweep of things, had scarcely seen such small
Jewel incidents until
I showed you, who had never watched a hill
Remote in contemplation 'neath far, far skies,
Except with eyes
That had no mind to see
A present beauty, only what might be
If distance were annihilate.
And then,
Where the road crossed the creek we could not cross,
We found again
Our power of sight redoubled by the loss
Of what I'd planned.
You said it was no sense
To pull off shoes and fasten up a skirt
And plunge through dirt
And mud
And water, water
Muddy,
Ruddy,
As zinnias and paint-water and a flood
Of heavy auburn hair. We'd better go
Round by the beach,
Not by the cliffs, to reach
That farthest cliff
I wanted to see tower
Above the waves in colour and in power,
More solid than the sky.
And so
We turned
Seaward among the sea-grass. I had learned
Some of your alien sense of beauty, line
Preferred to colour, distance to the near.
For it was I
Who saw
The lovely curve of the creek.
But the whole shore
Yellow, untrodden, (more
The loveliest thing of our whole lovely week
For subtle curve, unbroken surface, than
For colour) this wide shore
Was yours and mine
And yours and mine the foam
When it would shine
Flower-coloured in a glint of sun. But mine
The hurry
And swift scurry
Of wind-blown tea-tree up the cliff.
We gave
A double dower
Of beauty to each wave
That trailed its hair in the wind before it broke.
For all the power
Of alien philosophies awoke
Our power of sight.
You still proclaim the far
Eternal unity of things that are
Like Plato and the mountains. I prefer
Inchoate beauty, for my part aver
Plurality essential, am content
To find a gain in difference, in a while
Admit there's gain in union. Argument
Recurs. Oh well, at any rate we know
That walk was lovely;
Ecstasies of mind
And subtle mysteries of sight combined
With the dear love of friends to make it so.