The Bird-Catcher Read Online Free Page B

moon-lit fires of frosty scintillation
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On boughs of frozen pines
    Are jewels from the days before Creation
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Dug from no mortal mines.
    Row upon glassy row, from cornice white
    Of boughs and thatches, hang the slim and even
    Long icicles, like daggers frost-engraven.
    Seven on the eaves and on the pine-bough seven
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These are the swords shall smite
    The heart of Mary Mother, Queen of Heaven;
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For on this winter’s night
    The hidden Flower of Love wakes from its dreaming,
    Breaks the green sheath, uncurls each petal folded;
    And silently as dew on green leaves gleaming
    The world is shattered and a new world moulded
    In Love’s own likeness, ere world-weary men
    Have taken breath and breathed it out again.

The Fisherman’s Rest
    Under the shining helms
    Of piled white cloud
    A sombre screen of elms
    Is set to shroud
    The little red-roofed inn
    From the midday glare.
    Its smoke climbs straight and thin
    Through windless air,
    And breaks on the sombre boughs
    To an azure bloom.
    But we, who know the house
    And the clean-swept room,
    Enter and loudly ask
    Huge Mrs. Reece
    To draw from the new-tapped cask
    A pint apiece
    Topped with a creamy crown
    And clear and cool
    As the trout-stream lagging brown
    In its rock-carved pool.
    Then, after talk and drink,
    We’ll rise and go
    To the brown stream’s trembling brink,
    To crouch and throw
    A tinselled fly, till the trout
    That sulks alone
    Is artfully wheedled out
    From his shadowy stone.

Mrs. Reece Laughs
    Laughter, with us, is no great undertaking;
    A sudden wave that breaks and dies in breaking.
    Laughter, with Mrs. Reece, is much less simple:
    It germinates, it spreads, dimple by dimple,
    From small beginnings, things of modest girth,
    To formidable redundancies of mirth.
    Clusters of subterranean chuckles rise,
    And presently the circles of her eyes
    Close into slits, and all the woman heaves,
    As a great elm with all its mounds of leaves
    Wallows before the storm. From hidden sources
    A mustering of blind volcanic forces
    Takes her and shakes her till she sobs and gapes.
    Then all that load of bottled mirth escapes
    In one wild crow, a lifting of huge hands
    And creaking stays, a visage that expands
    In scarlet ridge and furrow. Thence collapse,
    A hanging head, a feeble hand that flaps
    An apron-end to stir an air and waft
    A steaming face … and Mrs. Reece has laughed.

Expostulation to Helen
    Helen, I’d be, if I could have my wish,
    A pool among the rocks where small, shy fish
    Gleam to and fro, and green and rosy weed
    Sways its long fringes. So I should not heed
    Your comings and your goings nor each whim
    So skilfully contrived to torture him,
    Your chosen fool. And still, as now, each day
    Your vanity would bring you where I lay
    To kneel and on my crystal face below
    Gaze self-entranced, as now; and I should grow
    Beautiful with your beauty, and you would be
    More beautiful for the crystal lights in me.
    But when, self-surfeited, you went away
    I should not care, nor could the blown sea-spray,
    Blurring your image all the winter through,
    Vex the pure, passionless water, strictly true
    To its own being. Only the weeds would swing
    Rosy and green, and the ripples, ring on ring,
    Tremble and wink above the gleaming fish.
    So would I be, if I could have my wish.

To Helen With a Bottle of Scent
    Sage titillator of a thousand noses,
    Old Hafiz the Perfumer, years ago
    Boiled down two gardensful of yellow roses
    And skimmed the gold froth from the sumptuous brew;
    Then strained it out into a crystal vat
    To work and settle during certain moons
    As ordered in the thirteenth Caliphate;
    Then boiled again and stirred with silver spoons
    Till shrunk to half; and so, by slow degrees,
    Boiled and laid up and boiled again, till fined
    To pure quintessence purged of subtlest lees.
    Then, death at hand, he chose with artist’s mind
    This curious flask