English

I scratch the Enemy's back, do overtime,
And he with no less vigour scratches mine.
I call him Friend and he calls back at me
‘Friend’. He is a gentle Enemy!
(These lonely compliments no animus
Can cause, this gentle fooling between us.)
If so the man we all were like this one
No man would need to carry a shot-gun!
A motley, of thrasonical intent,
He affects, to stage his modest argument.—
If names could bark then I think Woffington
Would bark at us. But it is dead and gone,
And only fleshless eardrums now can smash.

And yet this ‘Enemy’ counters all my song.
His is a battle all the way along.
With him the machete never seems to rust.
No room with him for thoughts of the ultimate dust.
Confucian philosophy and arms
Seem equal partners in his iron charms.
Ideal samurai, virtuous, loyal, modest,
He brings a tolerant something to the West,
That was never there before, I think, with this
Odd code of a devotion we have lost:
Samurai, yes, but with an artist crossed.
His not the tender moon above the stream!

You now solicit a few enemy thrusts
At the stock poets' thickly bay-leaved busts.
Ranged in that portrait-place, of marble and clay,
August with the as-yet unwithered bay
I seem to note a roman profile bland,
I hear the drone from out the cactus-land:
That must be the poet of the Hollow Men:
The lips seem bursting with a deep Amen.
I espy Ezra, bearded like the Kaiser,
And wistful Earp, like a mediaeval sizar,
The learned beneficiary of provisions,
Gone to the buttery to lubricate his visions.

Well well well!!!—a dirty piece of work—
Come out of the murk, gone back into the murk!
As sure as my name's Faust, that's one of the worst
That ever on my deadened senses burst.
He brought an odour with him that went well
With the congested passions of his dead hell,
Built in the early days of human spleen,
Concocted of a frausty discipline
He had a waggle of his hinder parts
As if shaken by the combustion of dud farts.
He had an apoplectic barber's block,
From always keeping under key and lock

I was a little gleaner
Of all the days would yield,
When wonder overtook me
At work within the field.

The stars they gathered round me,
Holding their torches high.
They cried, ‘Behold the chosen!’
And it was none but I.

They hailed me royal, kindred,
And made me understand
With gifts of light and darkness
They gave into my hand.

And here the wonder holds me
Though voices all are gone,
Here in the brimming silence,
With this to think upon.

The kiss upon my forehead

Nothing, either great or small,
Nothing, sinner, no;
Jesus did it, did it all,
Long, long ago.

When He from His lofty throne
Stooped to do and die,
Everything was fully done;
Hearken to His cry—

“It is finished!” Yes, indeed!
Finished every jot.
Sinner, this is all you need;
Tell me is it not?

Weary, working, burdened one,
Wherefore toil you so?
Cease your doing; all was done
Long, long ago.

Till to Jesus' work you cling,
By a simple faith,
“Doing” is a deadly thing—

Renounce the world, old Cassock cries,
With vice and folly it abounds;
But yet, in worldly vanities,
Cassock spends Twenty Thousand Pounds.

Renounce the world, old Cassock cries,
With vice and folly it abounds;
But yet, in worldly vanities,
Cassock spends Twenty Thousand Pounds.

There 's a wee, wee glen in the Hielan's,
Where I fain, fain would be;
There's an auld kirk there on the hillside
I weary sair to see.
In a low lythe nook in the graveyard
Drearily stands alane,
Marking the last lair of a' I lo'ed,
A wee moss-covered stane.

There 's an auld hoose sits in a hollow
Half happit by a tree;
At the door the untended lilac
Still blossoms for the bee;
But the auld roof is sairly seggit,
There 's nane now left to care;
And the thatch ance sae neatly stobbit

Three hours, O Christ,
Us to set free
Did thy body hang
On the bitter tree.
Longer, Prometheus,
Thou! Age-long
Did the ridge of Asia
Support thy wrong.
But Man, whom ye loved—
Man, in whose dream
Ye did deliver,
Ye did redeem—
Whose weightless body
At last hath wings,
Leaves not the mount
Of your sufferings:—
Of his own creatures
Become afraid,
Gnawn by the vultures
Himself hath made;
Man, in whom vision
Outsoars the will,
To Earth, war-weary
Is nailèd still.

We who praise poets with our labouring pen
And justify ourselves with laud of men,
Have not the right to call our own our own,
Being but the groundsprouts from those great trees grown.
The crafted art, the smooth curve, and surety
Come not of nature till the apprentice free
Of trouble with his tools, and cobwebbed cuts,
Spies out a path his own and casts his plots.
Then looking back on four-square edifices
And wind-and-weather-standing tall houses
He stakes a court, and tries his unpaid hand,
Begins a life whose salt is arid sand,