If I should die

Alone to walk the dripping woods of spring
   While daisies spy you?

This is where the water hurries under the archway,
This is where we enter the long tunnel,

No drums they wished, whose thoughts were tied
To girls and jobs and mother,

Gone away, away,
Suddenly at a word departed,

Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,

In this dread hour for thee and all mankind
Britain, be Freedom’s fortress or her grave.

..The fifth day of November, Fifty North and Forty West,
Was edging to its departure, like an undecided guest,

We lay in Iceland winterbound,
And heard the blizzard blow,

Above the great ship’s lifting bow
I watch the Pole Star nightly stand,

The story, as now we see, was over-written
By Herodotus, bless his warm Hellenic heart!

Could we locate the enemy of mankind
(I mean the GHQ, the Centre itself,

You may not pass this place. Here you must stop,
Though all the world’s great tides run heedless by

Heard how often, still the notes compel
Unused to awe, we stand listening.

Look where he lies, a clod of earth at best,
Yet colder than a clod, for where there shone

Out of this questioning, eventual truth;
Out of this doubt, faith rooted in the rock;

..By a blue winking sea,
The church stands in a green place,
Green as Calvary.

“Boy killed on Bicycle”; smallest print, four lines
Islanded in a tossing sea of type,

Out of the cloud my Lord the Sun,
Out of the earth my Lady Spring,

That dreaming day it was, the bell-like air
Unclosed the naked admirable heaven,

Come death suddenly from the sea or cloud,
With the blast of thunder and the blinding shroud,

Now, when the smoking ruins smoulder low
Of what was Europe once

This mountain means discovery, since the day
I climbed it first in boyhood and alone,

The ancient art of story-telling charms
The ear, keeps its first hold on men
The whole world over.

Could we locate the enemy of mankind
(I mean the GHQ, the Centre itself,

When a man dies
We find that suddenly there’s time to praise him.

Waylaid by Handel’s theme, I think of you
Now half a world away, and hear you say
‘His music always seems like coming home.’

You hold the timeless in your brief green boughs
The cardboard angels, home-made crib, the straw,
The new-born baby older than Abraham

Between the tumult of crucifixion
and the diapason of resurrection
that bar of absolute silence.

…Listening,
I am bereft, lost in the mystery
of music leaping quenchless, undefiled

‘The love that moves the sun and all the stars’ –
When Dante wrote there was no telescope:

Like liquid silk in golden eddies
the honey laps into my tin.

These trees reached up for light
when Jesus walked on earth,

It was a terrible world
And into it came a child

Heard how often, still the notes compel
Unused to awe, we stand listening.

Lord of earth and all creation
let your love possess our land;

..stamped with a star, but posted beyond the stars,
marked ‘No Commercial Value’, signed, with a cross,

Fare well. We come to send you on the way
we all must walk, so final, secret, strange.

The greatest word in the greatest book
is that conjunction, ‘Nevertheless’,

Arrived at the heavenly mansions, the blessed Saint
(female on earth) was welcomed by St Peter

Land of the singing light
Light that first I saw
Eighty years and more