The Bird-Catcher Read Free

mirror, and all across the pool
    Slow winking circles opened wide, till he
    Rose and in rising broke their symmetry.
    Laughter and shouting filled the sparkling air.
    Bright flakes of scattered water everywhere
    Leapt from their diving. Hosts of little billows
    Beat the shores, and the hanging boughs of willows
    Glittered with glassy drops. Then, bright as fire,
    A bugle sounded, and their happy din
    Stopped, and the boys, with that swift discipline
    By which keen life answers the soul’s desire,
    Rushed for the bank. And soon the bank was bright
    With bodies swarming up out of the stream.
    From the water and the boughs they came in sight:
    Across the leaves I saw their quick limbs gleam.
    Then brandished towels flashed whitely here and there.
    They dried their ears and scrubbed their towzled hair.
    One, stepping to the water, carefully
    Stretched a bare leg to rinse a muddy foot:
    Â Â Â Â One sat with updrawn knee,
    Bent head, and both hands tugging on a boot.
    And gradually the bright and flashing crowd
    Dimmed into sober khaki. Then the loud
    Laughter and shouts and songs died at a word.
    The ranks fell in: no sound, no movement stirred.
    The willow-boughs were still: the blue sky burned:
    The party numbered down, formed fours, right turned,
    Marched. And their shadows faded from the stream
    And the dark pool swayed back into its dream:
    Only the trodden meadow-grass reported
    Where all that gay humanity had sported.
    So the dream fades. I wake, remembering how
    Many of those smart boys no longer now
    Cast running shadows on the grass or make
    Â Â Â Â White tents with laughter shake,
    But lie in narrow chambers underground,
    Eyes void of sunlight, ears unthrilled by sound
    Of laughter. Round my post on every hand
    Stretches this grim, charred skeleton of land
    Where ruined homes and shell-ploughed fields are lost
    In one great sea of clay, clay seared by fire,
    Battered by rainstorms, jagged and scarred and crossed
    By gaping trench-lines hedged with rusted wire.
    The rainy evening fades. A rainy night
    Sags down upon us. Wastes of sodden clay
    Fade into mist, and fade all sound and sight,
    All broken sounds and movements of the day,
    To emptiness and listlessness, a grey
    Unhappy silence tremulous with the poise
    Of hearts intent with fearful expectation
    Â Â Â Â And secret preparation,
    Silence that is not peace but bated breath,
    Â Â Â Â A listening for death,
    Â Â Â Â The quivering prelude to tremendous noise.
    O give us one more day of sun and leaves,
    The laughing soldiers and the laughing stream,
    And when at dawn the loud destruction cleaves
    The silence, and (like men that walk in dream,
    Knowing the stern ordeal has begun)
    We climb the trench and cross the wire and start,
    We’ll stumble through the shell-bursts with good heart
    Like boys who race through meadows in the sun.

Immortality
    When on the sluggish tide of time
    The immortal moment comes
    Whose bugle-summons cleaves with gleaming edge
    Flesh and all stuff of the material world,
    The soldier-soul, with that swift discipline
    Wherewith keen life answers the heart’s desire,
    Leaps on the deed as tiger leaps on fawn,
    As powder answers fire.
    Soul is the perfect athlete running free
    Among the clear winds of reality;
    For whom dim speculation and the thought
    That measured, weighed, and sought
    In worlds unreal the cloudy paradises
    And comfortable prizes
    For loveless rules obeyed, are less than nought.
    The eternal moment being his vital air,
    He cannot ask nor care
    Whether his burning deed shall sow the seeds
    Of other life and deeds,
    Or if his being, ardent, pure, intact,
    Die on the summit of the immortal act.

Bugles
    Mournful and clear and golden on the dusk
    The sudden fire of bugles. Fervid flights
    Of burning wings flash up from the dark hill
    Where like a growth of giant lilies glow
    The lighted tents. That piercing music rouses
    The slumbrous memory. Forests of the past
    Answer those fervid