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Poem by Michael Field

Maidenhair

Plato of the clear, dreaming eye and brave

Imaginings, conceived, withdrawn from light,

The hollow of man's heart even as a cave.

With century-slow dropping stalactite

My heart was a dripping tedious in despair.

But yesterday, awhile before I slept:

I wake to find it live with maidenhair

And mosses to the spiky pendants crept.

Great prodigies there are-Johovah's flood

Widening the margin of the Red Sea shore,-

Great marvel when the moon is turned to blood

It is to mortals, yet I marvel more

At the soft rifts, the pushings at my heart,

That lift the great stones of its rock apart. 

July 

THERE is a month between the swath and sheaf 

When grass is gone 

And corn still grassy; 

When limes are massy 

With hanging leaf, 

And pollen-coloured blooms whereon 

Bees are voices we can hear, 

So hugely dumb 

This silent month of the attaining year. 

The white-faced roses slowly disappear 

From field and hedgerow, and no more flowers come; 

Earth lies in strain of powers 

Too terrible for flowers: 

And, would we know 

Her burden, we must go 

Forth from the vale, and, ere the sunstrokes slacken, 

Stand at a moorland's edge and gaze 

Across the hush and blaze 

Of the clear-burning, verdant summer bracken; 

For in that silver flame 

Is writ July's own name-- 

The ineffectual, numbed sweet 

Of passion at its heat. 

September 

BUT why is Nature at such heavy pause, 

And the earth slowly ceasing to revolve? 

Only the lapping tides abide their laws, 

And very softly on the sand dissolve. 

The fruit is gathered--not an apple drops: 

In little mists above the garden bed 

The petals of the last gold dahlia shed; 

The spider central 'mid his wreathed dewdrops! 

Oh still, oh quiet!--and no issue found; 

No laying up to rest of callow things, 

Or scale, or sheaf, or tissue of armed wings: 

Open the tilth, open the fallow ground! 

The fragrance of the air that has no home 

Spreads vague and dissolute, nor cares to roam.