Produced by Al Haines LOLLINGDON DOWNS AND OTHER POEMS, WITH SONNETS BY THE SAME AUTHOR Uniform with this Volume DAUBER THE DAFFODIL FIELDS PHILIP THE KING THE FAITHFUL (A PLAY) LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN LOLLINGDON DOWNS AND OTHER POEMS, WITH SONNETS BY JOHN MASEFIELD LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN. 1917. TO MY WIFE I. So I have known this life, These beads of coloured days, This self the string. What is this thing? Not beauty, no; not greed, O, not indeed; Not all, though much; Its colour is not such. It has no eyes to see, It has no ears; It is a red hour's war Followed by tears. It is an hour of time, An hour of road, Flesh is its goad; Yet, in the sorrowing lands, Women and men take hands. O earth, give us the corn, Come rain, come sun; We men who have been born Have tasks undone. Out of this earth Comes the thing birth, The thing unguessed, unwon. II. O wretched man, that for a little mile Crawls beneath heaven for his brother's blood, Whose days the planets number with their style, To whom all earth is slave, all living, food! O withering man, within whose folded shell Lies yet the seed, the spirit's quickening corn, That Time and Sun will change out of the cell Into green meadows, in the world unborn! If Beauty be a dream, do but resolve And fire shall come, that in the stubborn clay Works to make perfect till the rocks dissolve, The barriers burst, and Beauty takes her way: Beauty herself, within whose blossoming Spring Even wretched man shall clap his hands and sing. III. Out of the special cell's most special sense Came the suggestion when the light was sweet; All skill, all beauty, all magnificence, Are hints so caught, man's glimpse of the complete. And, though the body rots, that sense survives; Being of life's own essence, it endures (Fruit of the spirit's tillage in men's lives) Round all this ghost that wandering flesh immures. That is our friend, who, when the iron brain Assails, or the earth clogs, or the sun hides, Is the good God to whom none calls in vain, Man's Achieved Good, which, being Life, abides: The man-made God, that man in happy breath Makes in despite of Time and dusty Death. IV.