Classic Poetry Series Siegfried Sassoon

82
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Joy-Bells
 
Ring your sweet bells; but let them be farewells
To the green-vista’d gladness of the past
That changed us into soldiers; swing your bells
To a joyful chime; but let it be the last.
 
What means this metal in windy belfries hung
When guns are all our need? Dissolve these bells
Whose tones are tuned for peace: with martial tongue
Let them cry doom and storm the sun with shells.
 
Bells are like fierce-browed prelates who proclaim
That ‘if our Lord returned He’d fight for us.’
So let our bells and bishops do the same,
Shoulder to shoulder with the motor-bus.
 
Siegfried Sassoon
83
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive

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Lamentations
 
I found him in the guard-room at the Base.
From the blind darkness I had heard his crying
And blundered in. With puzzled, patient face
A sergeant watched him; it was no good trying
To stop it; for he howled and beat his chest.
And, all because his brother had gone west,
Raved at the bleeding war; his rampant grief
Moaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling
Half-naked on the floor. In my belief
Such men have lost all patriotic feeling.
 
Siegfried Sassoon
84
www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive

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Limitations
 
If you could crowd them into forty lines!
Yes; you can do it, once you get a start;
All that you want is waiting in your head,
For long-ago you’ve learnt it off by heart.
 
. . . .
Begin: your mind’s the room where you have slept,
(Don’t pause for rhymes), till twilight woke you early.
The window stands wide-open, as it stood
When tree-tops loomed enchanted for a child
Hearing the dawn’s first thrushes through the wood
Warbling (you know the words) serene and wild.
 
You’ve said it all before: you dreamed of Death,
A dim Apollo in the bird-voiced breeze
That drifts across the morning veiled with showers,
While golden weather shines among dark trees.
 
You’ve got your limitations; let them sing,
And all your life will waken with a cry:
Why should you halt when rapture’s on the wing
And you’ve no limit but the cloud-flocked sky?...
 
But some chap shouts, ‘Here, stop it; that’s been done!’—
As God might holloa to the rising sun,
And then relent, because the glorying rays
Remind Him of green-glinting Eden days,
And Adam’s trustful eyes as he looks up
From carving eagles on his beechwood cup.
 
Young Adam knew his job; he could condense
Life to an eagle from the unknown immense....
Go on, whoever you are; your lines can be
A whisper in the music from the weirs
Of song that plunge and tumble toward the sea
That is the uncharted mercy of our tears.
 
. . . .
I told you it was easy! ... Words are fools
85
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Who follow blindly, once they get a lead.
But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools
Of quiet; seldom-seen: and all you need
Is just that flash of joy above your dream.
So, when those forty platitudes are done,
You’ll hear a bird-note calling from the stream
That wandered through your childhood; and the sun
Will strike the old flaming wonder from the waters....
And there’ll be forty lines not yet begun.
 
Siegfried Sassoon