IN dream, again within the clean, cold hell
Of glazed and aching silence he was trapped;
And, closing in, the blank walls of his cell
Crushed stifling on him . . . when the bracken snapped,
Caught in his clutching fingers: and he lay
Awake upon his back among the fern,
With free eyes traveling the wide blue day
Unhindered, unremembering; while a burn
Tinkled and gurgled somewhere out of sight,
Unheard of him till, suddenly aware
Of its cold music, shivering in the light,
He raised himself; and with far-ranging stare
Looked all about him: and, with dazed eyes wide
Saw, still as in a numb, unreal dream,
Black figures scouring a far hillside,
With now and then a sunlit rifle’s gleam;
And knew the hunt was hot upon his track:
Yet hardly seemed to mind, somehow, just then . .
But kept on wondering why they looked so black
On that hot hillside, all those little men
Who scurried round like beetles — twelve, all told . .
He counted them twice over; and began
A third time reckoning them, but could not hold
His starved wits to the business, while they ran
So brokenly, and always stuck at ‘ five ’ . . .
And “One, two, three, four, five,’a dozen times
He muttered . . . ‘Can you catch a fish alive?’
Sang mocking echoes of old nursery-rhymes
Through the strained, tingling hollow of his head.
And now, almost remembering, he was stirred
To pity them; and wondered if they’d fed
Since he had, or if, ever since they’d heard
Two nights ago the sudden signal-gun
That raised alarm of his escape, they, too,
Had fasted in the wilderness, and run
With nothing but the thirsty wind to chew,
And nothing in their bellies but a fill
Of cold peat-water, till their heads were light . . .
The crackling of a rifle on the hill
Rang in his ears; and stung to headlong flight,
He started to his feet; and through the brake
He plunged in panic, heedless of the sun
That burned his cropped head to a red-hot ache
Still racked with crackling echoes of the gun.
Then suddenly the sun-enkindled fire
Of gorse upon the moor-top caught his eye;
And that gold glow held all his heart’s desire,
As, like a witless flame-bewildered fly,
He blundered toward the league-wide yellow blaze,
And tumbled headlong on the spikes of bloom;
And rising, bruised and bleeding and adaze,
Struggled through clutching spines: the dense, sweet fume
Of nutty, acrid scent like poison stealing
Through his hot blood: the bristling yellow glare
Spiking his eyes with fire, till he went reeling,
Stifling and blinded, on — and did not care
Though he were taken — wandering round and round,
‘Jerusalem the Golden’ quavering shrill,
Changing his tune to ‘Tommy Tiddler’s Ground’;
Till, just a lost child on that dazzling hill,
Bewildered in a glittering golden maze
Of stinging scented fire, he dropped, quite done,
A shriveling wisp within a world ablaze
Beneath a blinding sky, one blaze of sun.