Our English Friends

AN English oak
Whose leaves have so long listened
To the winds from Stonehenge
That their own messages
Are tinged with Druid sadness;
But what a stately melancholy,
A noble pensiveness
That hawthorn blossoms cannot last,
That summer must come claiming at
the end;
And then autumn, and then winter!
The golden gorse and purple heather
Hearken to him quite as rapt as we!

So unmistakably the gentleman
That, now and again,
One suffers embarrassment
On being led to Whitechapel,
Into gaol or the coal-pits.
An artist hampered a bit
By his ’varsity blazer,
His ’varsity accent,
By formulæ and strings;
An artist, a genuine artist,
So much the devotee of Nemesis,
That Sophocles would have said:
‘Behold a mind of amber!’
But first and last, the gentleman!

A seer under a brown derby,
With ideas so outrageously active
That they leap-frog over one another
Straight into the To-morrow!
Guy Fawkes to Mrs. Grundy:
Her house is doomed;
Her daughters fan the fuse,
For he knows their quirks
And the twists of their antagonists —
Meaning all men.
From the tragedies and comedies
Of his own up-hill life,
He has ferreted out,
Piece by piece,
The heart of realities.
These pieces he has unblushingly
Combined and recombined,
And cast before us,
Bound together by an invincible dream —
This glorified Mr. Polly!

The man stands outside of his work, —
A little cold, a little hard,
For all the tenderness of
‘Wee Willie Winkle’ and ‘ The Brushwood Boy’;
And most of us treat him
As though he had died some fifteen years ago.
And if he did, it is because we killed him:
Starving the whole great heart of India
— Which was his own —
When we passed by the hands which reached out
From the deep magnificence of ‘ Kim’!