The Happy Night

    I have loved to-night; from love's last bordering steep
    I have fallen at last with joy and forgotten the shore;
    I have known my love to-night as never before,
    I have flung myself in the deep, and drawn from the deep,
    And kissed her lightly, and left my beloved to sleep.
    And now I sit in the night and my heart is still:
    Strong and secure; there is nothing that's left to will,
    There is nothing to win but only a thing to keep.

    And I look to-night, completed and not afraid,
    Into the windy dark where shines no light;
    And care not at all though the darkness never should fade,
    Nor fear that death should suddenly come to-night.
    Knowing my last would be surely my bravest breath,
    I am happy to-night: I have laughed to-night at death.

John Collings Squire, Sir

John Collings Squire, also known as Sir John Squire, was an influential British poet, writer, historian, and influential literary editor of the early 20th century. He is best known for his role as editor of the London Mercury, a powerful literary journal of the time. Squire was a leading figure in the Georgian poetry movement, which sought to return English poetry to its traditional form and diction.

John Collings Squire, Sir

In The Park

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

Elegy

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

Acacia Tree

John Collings Squire, Sir, Simple Poetry

English

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At Night

    Dark fir-tops foot the moony sky,
    Blue moonlight bars the drive;
    Here at the open window I
    Sit smoking and alive.

    Wind in the branches swells and breaks
    Like ocean on a beach;
    Deep in the sky and my heart there wakes
    A thought I cannot reach.

John Collings Squire, Sir

Elegy

I vaguely wondered what you were about,
    But never wrote when you had gone away;
Assumed you better, quenched the uneasy doubt
    You might need faces, or have things to say.
    Did I think of you last evening? Dead you lay.
        O bitter words of conscience!
        I hold the simple message,
And fierce with grief the awakened heart cries out:
        'It shall not be to-day;

It is still yesterday; there is time yet!'
    Sorrow would strive backward to wrench the sun,
But the sun moves. Our onward course is set,
    The wake streams out, the engine pulses run
    Droning, a lonelier voyage is begun.
        It is all too late for turning,
        You are past all mortal signal,
There will be time for nothing but regret
        And the memo...

John Collings Squire, Sir

Elegy

    I vaguely wondered what you were about,
    But never wrote when you had gone away;
    Assumed you better, quenched the uneasy doubt
    You might need faces, or have things to say.
    Did I think of you last evening?    Dead you lay.
        O bitter words of conscience
        I hold the simple message,
    And fierce with grief the awakened heart cries out:
        "It shall not be to-day;

    It is still yesterday; there is time yet!"
    Sorrow would strive backward to wrench the sun,
    But the sun moves.    Our onward course is set,
    The wake streams out, the engine pulses run
    Droning, a lonelier voyage is begun.
        It is all too late for turning,
        You are past all mortal signal,
    There will be time for nothing but reg...

John Collings Squire, Sir

Town

    Mostly in a dull rotation
    We bear our loads and eat and drink and sleep.
    Feeling no tears, knowing no meditation,
    Too tired to think, too clogged with earth to weep.

    Dimly convinced, poor groping wretches,
    Like eyeless insects in a murky pond
    That out and out this city stretches,
    Away, away, and there is no beyond.

    No larger earth, no loftier heaven,
    No cleaner, gentler airs to breathe.    And yet,
    Even to us sometimes is given
    Visions of things we other times forget.

    Some day is done, its labour ended,
    And as we sit and brood at windows high,
    A steady wind from far descended,
    Blows off the filth that hid the deeper sky;

    There are the empty waiting spaces,
    We w...

John Collings Squire, Sir

Prologue: In Darkness

    With my sleeping beloved huddled tranquil beside me, why do I lie awake,
    Listening to the loud clock's hurry in the darkness, and feeling my heart's fierce ache
    That beats one response to the brain's many questionings, and in solitude bears the weight
    Of all the world's evil and misery and frustration, and the senseless pressure of fate?

    Is it season of ploughing and sowing, this long vigil, that so certainly it recurs?
    In this unsought return of a pain that was ended, is it here that a song first stirs?
    Can it be that from this, when to-night's gone from memory, there will spring of a sudden, some time,
    Like a silver lily breaking from black deadly waters, the thin-blown shape of a rhyme?

John Collings Squire, Sir

Song

    The heaven is full of the moon's light,
    The earth fades below.
    In this vast empty world of night
    I only know

    Pale-shining trees and moonlit fields,
    The bird's tune,
    And my night-flowering heart that yields
    Her fragrance to the moon.

John Collings Squire, Sir