Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, SONGS OF LOVE AND YOUTH: PROLOGUE, by AUSTIN PHILIPS


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

SONGS OF LOVE AND YOUTH: PROLOGUE, by                    
First Line: Even as one who finds his face
Last Line: But ever battling upwards,—battling towards the light.
Subject(s): Family Life; Hearts; Love; Mothers; Youth; Relatives


EVEN as one who finds his face—
His face at five-and-twenty years—
Finds it in some forgotten place,
And, fifty, feels his heart in tears,
So I, who find
These first-fruits, bind
My brow with rue and seek in vain to span
The gulf which yawns so wide 'twixt past and present man.

I may not know what man was he
Who wrote these words of wrath and ruth,
Because that man has ceased to be—
Ceased, with his songs of Love and Youth:
I know, alone,
That all is gone
Save certain pictured things that crowd my brain,
Burned there through joy and suffering, painted in by pain.

First among these, fair Mother mine,
Your Turf, your Terraces, your Tow'r,
Your Hills, your Plain, the silver'd line
That Severn lends this present hour,
As, long ago,
She loved to show
Your earlier sons that same elusive shape,
Which peeps from bosks by Upton ... peeps, hides, finds escape.

Though from your womb untimely torn,
And flung, alone and friendless, far
Down to Avernus' foot, there shorn
Of Hope and Learning ... like a star
Amid the dark,
I nursed some spark
Of love for you, by which to guide my way
Upward, and so transformed black night to partial day.

It glowed, it guided me, that gleam,
Mid the hot reek of boiling wax,
Mid date-stamp's thud and strident scream
Of pigskin trolleys piled with sacks
From which, pell-mell,
The bundles fell
For me, the sorter, (tyrant-ridden wretch!)
To stand, dividing dumbly, eight hours at a stretch.

It glowed, that love, when foul-flung words
Pierced through my soul and stung my sense,
(Even as stabs from poisoned swords!)
It shone, relumed, to shore and cleanse
The boy whose heart,
Though clogged with dirt,
Still beat, unbroken, helped by highest pride,
Saving that bosom'd bird which but for you had died.

It glowed, that love, in later days,
Even when, hired to trap his kind,
Your luckless son walked loathsome ways,
Such as bring shame if called to mind,
And, weary-eyed,
Sat crouched, and spy'd
By night and day, through panes of frosted glass,
Innocent men and guilty come and go and pass.

It glowed and died not, gathering strength,
To find, at last, so fierce a flame
That he who felt it burned, at length,
With hot desire to reach some fame
Such as (vain fool!)
Should make his School
Remember him who never could forget
All that he owed to Malvern—owed, and still owes yet.

So, Malvern's Lover, he came down,
Relinquishing material things,
To tiny post in tinier town,
And all the grief that exile brings,
Toiled, moiled and slaved,
Wrote fiction, braved
Real risks, broke free, and, later, penniless,
Hacked his inhibited way to what men call success.

This, twenty years past. Nothing yet
Worthy of Alma Mater's shrine.
I know, too well, the unpaid debt
Eternal, and its onus mine:
Still, if I gave
Just what I have,
Might not the simple fact of giving prove
My gratitude—and, with it, a Malvernian's love?

Take, then, my songs, sweet Mother. Know
Them all imperfect, immature,
Often too humble—when not so,
Too confident to be quite sure ...
The wrath and ruth
Of ardent youth,
Flung to Avernus' foot and darkest night,
But ever battling upwards,—battling towards the light.





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