Characters of Fanfics Index

More Famous Poetry by John Breteton

All poems within this chapter are by John Breteton

An Epitaph

On a monument formed as a curving wave

By ceaseless waves, that break and waste,
All human record is effaced:
Only our love in brief defence
Shall hold the billow in suspense.

Beauty And Hate

I have sought and followed you, drunk with your sacred wine;
Led out by a laughing wind on a tumbling sea,
On crags amid clouds, in cups that allure the bee,
And deep in the gem-lit gloom of the tortuous mine,
And on widespread wings where the great worlds dance and shine
I have sought by the golden light; but have bent the knee
At last where you lie, a humble goddess and free,
Naked and flushed in the warmth of a crimson shrine.
The hordes of hate have trampled your blooms in mire,
And cackle and roar as their mockery priests blaspheme,
And sing the marching hymn of a wingless might.
They forge their god in the heat of unholy fire
The squat strong incubus born of an evil dream;
And it shrinks and crumbles away in the golden light.

Belgium

The Blatant Beast saw meadows, made for peace,
Sunlit and gently asway, and held them light,
Till each green blade grew rigid in the night
And ruddied with a glorious morn's increase.
Thou hast suffered; nor till Freedom find release
And set for ever on the shining height
The eternal rolling banner of her might
Shall thy great gift of strife and suffering cease.

We, bred of one small island in the west,
A little shrine of Freedom, far away
We, who can bow at no strong tyrant's hest,
Bend low our heads in pride to thee to-day,
For all unknown, a smiling babe at rest,
Within thy lowly manger Freedom lay.

David

Eternal cold of silence, where each sound
Dies in its birth, and Death's pale henchmen meet
With soft Lethean traps unwary feet
Or ride with hell's white steed and slavering hound;
Which of us, searching selfward, has not found
This desolate realm, and long black seams, that greet
Our souls with recollections of defeat,
And torrid fossils in the frozen ground?
Not he, who comes among us as a king;
Strange were the secret waste and granite walls
To him whose reverent feet have travelled far
Where duty beckons and adventure calls.
He steers his course, by one red tropic star,
Where ripples the green robe of the lilting spring.

Disillusion

When fires have burnt your forest bare and black,
And you are parched and dizzy, and search in vain
For pools in dust unvisited of rain,
And shamble, lost, along a shimmering track,
This is the comfort of the world: "Alack!
So youth's illusions die, that we may gain
Wisdom and strength to face our lifelong pain,
The truth, from which no man shall turn him back."
Falter for no such melancholy lies,
For by one holy touch the spirit is healed
To know its treasure of sight and sound and scent;
Veil after veil the earthborn fogs arise,
Star beyond star the heavens are then revealed,
And truth is fair in love's enlightenment.

Home

"Where shall we dwell?" say you.
Wandering winds reply:
"In a temple with roof of blue
Under the splendid sky."

Never a nobler home
We'll find though an age we try
Than is arched by the azure dome
Of the all-enfolding sky.

Here we are wed, and here
We live under God's own eye.
"Where shall we dwell," my dear?
Under the splendid sky.

July

'Twas Jack-o'-Winter hailed it first,
But now more timid angels sing,
For what dull ear can fail to hear
Afar the fluting of the Spring?

In all free spaces of the land
A sightless flame is flickering;
Through every vein it leaps amain,
The fiery miracle of Spring.

A music ranging in the air,
A lambent light in everything;
O sweet, my sweet, the subtle heat,
The dancing light of Love and Spring!

Light Loss

"Our loss was light," the paper said,
"Compared with damage to the Hun" :
She was a widow, and she read
One name upon the list of dead
Her son, her only son.

Maxims

The heart is hard that cannot feel
The bruising of a light appeal.

The heart is deaf that cannot hear
The splashing of a tiny tear.

The heart is dumb that cannot say
"God speed you, comrades," night and day.

The heart is blind that cannot see
The beckoning soul of mystery.

The heart is lame that cannot rise
From clamouring earth to silent skies.

And O that heart were better dead
That truckles to the prudent head.

Marlowe

The spell of Shakespeare fills the heart
With earthly music loud and low;
But Marlowe drives the clouds apart,
And through their thundering rifts we go.