The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lost city

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Title: Lost city

Verses

Author: Kathleen Montgomery Wallace

Release date: January 4, 2026 [eBook #77613]

Language: English

Original publication: Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons Ltd, 1918

Credits: chenzw and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOST CITY ***

[Pg 1]

LOST CITY

[Pg 2]

“My thanks are due to the Editors of the Westminster Gazette, the Cambridge Review, and the Cambridge Magazine, for permission to reprint some of the following poems.”

[Pg 3]

LOST CITY
VERSES

BY
 KATHLEEN MONTGOMERY WALLACE

CAMBRIDGE
W. HEFFER & SONS LTD
1918

[Pg 4]

CANTABRIGIAE
MORTUISQUE CARISSIMIS

[Pg 5]

BEFORE

[Pg 7]

THE GENTLE COUNTY

From north and south the counties
With hills and splendour call,
But Cambridgeshire of fenlands
Is gentlest of them all.
Sweetness of cool gray beanfields;
May in the snow-white hedge,
And amber flame of sunsets
Against the land’s stark edge.
Open and green and golden
It spreads before the eyes,
With roads that call to follow,
White under quiet skies;
And under dreaming willows
The river winds and gleams,
Nor speaks above a whisper
For fear to break their dreams....
It winds about the township
Of gracious walls and towers,
Within whose shade is healing,
Whose years are young as hours—
Oh, here’s the Gentle County,
The land of hearts’ release,
In Cambridgeshire of fenlands,
Upon whose fields be peace....

[Pg 8]

ON THE LOWER RIVER

Oh, when the very last is played
Of games that we have lost and won,
And out of reach of wind and sun
You are a shade; and I a shade,
We’ll not be sociable, nor mix
With all those far heroic souls,
But slip away to where there rolls
The quiet current of the Styx.
Charon will stand aside for us
(Fingering a coin, all amaze),
And you, whom every dog obeys,
Will swiftly deal with Cerberus,
Who, rearing an abysmal throat
In bull-dog smile serene and bland,
With all three tongues will lick your hand
And curl round meekly in the boat.
So, moving smoothly from the side,
You with the oars and I the lines,
Over the tide where no sun shines
That immemorial barque shall glide,
[Pg 9]
Sheer through the weeds and sedges dank,
Disturbing ghostly rats at play,
And veering, in a well-known way
From one bank to the other bank....
And when the backwater we pass
Where Lethe flows but makes no sound,
We will shoot on, nor turn us round
At those faint voices from the grass;
“Turn. Here is room for millions yet,
And here the cure for every ill....”
Be still, most piteous shades, be still.
We would remember, not forget.
And when indignant ghosts who wait
For Charon’s boat across the stream,
Shatter with shouts his pipe-filled dream,
Demanding why the —— he’s late—
He’ll call across the waters black,
“Sorry, sir! They was lookin’ so
Happy, I had to let them go—
And Heaven knows when they’ll be back!...”

[Pg 10]

ET EGO IN ARCADIA VIXI

Autumn is on the fields and still November,
Here with a wide-winged flame and flooding of gold,
Here where the moist ploughed slopes rise fold on fold,
Down where the cherry-copse heart is a crimson ember,
Up where the blood red tide of the woods is rolled,
—And oh, dear God! I remember—how I remember
Autumn upon your fields in a time grown old....
—Shivering poplar trees on the long horizon,
Wastes of the dim deep fen, and the water’s gleam,
Rime all white on the furrow and toiling team,
Scarcely a streak of colour to rest the eyes on—
And here, where the beechwoods blaze and the red fires stream,
The call of your far, dank fields that the dead mist lies on,
Tugs at my heart for ever, and shatters my dream....

[Pg 11]

AFTER

[Pg 13]

MAY TERM, 1916

I have come back in a rich hour of May
My heart, to this gray town of yours and mine,
To the grave gardens by the river’s line
Where scents rise softly at the end of day
—Back from hot city pavements worlds away,
Where life flows outwards in a ceaseless line,
Where soul treads hard on soul and makes no sign.
—To the dear smell of lawns, and the branches sway.
Gold of the sky, black boughs, and the rooks call
The evening stillness rises like a tide—
Across the cobbled court I hush my tread;
There is your window, lamplight on your wall,
There is a shadow on the blind inside—
But you are dead, my dear, but you are dead.

[Pg 14]

WALNUT-TREE COURT

The court below drowns in an emerald deep
Of dusk, all murmurous
With things the river whispers in its sleep;
I, leaning outward thus
From this high window, over the silence, hear
Your voice, your laugh, and know
Down in the dusk, and infinitely near
You stand below....

[Pg 15]

CHESTNUT SUNDAY

From end to end of Cambridge town
The chestnut boughs move up and down,
And rain their petals on the grass
And on the busy folk who pass.
Their foaming sweetness drops in showers
Under a sky like gentian flowers;
White as a bride’s is their array,
The chestnuts keeping holiday!
Oh, in your dreamless sleep, my dear,
I know, I know you see me here,
Between the voices and the sun,
And petals pattering, one by one.
I never feel you watch me weep,
Nor din of battle breaks your sleep,
But I am sure you woke this hour
To see your chestnut trees in flower!

[Pg 16]

UNRETURNING

Under these walls and towers
By these green water-ways,
Oh the good days were ours,
The unforgotten days!
Too happy to be wise
When the road used to run
Under such maddening skies
Headlong to Huntingdon.
Paths where the lilac spills
Blossom too rich to bear;
Gold sheets of daffodils
Lighting the Market Square;
Shimmer of gliding prows
Where the green shade is cool,
Tea under orchard boughs,
Smoke-rings by Byron’s Pool.
Sunset at back of King’s
Behind the silver spire,
Talk of uncounted things
Over a college fire—
[Pg 17]
Red leaves above your door,
Gray walls and echoing street
Whose stones will never more
Ring to your passing feet;
Strange! to think Term is here,
Life leads the same old dance,
While you lie dead, my dear,
Somewhere in France....

[Pg 18]

THE DREAM

Through the still streets whose windows were shut down
I wandered in a dumb and unknown town,
Where streets wound on and on, and had no name,
Where unseen fingers brushed my sleeve, and came
To a walled place of trees, and a voice said,
“Seek here, seek here, and you shall find your dead!”
And stooping down beneath the boughs asway
I found your name, and knew that there you lay.
And the blue twilight fell, and the cold dew,
While I lay in the grass and spoke to you....
So, when I rose, “Now God be thanked,” said I,
“Who set my feet to find you, where you lie.
My own, my own, I shall not dream again
You lie uncoffined in the pitiless rain....”
And woke; and knew I dreamed; and turned, to see
There, on my pillow, the old agony....

[Pg 19]

OLD ROADS

I have been glad in such unlikely places
That now I walk in the same ways alone
The very stones are thronged by vanished faces
And echoes of dead laughter’s undertone.
Mellow stone courts, a bridge across a river,
A frosty road whose flints strike leaping fire—
The dead days stab me till I stand and shiver,
Because of rose-light over a gray spire.
And there’s a cliff-road with the white gulls wheeling,
Where ev’ry time, they catch me unaware;
And still the happy ghosts come stealing, stealing,
At just one corner of Trafalgar Square....
At city crossings and in heather spaces,
There’s not a pathway that my feet have known
But mocks me, with its throng of vanished faces
And echoes of dead laughter’s undertone.

[Pg 20]

NEW ROADS

Of all the winds that drive, be one to guide us
Into new roads, where we no more may be
Haunted of feet that used to walk beside us,
And now lie silently.
Through crowded streets go treading the feet that left us,
In spray-blown lanes they follow our steps like goads;
Oh unrestoring Powers that have bereft us,
Give us, at least, new roads!

[Pg 21]

DIED OF WOUNDS

Because you are dead, so many words they say,
If you could hear them, how they crowd, they crowd;
“Dying for England—but you must be proud”—
And “Greater love, honour, a debt to pay,”
And “Cry, dear,” someone says; and someone “Pray!”
What do they mean, their words that throng so loud?
This, dearest; that for us there will not be
Laughter and joy of living dwindling cold,
Ashes of words that dropped in flame, first told;
Stale tenderness, made foolish suddenly.
This only, heart’s desire, for you and me,
We who lived love, will not see love grow old.
We who had morning time and crest o’ the wave
Will have no twilight chill after the gleam,
Nor any ebb-tide with a sluggish stream;
No, nor clutch wisdom as a thing to save.
We keep for ever (and yet they call me brave)
Untouched, unbroken, unrebuilt, our dream.

[Pg 22]

INTERVAL; FRONT ROW STALLS

Over the footlights the ankles caper,
The grease paint glistens, the fringed eyes glance;
The last note shrills, and the curtain runs.
The man beside me opens a paper:
“Bitter weather—three mile advance—
Heavy losses—we take the guns.”
And between my eyes and the crimson lights
Move the ranks of men who sat here o’ nights,
And now lie heaped in the mud together,
Stiff and still in the bitter weather.

[Pg 23]

YESTERDAY

The winds are out to-night,
Strange winds, blown from a far-off troublous sea,
Rending the sky over the chimney pots,
Into a writhing web of jade and pearl—
And lashing my sedate black London trees
All into wonder and a breathless maze.
I wonder if you hear?
From your still bed under the Flanders soil,
I wonder if you know the winds are out?
For, if you do, I know across your sleep
There comes the dream that’s tugging at my heart
Alone here with the lamplight and the fire,
And the day dying over London roofs:
The thin white road
Leaping between the fenlands, where the sky
Swoops down to meet the fields, the flat brown fields,
With never a hill’s curve, only poplar boughs
Like spires out of the mist at the day’s edge.
And all the mad winds of the world full cry
Careering through the dusk into the town.
[Pg 24]
And down the narrow streets,
Under the gray towers and serene gray walls,
Under the yellowing elms along the Backs,
The winds went rollicking and dancing still;
Swaying the chain of lights down King’s Parade
And driving purple cloud-wrack down the sky
Running red flame behind the spires of King’s.
And so they came to us
Beating with wild wings in the court below,
Rocking the room, breaking the fire in gusts,
Filled with the spice of dead leaves and wet boughs,
Just as they come to me, alone, to-night.
... My dear, they say they will rebuild the world
Out of the soil where you and yours lie dead;
But not, I think, the free, the careless hours
That knew no shadow of purpose, but were glad,
When the glad winds raced under Cambridge walls.

W. Heffer & Sons Ltd., 104, Hills Road, Cambridge.