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    Collected Poems: "And Earth is but a star, that once had shone"
    Collected Poems: "And Earth is but a star, that once had shone"
    Collected Poems: "And Earth is but a star, that once had shone"
    Ebook192 pages2 hours

    Collected Poems: "And Earth is but a star, that once had shone"

    By James Elroy Flecker

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    About this ebook

    James Elroy Flecker was born on 5th November 1884, in Lewisham, London.

    Flecker does not seem to have enjoyed academic study and achieved only a Third-Class Honours in Greats in 1906. This did not set him up for a job in either government service or the academic world.

    After some frustrating forays at school teaching he attempted to join the Levant Consular Service and entered Cambridge to study for two years. After a poor first year he pushed forward in the second and achieved First-Class honours. His reward was a posting to Constantinople at the British consulate.

    However, Flecker’s poetry career was making better progress and he was beginning to garner praise for his poems including The Bridge of Fire. Unfortunately, he was also showing the first symptoms of contracting tuberculosis. Bouts of ill health were to now alternate with periods of physical well-being woven with mental euphoria and creativity.

    Before his early death he managed to complete several volumes of poetry, which he continually revised, together with some prose works and plays. It was a small canon of work but on his death on 3rd January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland he was described as "unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats".

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPortable Poetry
    Release dateFeb 1, 2018
    ISBN9781787377264
    Collected Poems: "And Earth is but a star, that once had shone"

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      Book preview

      Collected Poems - James Elroy Flecker

      Collected Poems by James EIroy Flecker

      The Athenceum said: "It has been the fate, and perhaps the happy fate, of many English poets

      to die young... Great as was the promise of Middleton and Brooke, it is the death of Flecker that is

      perhaps our most grievous loss."

      James Elroy Flecker was born on 5th November 1884, in Lewisham, London.

      Flecker does not seem to have enjoyed academic study and achieved only a Third-Class Honours in Greats in 1906.  This did not set him up for a job in either government service or the academic world. 

      After some frustrating forays at school teaching he attempted to join the Levant Consular Service and entered Cambridge to study for two years. After a poor first year he pushed forward in the second and achieved First-Class honours. His reward was a posting to Constantinople at the British consulate.

      However, Flecker’s poetry career was making better progress and he was beginning to garner praise for his poems including The Bridge of Fire.  Unfortunately, he was also showing the first symptoms of contracting tuberculosis. Bouts of ill health were to now alternate with periods of physical well-being woven with mental euphoria and creativity.

      Before his early death he managed to complete several volumes of poetry, which he continually revised, together with some prose works and plays. It was a small canon of work but on his death on 3rd January 1915, of tuberculosis, in Davos, Switzerland he was described as unquestionably the greatest premature loss that English literature has suffered since the death of Keats.

      Index of Contents

      An Introduction by JC Squire

      JUVENILIA

      Four Translations and Adaptations from Catullus

      Sirmio

      Lucretia

      Song in the Night

      Glion—Noon

      Glion—Evening

      Last Love

      Fragments of an Ode to Shelley

      LATER POEMS

      A New Year's Carol

      From Grenoble

      Narcissus

      Inscription for Arthur Rackham's Rip Van Winkle

      Envoy

      Rioupéroux

      Mignon

      Tenebris Interlucentem

      The First Sonnet of Bathrolaire

      The Second Sonnet of Bathrolaire

      The Ballad of Hampstead Heath

      Litany to Satan

      The Translator and the Children

      Destroyer of Ships, Men, Cities

      Oxford Canal

      Hialmar Speaks to the Raven

      The Ballad of the Student in the South

      The Queen's Song

      On Turner's Polyphemus

      The Bridge of Fire

      We That Were Friends

      My Friend

      Ideal

      Mary Magdalen

      I Rose from Dreamless Hours

      Prayer

      The Piper

      The Masque of the Magi

      To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence

      Heliodora

      Love, the Baby

      Ballad of the Londoner

      Resurrection

      Dulce Lumen, Triste Numen, Suave Lumen Luminum

      Joseph and Mary

      The Lover of Jalalu'ddin

      Donde Estan?

      The Town without a Market

      A Western Voyage

      Invitation

      War Song of the Saracens

      The Ballad of Camden Town

      Gravis Dulcis Immutabilis

      Fountains

      Dirge

      The Parrot

      Lord Arnaldos

      A Miracle of Bethlehem

      Felo-de-se

      The Welsh Sea

      In Memoriam

      Opportunity

      No Coward's Song

      Pillage

      The Ballad of Zacho

      Pavlova in London

      The Sentimentalist

      Don Juan in Hell

      The Ballad of Iskander

      The Golden Journey to Samarkand

      Gates of Damascus

      Yasmin

      Saadabad

      The Hammam Name

      In Phæacia,

      Epithalamion

      Hyali

      Santorin

      A Ship, an Isle, a Sickle Moon

      Oak and Olive

      Brumana

      Areiya

      Bryan of Brittany

      Don Juan Declaims

      The Painter's Mistress

      In Hospital

      Taoping

      Virgil's Æneid: Book VI

      The Dying Patriot

      A Sacred Dialogue

      The Old Ships

      The Blue Noon

      A Fragment

      Narcissus

      Stillness

      The Pensive Prisoner

      Hexameters

      Philomel

      From Jean Morèas' Stances

      The Princess

      Pannyra of the Golden Heel

      The Gate of the Armies

      November Eves

      God Save the King

      The Burial in England

      The True Paradise

      Ode to the Glory of Greece

      The Old Warship Ablaze

      An essay on James Elroy Flecker by JC Squire

      James Elroy Flecker – A Short Biography

      James Elroy Flecker – A Concise Bibliography

      JUVENILIA

      Four Translations and Adaptations from Catullus

      I

      For whom this pretty pamphlet, polished new

      With pumice-stone? Cornelius, for you:

      For you were never unprepared to deem

      My simple verses worthy of esteem,

      Though you yourself—who else in Rome so bold?—

      In volumes three have laboured to unfold

      A Universal History of Man—

      Dear Jove! A learned and laborious plan!

      Wherefore to you, my friend, I dedicate

      This so indifiFerent bookling; yet I pray,

      Poor as it is—goddess of my fate.

      Let it outlive the writer's transient day!

      1900 at age 16

      III

      Cupids and loves, and men of gentler mien.

      Mourn, for my lady's lovèd one is dead,

      Her darling sparrow that to her hath been

      Dearer than her own eyes: even as a maid

      Loveth her mother, so had he been bred

      To know his mistress. He was honeysweet

      Nor ever truant from her bosom strayed.

      But there would twitter from his soft retreat.

      And now—he's flitting down the Shadow Way,

      Ah, never to return! A curse on ye,

      Black shades of death, that let no fair thing stay;

      How fair a sparrow have ye snatched from me!

      Poor birdie—all for thee the teardrops rise.

      Till red with weeping are my Love's bright eyes.

      1900

      IV

      Proud is Phaselus here, my friends, to tell

      That once she was the swiftest craft afloat:

      No vessel, were she winged with blade or sail,

      Could ever pass my boat.

      Phaselus shunned to shun grim Adria's shore,

      Or Cyclades, or Rhodes the wide renowned,

      Or Bosphorus, where Thracian waters roar.

      Or Pontus' eddying sound.

      It was in Pontus once, unwrought, she stood.

      And conversed, sighing, with her sister trees,

      Amastris born, or where Cytorus' wood

      Answers the mountain breeze.

      Pontic Amastris, boxwood-clad Cytorus!—

      You, says Phaselus, are her closest kin:

      Yours were the forests where she stood inglorious:

      The waters yours wherein

      She dipped her virgin blades; and from your strand

      She bore her master through the cringing straits.

      Nought caring were the wind on either hand.

      Or whether kindly fates

      Filled both the straining sheets. Never a prayer

      For her was offered to the gods of haven,

      Till last she left the sea, hither to fare.

      And to be lightly laven

      By the cool ripple of the clear lagoon.

      This too is past; at length she is allowed

      Long slumber through her life's long afternoon.

      To Castor and the twin of Castor vowed.

      1901

      X

      When lounging idle mid forensic whirl,

      Friend Varus took me off to see his girl.

      The naughty wench, I very soon was shewn,

      Had got some wit and beauty of her own.

      Arriving, we began a busy chat

      On politics, and weather, this and that—

      Then on my province's internal state,

      And Had I found the profit adequate?

      I answered truthfully, "There's nothing there

      For common soldier or for officer

      Wherewith to purchase grease for home-bound hair."

      You found at least—said she—"one always can:

      Some aboriginals for your sedan?"

      Said I in answer, posing for her eyes

      In prosperous and fashionable guise,

      "Oh, really, I was not so penniless

      That any mere provincial distress

      Should render me incompetent to get

      Eight smartish bearers for the voiturette."

      (In truth there was no slave in all the earth

      Whom I could then have summoned to my hearth

      To shoulder the debilitated leg

      Of my old pallet.) Then, dear friend, I beg—

      Cries she most aptly for so bad a minx—

      "I want to pay a visit to the Sphinx—

      You'll lend them me just to the temple door,

      My sweet Catullus? "

      Oh, you may be sure—

      Said I—"I would—but what I mentioned now

      As mine—I just forgot—what matter how ?—

      My messmate Cinna, Gaius Cinna, he

      Has commandeered them. Really, as for me,

      What difference if you call them his or mine?

      I use them just whenever I incline.

      But you're a silly pestilential jade

      To want a chance remark so nicely weighed."

      1901

      Sirmio

      Little gem of all-but-islands and of islands, Sirmio,

      Whether set in landlocked waters, or in Ocean's freer flow—

      Oh the pleasant seeing of thee, bright as ever—there below—

      Far behind me, to the Northward, lie the dreamy lands of snow.

      Oh the hour of mad rejoicing, oh the sweet good-bye to woe

      As with quiet soul aweary of world-wandering to and fro

      In we hurry through the doorway of our home of long ago....

      Hail then, hail! Thy master welcome, welcome him, sweet Sirmio,

      Leap for joy, ye tumbling waters, winking at the summer's glow,

      Gaily through the house resounding let the peals of laughter go-

      1901-04

      Lucretia

      As one who in the cold abyss of night

      Stares at a book whose grey print meaningless

      Dances between the lamplight and his eyes,

      Lucretius lay, soul-poisoned, conquering still

      With towering travail Reason's Hellene heights.

      Listen, Lucretia, to the voice of his pain:

      Thrice welcome hour of Reason: ne'er of old

      Knew I thy naked loveliness, till night.

      The nether night of Folly pinioned forth.

      Shrouded my senses, taught me terribly

      That thou alone, my light and life and love,

      Wearest the high insignia of the stars.

      Grant then thy worshipper, austerest Queen,

      Refreshing dews—Now, now, I thirst with flame:

      They flee the strainings of my fevered hps

      Cruelly, and in dank distance a new noise

      Of rushing wings I hear. Who thunders nigh?

      Devil delirium, chaos charioted.

      Curb, curb, the coal-red chargers, heard not seen.

      See, Madam Wife, that loveless lust of thine

      Leaves no sweet savour lingering, but a curse:

      And 'stead of Love and Reason, palace tenant,

      There flits a weak and tremulous loathsomeness!

      Suppliant fled Lucretia to the couch:

      And all her glory trembled as she sang:

      Awake, dead soul of dear Lucretius,

      Awake, thy witless fond destroyer prays.

      Awake, awake, and quit thy aimless journey

      In old oblivion's purple-misted paths.

      Dost thou remember, husband? It was evening:

      We wandered shorewards, mid the ocean of air

      That glassed the gliding Nereids of the Pole.

      Immeasurable moonlight kissed the brow

      Of the white sea whose ripples swayed to greet

      Our heart's unnumbered laughter. Strongest sleep

      So held the life of earth that dimly we heard

      Time's fatal pulse through the dark reverberated.

      Then died thy soul: that night I, murderess, dreamt,

      Ah, dolorous dreams of limb-dissolving love.

      Lucretius,

      Why live I still, protracting hopeless pain?

      "The chillness of the long Lethean stream

      Is more to be commended for my sailings

      Than love's hot eddies.

      God, for the draught of death!

      What sourer, sweeter vintage could be pressed?

      To slumber shall I lull me, where no sorrow

      Can pierce the drifted

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