Victoria Sackville West

If I had only loved your
And careless damned your soul to Hell,
I might have laughed and loved afresh,
And loved as lightly and as well,

So well she knew them both
yet as she
Into the room, and heard their
Of tragic meshes knotted with her name,

I saw within the wheelwright’s
The big round cartwheels, blue and red;
A plough with blunted share;
A blue tin jug; a broken chair;

Lying on Downs above the wrinkling bayI with the kestrels shared the cleanly day,
The candid day; wind-shaven, brindled turf;
Tall cliffs; and long sea-line of marbled
From Cornish Lizard to the Kentish

Cisterns and stones; the fig-tree in the
Casts down her shadow, ashen as her boughs,
Across the road, across the thick white dust
Down from the hill the slow white oxen crawl,

Leopards on the gable-ends,
Leopards on the painted stair,
Stiff the blazoned shield they bear,
Or and gules, a bend of vair,

The greater cats with golden
Stare out between the bars
Deserts are there, and the different skies,
And night with different stars

When little lights in little ports come out,
Quivering down through water with the stars,
And all the fishing fleet of slender
Range at their moorings, veer with tide about;

All her youth is gone, her beautiful youth outworn,
Daughter of tarn and tor, the moors that were once her
No longer know her step on the upland tracks forlorn Where she was wont to roam
All her hounds are dead, her beautiful hounds...

Tools with the comely names, Mattock and scythe and spade, Couth and bitter as flames, Clean, and bowed in the blade,--A man and his tools make a man and his trade
Breadth of the English shires, Hummock and kame and mead, Tang of the reeking ...

She was wearing the coral taffeta
Someone had brought her from Ispahan,
And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,
And the coral-hafted feather fan;

What time the meanest brick and
Take on a beauty not their own,
And past the flaw of builded
Shines the intention whole and good,