Jan Struther Poems

You shall have roast peacock
For your mid-day meat;
But the bitter Fool's Parsley
Is all that I shall eat.
...

LIKE rays once shed
By a spent star
The words of a dead
Poet are,
That through bleak space
...

How strange a stuff is love, which has no worth
Unless it's paid for in identical coin;
Which, given and returned, enriches both
The lover and the loved; but, given alone,
...

THE raw materials of love are yours-
Fond hearts, and lusty blood, and minds in tune;
And so, dear innocents! you think yourselves
Lovers full-blown.
...

There are no chains to bind me to your side,
No links of love, no fetters of desire,
No firm-wrought bonds of iron friendship tried,
Nor sympathy that's forged in sorrow's fire.
...

YOU need not envy lovers who are never apart:
For not in the pin-point starry conflagration
Of touch or kiss
...

On a carpet red and blue
Sits Betsinda, not quite two,
Tracing with baby-starfish hand
The patterns that a Persian planned.
...

HERE lies a woman-known to me, and you-
Who tried to eat her cake and have it too;
Who saved her pence and threw away her pounds,
...

LOVE, to be sweetest, should keep pace with the year:
Be new in spring, wild, uncertain and tender,
Make soul sing, heart ache with wonder
And exquisite despair;
...

ON the first of spring, walking along the Embankment,
Light-footed, light-headed, eager in mind and heart,
I found my spirit keyed to a new pitch,
I felt a strange serenity and a strange excitement.
...