Roy Campbell Poems

In the grey wastes of dread,
The haunt of shattered gulls where nothing moves
But in a shroud of silence like the dead,
...

From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,
Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,
The zebras draw the dawn across the plains
Wading knee-keep among the scarlet flowers.
...

I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
...

Maternal Earth stirs redly from beneath

Her blue sea-blanket and her quilt of sky,

A giant Anadyomene from the sheath
...

Close at my side a girl and boy
Fell firing, in the doorway here,
Collapsing with a strangled cheer
As on the very couch of joy,
...

Now Spring, sweet laxative of Georgian trains,

Quickens the ink in literary veins,

The Stately Homes of England ope their doors
...

His naked skin clothed in the torrid mist
That puffs in smoke around the patient hooves,
The ploughman drives, a slow somnambulist,
And through the green his crimson furrow grooves
...

I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
...

When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder
Down where the sweating gang its labour plies
A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder
Unslings her child tormented by flies.
...