MARY BUTTS

CORFE.

Corfe, the hub of a wheel
Where the green down-spokes turning
Embrace an earth-cup of smoke and ghosts and stone.
The sea orchestrates
The still dance in the cup
Danced for ever, the same intricate sobriety
Equivocal, adored.

But when I remember you Corfe, I remember Delphi
Because your history also is a mystery of God.

'And God is no blind man and God is our father':
But like lovers
Your cup is full of the courts of other princes
Disputing you.

Very sweet is the Sacred Wood
In the gold clearing, in the mustard patch;
But at night comes a change
Like a gold ball thrown out
And a black ball thrown in

MARIE BUTTS

37

(Not sunset behind Tyneham Cap
On a night without a moon.)
But a shift of potencies
Like a black ball thrown in
And a gold ball thrown out
And the players are princes
Of the turf and the weed
And the wind-moulded trees
And the hazel thicket
And the red blackberry thorn.

Never trust a hemlock
An inch above your mouth.
An ice-green hemlock
Is a lover
In the wood.
Now every way the wind blows this sweetie goes
In the south
Where goes the leaf if the rose
And the evergreen tree.

II

Inside the house, above the wood
Look out of the tall windows squared
With wood-strips painted white.
The wild grass runs up the wild hill
The wild hill runs up the wild sky
The wild sky runs over itself
And goes nowhere.

A man crosses the rough grass
Up the wild hill;

38 AN "OBJECTIVISTS" ANTHOLOGY

Strong graceless kharki legs in silhouette
Tired and tough, treading the hill down.

He will not wear it down
Let him try!
He is here only because this place is
A button on the bodies of the green hills.

III

God keep the Hollow Land from all wrong!
God keep the Hollow Land going strong!
A song a boy made in a girl
Brother and sister in a car
Over the flints, upon the turf
Beside the crook-backed angry thorn
Under the gulls, above the dead
To where the light made the grass glass.

Until they came to the world's end
The sea below and under them
The gulls above and over them
And through the thunder and the wailing
Sun full of wings was over them
In a glass world made out of grass.
'God keep the Hollow Land from all wrong!
God keep the Hollow Land going strong!
Curl horns and fleeces, straighten trees,
Multiply lobsters, assemble bees.

Give it to us for ever, take our hints
Knot up its roads for us, sharpen its flints,
Pour the wind into it, the thick sea rain,
Blot out the landscape and destroy the train.

MARIE BUTTS

39

Turn back our folk from it, we hate the lot
Turn the American and turn the Scot;
Take unpropitious the turf, the dust
If the sea doesn't get 'em then the cattle must.

Make many slugs where the stranger goes
Better than barbed wire the briar rose;
Swarm on the down-tops the flint mens' hosts
Taboo the barrows, encourage ghosts.

Arm the rabbits with tigers teeth
Serpents shoot from the soil beneath
By pain in belly and foot and mouth
Keep them out of our sacred south.'