Poem - Rose Macaulay

Picnic: July 1917

by Rose Macaulay

We lay and ate the sweet hurt-berries

In the bracken of Hurt Wood.

Like a quire of singers singing low

The dark pines stood.

Behind us climbed the Surrey Hills,

Wild, wild in greenery;

At our feet the downs of Sussex broke

To an unseen sea.

And life was bound in a still ring,

Drowsy, and quiet and sweet….

When heavily up the south-east wind

The great guns beat.

We did not wince, we did not weep,

We did not curse or pray;

We drowsily heard, and someone said,

‘They sound clear today’.

We did not shake with pity and pain,

Or sicken and blanch white.

We said, ’If the wind’s from over there

There’ll be rain tonight’.

Once pity we knew, and rage we knew,

And pain we knew, too well,

As we stared and peered dizzily

Through the gates of hell.

But now hell’s gates are an old tale;

Remote the anguish seems;

The guns are muffled and far away.

Dreams within dreams.

And far and far are Flanders mud,

And the pain of Picardy;

And the blood that runs there runs beyond

The wide waste sea.

We are shut about by guarding walls;

(We have built them lest we run

Mad from dreaming of naked fear

And of black things done).

We are ringed all round by guarding walls,

So high, they shut the view.

Not all the guns that shatter the world

Can quite break through.

Oh guns of France, oh guns of France,

Be still, you crash in vain….

Heavily up the south wind throb

Dull dreams of pain…..

Be still, be still, south wind, lest your

Blowing should bring the rain…...

We’ll lie very quiet on Hurt Hill,

And sleep once again.

Oh we’ll lie quite still, not listen nor look,

While the earth’s bounds reel and shake,

Lest, battered too long, our walls and we

Should break…....should break……....