Neglected Poets: James Reeves

James Reeves (1909-1978) devoted his life to poetry -- as a poet, an editor, an anthologist, a teacher, and a critic.  But his devotion was a quiet one.  Hence, his poetry does not receive the attention that it deserves.  I urge you to seek it out, for I believe that you will find it rewarding.  The poems below may all be found in his Collected Poems: 1929-1974 (Heinemann 1974).

                    Things to Come

The shadow of a fat man in the moonlight
   Precedes me on the road down which I go;
And should I turn and run, he would pursue me:
   This is the man whom I must get to know.

                                      Stanley Roy Badmin (1906-1989)

                           "The Abbey Barn, Doulting, Somerset" (1930) 

To put the following poem in context, it may be helpful to know that it was written by Reeves after the death of his wife Mary (1910-1966).  He dedicated his Collected Poems to her.              

                         To Not Love

One looked at life in the prince style, shunning pain.
Now one has seen too much not to fear more.
Apprehensive, it seems, for all one loves,
One asks only to not love, to not love.

                         Stanley Roy Badmin, "Fallen Mill Sails" (1931)

                       Bestiary

Happy the quick-eyed lizard that pursues
   Its creviced zigzag race
Amid the epic ruins of a temple
   Leaving no trace.

Happy the weasel in the moonlit churchyard
   Twisting a vibrant thread
Of narrow life between the mounds that hide
   The important dead.

Close to the complex fabric of their world
   The small beasts live who shun
The spaces where the huge ones bellow, fight,
   And snore in the sun.

How admirable the modest and the frugal,
   The small, the neat, the furtive.
How troublesome the mammoths of the world,
   Gross and assertive.

Happy should we live in the interstices
   Of a declining age,
Even while the impudent masters of decision
   Trample and rage.

                                     Stanley Roy Badmin, "Priory Pond"

                              Precept

Dwell in some decent corner of your being,
Where plates are orderly set and talk is quiet,
Not in its devious crooked corridors
Nor in its halls of riot.