dichroic | the savour of the strange, the solace of the known

Did you know Jan Struther (author of Mrs. Miniver) wrote ,a href='http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/struther/glass/glass.html#10">poems too?

Rather like Dorothy parker with a heart, or Edna St. Vincent Millay with a wider sense of adventure - and I had a hard time keeping it to just three here. I wouldn't say these are the best, but they are three that struck me.

SLEEVELESS ERRAND
THROUGH space and time I range
Seeking these two alone:
The savour of the strange,
The solace of the known.

These must I still pursue
Till body and brain grow cold:
The lustre of the new,
The comfort of the old.

Fool! Shall midnight and noon
Consent to fuse in one
The magic of the moon,
The healing of the sun?

AT A DULL PARTY
IN fifty years at most I shall be dead.
These jaws, which now grind hard to scotch a yawn,
Will gape unchecked; and in a clay-cold bed
Clamped fast, I'll wait a problematical dawn.
I have less than twenty thousand days to live–
Six hundred months, a bare half-million hours;
And each new breath, heedless and fugitive,
Another mouthful of my life devours.
Then, Christ! what spendthrift folly brought me here,
To breathe stale smoke, and drink, talk, think, small beer?

YOU NEED NOT ENVY
YOU need not envy lovers who are never apart:
For not in the pin-point starry conflagration
Of touch or kiss
Deepest contentment is,
But in the memory of delight, and its anticipation–
The interstellar spaces of the heart.