Winter Offering

All I can offer now is a cracked china jug

Of water, and, grown with tedious sweat and toil,

Potatoes from the back-garden clods dug,

Cut with the blunt spade-edge, clogged with heavy soil.

I wish I could give you apples, grapes and pears,

I wish I could give you cider and sour wine

But the orchard has been rank and green for years

And its fruit won't ripen without sunshine.

Potatoes cement bone, keep body and soul together.

Water costs nothing and will do for the present.

It's difficult enough to be gay in this wretched weather

Without useless regrets for living like a peasant.

We'll make no virtue of enforced economy,

Strike no impressive plaster or tin attitudes.

Poverty's fixed, archaic physiognomy

Projects only through masks where nothing else extrudes.

SONG

Wretched cold and miserable

The streets are mirrors glazed with pain

Imaging my bitter moods

There is nothing but the tall

Trees in dejected attitudes

Cowed by the continual rain.

Last week's rent is owing still

The sky will never clear again

My cap is soaked and my boots leak

I haven't tuppence for a meal

The trees have bent all the past week

Under the continual rain.

Lachrymose the gutter spills

Despondent water down the drain

Despondency has come to stay

With influenza coughs and chills

Through an unending wintry day

Cowed by the continual rain.