Harold Monro

Harold Monro was a British poet, editor, and bookseller active in the early twentieth century. He is best known for founding the Poetry Bookshop in London and for his lyrical poetry that often explores themes of urban loneliness and domestic life. Biographie ↓Plus ↓

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Harold Monro

The Nightingale Near the House

Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn : It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond Stares. And you sing, you sing. That star-enchanted song falls through the air From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground ; While all the night you sing. My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee, As all night long I listen, and my brain Receives your song, then loses it again In moonlight on the lawn. Now is your voice a marble high and white, Then like a mist on fields of paradise ; Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, Then breaks, and it is dawn.

Harold Monro

Dog

O LITTLE friend, your nose is ready ; you sniff, Asking for that expected walk, (Your nostrils full of the happy rabbit-whiff) And almost talk. And so the moment becomes a moving force ; Coats glide down from their pegs in the humble dark ; You scamper the stairs, Your body informed with the scent and the track and the mark Of stoats and weasels, moles and badgers and hares. We are going Out. You know the pitch of the word, Probing the tone of thought as it comes through fog And reaches by devious means (half-smelt, half-heard) The four-legged brain of a walk-ecstatic dog. Out through the garden your head is already low. You are going your walk, you know, And your limbs will draw

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While We Sleep

The earth takes up our bodies, every one, And brings them slowly backward to the dark ; Then on her shadowed side we droop and slumber, Turned from the sun.

(Meanwhile He covers continents in light One after other, so they stretch and wake, Live their day through and droop again to slumber : Day, night : day, night.)

The stars shine forth and disappear again, Roaring about in space above our heads, While we are folded to the earth in slumber With dreaming brain.

We travel through the darkness : we are spun Upward through rays of light into the morning ; We waken with the earth : we glide from slumber Toward the sun.

The Bird at Dawn

What I saw was just one eye In the dawn as I was going : A bird can carry all the sky In that little button glowing. Never in my life I went So deep into the firmament.

He was standing on a tree, All in blossom overflowing ; And he purposely looked hard at me, At first, as if to question merrily : " Where are you going ? " But next some far more serious thing to say I could not answer, could not look away. Oh, that hard, round, and so distracting eye Little mirror of all sky !- And then the after-song another tree Held, and sent radiating back on me.

If no man had invented human word, And a bird-song had been The only way to utter what we mean, What would we men have heard, What understood, what seen, Between the trills and pauses, in between The singing and the silence of a bird ?

Solitude

When you have tidied all things for the night, And while your thoughts are fading to their sleep, You'll pause a moment in the late firelight, Too sorrowful to weep.

The large and gentle furniture has stood In sympathetic silence all the day With that old kindness of domestic wood ; Nevertheless the haunted room will say : "Someone must be away."

The little dog rolls over half awake, Stretches his paws, yawns, looking up at you, Wags his tail very slightly for your sake, That you may feel he is unhappy too.

A distant engine whistles, or the floor Creaks, or the wandering night-wind bangs a door. Silence is scattered like a broken glass. The minutes prick their ears and run about, Then one by one subside again and pass Sedately in, monotonously out.

You bend your head and wipe away a tear. Solitude walks one heavy step more near.

Biographie

Harold Monro was a British poet, editor, and bookseller who lived from 1879 to 1932. He founded the Poetry Bookshop in London in 1913, which became a central meeting place for poets and readers and also published poetry. Monro edited the periodicals The Poetry Review and Poetry and Drama, helping to promote modernist and Georgian poetry. His own verse often addresses everyday urban life, loneliness, and the quiet moments of domestic existence, using clear imagery and a restrained, musical style. Though sometimes associated with the Georgian poets, his work also shows sympathy with more experimental currents of his time. His poetry collections include works such as Strange Meetings. Monro's significance lies less in any single school than in his practical support for poetry through publishing, bookselling, and editorial work, and he remains an important figure in early twentieth-century British literary culture.

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