CASTLE HOWARD
Castle Howard, in Yorkshire, where the writer spent much of his childhood, was burned down last November.
THIS is the dream—this is the nightmare—
Here magic real, and the untrue true: Wandering, wondering, past the stair And along the passage as I used to do.
The garden-hall floor is warped and waving ; The dome is broken ; the regular turning Of rails round the gallery gapes ; the paving Is stained with tannin ; and the smell of burning Weighs on the air. Once with young yells Through basement-passage, wheeling and whirling On banking bicycles, braying our bells, Went I and Christopher, before smoke came swirling.
We played in the hall with piebald paving- Big-white, little-black, lines diagonal ; Twisted up the stairs to the dome, where raving Flames in November burned it all. • In the dining-room where I the Papist Was given poached eggs for Friday lunch, The ice-wild wind is driving the latest Quivering snowflakes, soft for the scrunch Of the workman's hobnails. The sturdy walls, Raw-red and charred, robbed of ornament, Whipped and scoured by the razor squalls, Grin all toothless, with cracked cement, As dying men grin, leering madly, This is the end of a phase, of an era ; The bricked-up doorway in the passage sadly Marks the end of a stage, as the next comes nearer.
This is the forward step, with no backsliding ; The young days are bricked-up behind the wall ; Gone are the days when I came riding, The hopefully hopeless good-bye in the hall.
The workmen who wheel the barrows of rubble Out of the way to the wind-whipped garden, Rake out the wreckage of a life without trouble, Force me firmly where my soul must harden Or be battered. There are memories of naked bathing- Fauns in the fountain, of defiant lunge At the terrace statue, of picnics in swathing Bracken on birthdays, with Tilda's plunge After riddle-running rabbits in the hot sun., Of fly-buzzing bracken, of shadowed Temple Hole, Of playing in the hay, of warm wet fun
During battles on the lake in canoes which roll.
That life is over, that phase has passed; Bricked-up and sealed by the nightmare-burning ; I'm faced forwards, away from the past, Forced forwards with no more- turning. LAWRENCE TOYNI30.
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