THE LITTLE HOUSE BY ELIZABETH GODLEY

  

   

In a great big wood in a great big tree, 

There's the nicest little house that could possibly be.

There's a tiny little knocker on the tiny little door, 

And a tiny little carpet on the tiny little floor.

There's a tiny little table, and a tiny little bed, 

And a tiny little pillow for a tiny weeny head;

A tiny little blanket, and a tiny little sheet, 

And a tiny water bottle (hot) for tiny little feet.

A tiny little eiderdown; a tiny little chair; 

And a tiny little kettle for the owner (when he's there.)

In a tiny little larder there's a tiny thermos bottle 

For a tiny little greedy man who knows the Woods Of Pottle

There's a tiny little peg for a tiny little hat 

And a tiny little dog and a tiny little cat.

If you've got a little house 

And you keep it spic and span,
Perhaps there'll come to live in it 

A tiny little man. 

You may not ever see him, 

(He is extremely shy): 

But if you find a crumpled sheet -
Or pins upon the window seat -
Or see the marks of tiny feet -
You'll know the reason why.

VIRGINIA WAUCHOPE BASS 'S LITTLE COTTAGE

 I know a little cottage

where everything's just right;

The windows bloom with tulips-

At dusk there's candlelight

The knotted oak beside it

Is webbed with ivy leaves,

And honeysuckle tangles

In clusters round the eaves

The friendly gate swings open

Against a low stone wall

Where quaint old fashioned blossoms

Design a paisley shawl;

And up the winding pathway

The stones with moss are grown-

I love that little cottage

Because it is my own !

ANONYMOUS – HIERUSALEM , MY HAPPY HOME

HIERUSALEM, my happy home,

When shall I come to thee?

When shall my sorrows have an end

Thy joys when shall I see?

O happy harbour of the saints,

O sweet and pleasant soil

In thee no sorrow may be found

No grief, no care, no toil……

No dampish mist is seen in thee,

Nor cold nor darksome night;

There every soul shines as the sun,

There God himself gives light.

There lust and lucre cannot dwell,

There envy bears no sway;

There is no hunger, heat nor cold,

But pleasure every way.

Hierusalem, Hierusalem,

God grant I once may see

Thy endless joys, and of the same

Partaker aye to be

Thy walls are made of precious stones,

Thy bulwarks diamonds square;

Thy gates are of right orient pearl,

Exceeding rich and rare

Thy turrets and thy pinnacles

With carbuncles do shine;

Thy very streets are paved with gold,

Surpassing clear and fine

Thy houses are of ivory,

Thy windows crystal clear,

Thy tiles are made of beaten gold,

O God, that I were there

Within thy gates nothing doth come

That is not passing clean;

No spider’s web, no dirt, no dust,

No filth may there be seen

Ah, my sweet home, Hierusalem,

Would God I were in thee!

Would God my woes were at an end,

Thy joys that I might see!  …

Thy gardens and thy gallant walks

Continually are green;

There grows such sweet and pleasant flowers

As nowhere else are seen…..

Quite through the streets with silver sound

The flood of life doth flow;

Upon whose banks on every side

The wood of life doth grow

There trees for evermore bear fruit

And evermore do spring;

There evermore the angels sit

And evermore do sing.

There David stands with harp in hand

As master of the Quire;

Ten thousand times that man were blest

That might this music hear

Our Lady sings Magnificat

With tune surpassing sweet;

And all the virgins bear their parts

Sitting about her feet

Te Deum doth saint Ambrose sing,

Saint Austin doth the like;

Old Simeon and Zachary

Have not their songs to seek

There Magdalen hath left her moan

And cheerfully doth sing,

With blessed saints whose harmony

In every street doth ring.

Hierusalem, my happy home,

Would God I were in thee!

Would God my woes were at an end,

Thy joys that I might see!

SIR JOHN BETJEMAN’S THE COTTAGE HOSPITAL

At the end of a long- walled garden

In a red provincial town,

A brick path led to a mulberry-

Scanty grass at its feet.

I lay under blackening branches

Where the mulberry leaves hung down

Sheltering ruby fruit globes

From a Sunday –tea –time heat

Apple and plum espaliers

Basked upon bricks of brown;

The air was swimming with insects,

And children played in the street.

Out of this bright intentness

Into the mulberry shade

Musca domestica (house fly)

Swung from the August light

Slap into slithery rigging

By the waiting spider made

Which spun the lithe elastic

Till the fly was shrouded tight.

Down came the hairy talons

And horrible poison blade

And none of the garden noticed

That fizzing, hopeless fight.

Say in what cottage hospital

Whose pale green walls resound

With the tap upon polished parquet

Of inflexible nurse’s feet

Shall I myself be lying

When they range the screens around?

And say shall I groan in dying,

As twist the sweaty sheet?

Or gasy for breath uncrying,

As I feel my senses drown’d

While the air is swimming with insects

And children play in the street.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON’S THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL

A naked house, a naked moor,

A shivering pool before the door,

A garden bare of flowers and fruit

And poplars at the garden foot:

Such is the place that I live in,

Bleak without and bare within

Yet shall your ragged moor receive

The incomparable pomp of eve,

And the cold glories of the dawn

Behind your shivering trees be drawn;

And when the wind from place to place

Doth the unmoored cloud-galleons chase,

Your garden gloom and gleam again,

With leaping sun, with glancing rain

Here shall the wizard moon ascend

The heavens, in the crimson end

Of day’s declining splendour; here

The army of the stars appear.

The neighbour hollows dry or wet

Spring shall with tender flowers beset;

And oft the morning muser see

Larks rising from the broomy lea,

And every fairy wheel and thread

Of cobweb dew- be diamonded.

When daisies go, shall winter time

Sliver the simple grass with the rime;

Autumnal frosts enchant the pool

And make the cart-ruts beautiful;

And when snow- bright the moor expands,

How shall your children clap their hands!

To make this earth, our hermitage,

A cheerful and a changeful page,

God’s bright and intricate device

Of days and seasons doth suffice.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEASTS’S THE STARE’S NEST BY MY WINDOW

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; some where

A man is killed, or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare

A barricade of stone or of wood;

Some fourteen days of civil war;

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; O honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

EDWARD THOMAS’S THE NEW HOUSE

Now first, as I shut the door,

I was alone

I n the new house; and the wind

Began to moan

Old at once was the house,

And I was old;

My ears were teased with the dread

Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;

Sad days when the sun

Shone in vain: old grief’s and grief’s

Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught

Could I fore see;

But I learned how the wind would sound

After these things should be

STEPHEN SPENDER”S THE ROOM ABOVE THE SQUARE

The light in the window seemed perpetual

Where you stayed in the high room for me;

It flowered above the trees through leaves

Like my certainty.

The light is fallen and you are hidden

In sun bright peninsulas of the sword:

Torn like leaves through Europe is the peace

Which through me flowed

Now I climb alone to the dark room

Which hangs above the square

Where among stones and roots the other

Peaceful lovers are.

LOUIS MACNEICE’S THE BRITISH MUSEUM READING ROOM

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers

Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge-

Honey and wax, the accumulation of years-

Some on commission, some for love of learning,

Some because they have nothing better to do

Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden

The drumming of the demon in their ears

Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,

In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards

And cherishing their hobby or their doom

Some are too much alive and some are asleep

Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,

Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent;

This is the British Museum reading room

Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting,

Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking

A sun –bath at their ease

And under the totempoles-the ancient terror-

Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns

There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces

The guttural sorrow of the refugees

WILLIAM BLAKE’S THE CRYSTAL CABINET

The maiden caught me in the wild,

Where I was dancing merrily;

She put me into her cabinet,

And lock’d me up with a golden key.

This cabinet is form’d of gold

And pearl and crystal shining bright,

And within it opens into a world

And a little lovely moony night.

Another England there I saw,

Another London with its Tower,

Another Thames and other hills,

And Another pleasant surrey bower,

Another Maiden like herself,

Translucent, lovely, shining clear,

Three fold each in the other clos’d-

O, what a pleasant trembling fear!

O, what a smile! a threefold  smile

Fill’d me, that like a flame I burn’d;

I bent to kiss the lovely maid,

And found a threefold kiss return’d.

I strove to seize the inmost form

With ardour fierce and hands of flame,

But burst the crystal cabinet,

And like a weeping Babe became-

A weeping Babe upon the wild,

And weeping woman pale reclin’d,

And in the outward air again

I fill’d with woes the passing wind.

THOMAS HOOD’S THE HAUNTED HOUSE

O’er all there hung a shadow and a fear

A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,

And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,

The place is haunted!

Unhinged the iron gates half open hung,

Jarr’d by the rusty gales of many winters,

That from its crumpled pedestal had flung

One marble globe in splinters.

No dog was at the threshold, great or small;

No pigeon on the roof- no house hold creature-

No cat demurely dozing on the wall-

Not one domestic feature.

No human figure stirred, to go or come,

No face looked forth from shut or open casement;

No chimney smoked- there was no sign of home

From parapet to basement.

With shatter’d panes the grassy court was starr’d;

The time- worn coping- stone had tumbled after!

And through the ragged- roof the sky shone, barr’d.

With naked beam and rafter.”

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S THE HAUNTED PALACE

In the greenest of our valleys

By good angels tenanted,

Once a fair and stately palace-

Radiant palace- reared its head.

In the monarch thought’s dominion-

It stood there!

Never seraph spread   a pinion

Over fabric half so fair!

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,

On its roof did float and flow

( This- all this- was in the olden

Time long ago),

And every gentle air that dallied,

In that sweet day,

Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,

A winged odour went away.

Wanderers in that happy valley,

Through two luminous windows, saw

Spirits moving musically,

To a lute’s well- tuned law,

Round about a throne where, sitting

(Porphyrogene!)

In state his glory well befitting,

The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing

Was the fair palace door,

Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,

And sparking ever more,

A troop of echoes, whose sweet duty

Was but to sing,

In voices of surpassing beauty,

The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch’s high estate.

(Ah, let us mourn!- for never morrow

Shall dawn upon him desolate!)

And round about his home, the glory

That blushed and bloomed

Is but a dim remembered story

Of the old time entombed.

And travellers now, within that valley,

Through the red – litten windows see

Vast forms, that move fantastically

To a discordant melody,

While, like a ghastly rapid river,

Through the pale door

A hideous throng rush out for ever

And laugh- but smile no more.

H.W. LONG FELLOW - ‘’ THE CHILDREN’S POET’’ PRELUDE TO ‘’TALES OF A WAYSIDE INN’’

‘’One Autumn night in Sudbury town,

  Across the meadows bare and brown,

  The windows of the wayside inn

  Gleamed red with fire light through the leaves

  Of wood bine, hanging from the eaves,

  Their crimson curtains rent and thin.

  As ancient is this hostelry

  As any in the land may be,

  Built in the old colonial day,

  When men lived in the grander way,

   With ampler hospitality;

   A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall,

  Now somewhat fallen to decay,

  With weather- stains upon the wall,

  And stairways worn, and crazy doors,

  And creaking and un even floors,

  And chimneys huge and tiled and tall.

  A region of repose it seems

  A place of slumber and of dreams

  Remote among the wooded hills!’’