Alfred Edgar Coppard (1878 – 1957) was an English writer, noted for his influence on the short story form, and poet.
He was born, the son of a tailor and a housemaid, in Folkestone, and had little formal education. He left school at the age of nine to work as an errand boy for a Jewish trouser maker in Whitechapel during the period of the Jack-the-Ripper murders.
In the early 1920s, and still unpublished, he was in Oxford and a leading light of a literary group, the New Elizabethans, who met in a pub to read Elizabethan drama. W. B. Yeats sometimes attended the meetings.
THE UNFORTUNATE MILLER
On windy days the mill
Turned with a will,
But on calm days it spread
Its four sails -- dead.
The one-eyed miller man
Laments that ban,
And to the windless sky
Turning his vexed eye:
"God help," he sadly says,
"This business;
A hundred days and more
The wind's forebore,
And lacking breezes I
Am bound to die;
The profit I've forgone
In offal and grist alone
Would have bought a cock and a hen,
A gilt for my pen,
And a row of asters planted
Just where I wanted;
But since the wind is still --
The devil take the mill!
Never it rains but pours --
Let's in-a-doors."
So in-a-doors goes he
To see -- alas, to see --
Not the scrapings of a pan or pot
In his famished cot.
The tap of the clock indoors,
The dusty floors,
His empty crock and purse,
Made bad seem worse.
He looked at himself in the glass --
How thin he was!
He looked at the time and date --
Too late! Too late!
And creeping again to the mill
That stood stone still,
He tied round his neck the loop
Of a long dark rope.
Drove a tenpenny nail
Into the mill's black sail,
Hung his watch on a shelf,
Then hung himself.
And lo, the wind came! Beshrew,
How the wind blew!
And the sails, with the miller dying,
Went flying, flying.
A.E. Coppard
