Chapter 3

What Aprils taught us, children at the knee, Word by slow word, the language April knows! What Summers broke that brooding reverie, Through patient iterations of the rose!-- Ah, dearest tutors of our lisping-time, Today we bring you of our brightest rhyme.

MOONFLOWERS

These frail, white blooms have lit the Summer night Like ghosts of beauty that had gone too soon,-- With something less than any glimmering light That sways and faints and trembles in the moon. I think the Earth, grown half-regretful, now, Of faces that were lovely of old time, Lifts here again dim hands and hair and brow, In loveliness more fragile than a rhyme.

So that the listening night has somehow learned A way of prescient waiting through the dark, For half-forgotten loveliness returned,-- Too frail and dim for eyes like ours to mark More than a ghostly glimmer on the air, That once was lighted brows and hands and hair.

CHALLENGE

The Spring has crowned the startled grass with light, And lit each apple-tree with blooms of May, Her footprints flowering through the silent night, Show where she went her hurried, careless way ... A magic that awakens and goes by, Too care-free to be bound, too fickle-fleet, Leaves helpless legions staring at the sky, Confronted with a later, sure defeat.

A bird, half-hid among the apple boughs, Sings and sings on above the blossoming earth, A high, clear music of eternal vows To transient joy ... and joy's eternal worth ... Above the certain wreck, this dauntless thing, Caught up and hurled from ruined Spring to Spring.

BEFORE SPRING

Who knows what endless practices are held, Before bright pencils mark the April earth---- Where grasses learn how gaiety is spelled, And jonquils trace the golden writs of mirth; Some slow, imperfect patterns must be wrought Some, cast aside in dark, abandoned crypts, Before the swift, impulsive hands are taught To shape the Spring's illuminated scripts.

What gifted fingers are so quick to mould And form aright the thin Aprilian line, The frail, fair lettering in green and gold!-- What art has taught that intricate design, From which those later scriveners compose Such final, crowning rubrics as the rose!

MOONS KNOW NO TIME

Moonlight is memory ... though the sun forget, And moonlight lingers by a crumbling wall, And grass-grown walks where flagging-stones are set For feet that pass that way no more at all. Summers gone by, and laughter that is still, And hair whose gold is hidden from the sun,-- Moonlight remembering on a lonesome hill Might half return them, one by ghostly one.

Suns mark the days ... but moonlight knows no time, Finding old springs in every lighted face, Old musics in a whisper hushed like rhyme: And Summers that have gone and left no trace, Are one with each new Summer come to flower, Moving in moonlight through a haunted hour.

MY NEIGHBOUR

He never could grow old, for gay Romance Walks with him daily through our crowded ways, Illumining each common circumstance, And rearing splendid dreams about his days. Whether he walks or rides, it is the same, He is the grey-haired knight, his cane for lance, On some adventure for a lady's name, With fancied kings and queens for confidants.

Folk that he meets--woman or man or boy-- All play a role in some forgotten place: His carriage is a chariot at Troy, And somewhere, at the end, is Helen's face ... I like to wonder, when he looks at me, What glorious thing, that instant, I may be.

AT THE NEXT TABLE

O, Lady like a tea-cup, A flower, or a fan, What dear, archaic fancy Devised you as it ran Through gone Arcadian summers Of sweet and gentle airs, Of roses at the casement, And slippers on the stairs? O, Lady like a poem Out of the olden time, Be now the fading pattern Of this archaic rhyme.

SALVAGE

Since we have learned how beauty comes and goes: A phantom fading from the hills like light, Summer and slow disaster in the rose, An April face that wanders toward the night,-- It is not strange that we who linger here, Are haunted by the colours of the sky, The ghost of beauty in the stricken year, The thought of beauty gone too swiftly by.

So that men strive with chisel, pen and brush, To save the lifted brow, the transient spring, Happy if they may fix the fading blush, Or make the mood a memorable thing, And snare one glowing hour from fleeting time, A golden bird, caged in a golden rhyme.

IN A GIRLS' SCHOOL

These walls will not forget, through later days, How they had bloomed with lifted, tossing heads Of swaying girls who thronged these ordered ways Like windy tulips blowing in their beds. Stones may remember laughter down a hall, And eyes more bright than blossoms in the grass,-- A dream to haunt them--after all and all-- When they are dust with dusty things that pass.

So that some wind of beauty, waking then, Whose breath shall be new summertimes for earth, Will stir these scattered stones to dreams, again, Of blowing shapes, of brightening eyes and mirth, And corridors, like windy tulip beds, Of swaying girls and beautiful, bright heads.

AT ELSINORE

... And still, they say, when nights are nearly spent, And watchmen take their doze, before relief, He comes to walk upon the battlement, And all his brow is clouded with a grief. From end to end, from end to end he goes, Muttering his maledictions--and a name Of one who drowned, it seems--though no one knows, For there's a madness in his words, they claim.

TO WILLIAM GRIFFITH

(_He that is Pierrot_)

I think your soul goes clad in dominoes, Haunting old gardens that are always June, To sit within the shadow of a rose, And strum and sing your every fragile tune. For all we meet you where the great world rides, You have no league with anything we are: Your life is all entangled in the tides Of goblin moons and musics and a star.

You talk to us of what the moment brings, Of earnest men and worlds of work-a-day, Of stocks and stores and half a hundred things,-- And all the while, your soul is leagues away, Troubling old ghostly gardens where it goes, Motlied with moonlight and your dominoes.

REVELATION

Walking these long, late twilights of the Spring, Where all the fret of life seems nothing worth, And grief, itself, a half-forgotten thing, Less keen than these cool odours of the earth,-- I sometimes think we find the secret gate That gives on gardens of enchanted light, Restoring glories that we lost of late, To quiet wisdom and more certain sight.

A holier mood will haunt our stubborn will, Till we shall see revealments through the grass, And stop, abashed, before a daffodil, A shining weed, a stone on ways we pass, Stand with bared head before the evening star, And know these holy things for what they are.

DISCOVERY

I shall discover ... after all and all ... From what alembic issues forth the Spring, What cryptic finger, moving by a wall, Leaves tulip writs in tulip colouring; I shall have knowledge of the tug and grip Of tender roots where they are thrust and curled, And what frail doors are opened to let slip The hidden spear into the lighted world.

So I shall know the mint of daffodils, In darkened rooms where colour comes to birth, The mouldy chamber where the rose distils A sweetness that is Summer for the earth ... And all the strange, alchemic, secret spell, I shall discover, ... but I shall not tell.

FOR BOB: A DOG

(_In Memoriam_)

You, who would never leave us to our sleeping, But ever nosed us out of bed to play, How can we ever think of you as keeping So strangely still, as stirless as the clay? We cannot think you dead to games and laughter; Surely in some bright place beyond the sun, Girls race and play, and you go racing after, And lie across their feet when games are done.

Who knows, but in our separate times and places When we have slept the last, last sleep away, You yet may come, your nose against our faces, And wake us to our bright, immortal play... And if you startle us with rude surprise, You'll beg--and win--forgiveness with those eyes.

IN SUMMER

I think these stars that draw so strangely near, That lean and listen for the turning earth, Are never wholly careless when they hear The murmur of her hushed and quiet mirth,-- But looking out upon a world in bloom, They half-remember, and they heed and hark: An old, old sweetness in the scented gloom, An old, old music in the singing dark.

Their own full Summers gone, such aeons past, Bird-song and bloom and swallow from the sky, These dead, desireless worlds find here, at last, Something remembered when the earth turns by, Sweet with these blowing odours they had known, This happy music that was once their own.

SURVIVAL

Men building ships, and women cooking meals, The mothering girl-child with her doll in arms, The ploughman trudging at his horse's heels, The fires we lay, our chill at war's alarms:-- These epic, ancient gestures of the race Have still the greatness of those great who wrought In other days than ours, who keep their place Along our shadowy borderlands of thought.

A word evokes them,--aye, a lifted hand Stirs slumbrous queens whose sceptres were upraised For life or death in what forgotten land!-- Where cowherds pass, old Grecian kine are grazed, And many a rocking-horse and laughing boy Lead back the tragic chariots of Troy.

NOMENCLATURE

There is a magic in the shining name, A legacy that beauty yields to speech, Something more quick and subtle than her fame,-- Who else had blown beyond our stunted reach. By what occult divining does the will Fashion the cryptic word whose sound and sense Evoke the trembling image, lovely still, Of something lost but for this recompense?

There have been ships whose names were music's own; But speak them--and the lifted prows go by! Women who stir as from the sculptor's stone, For syllables still tender as a sigh ... And banished Aprils that we saw and heard, Return their lights and colours ... in a word.

TO ONE RETURNED FROM A JOURNEY

You have come home with old seas in your speech, And glimmering sea-roads meeting in your mind: The curve of creeping silver up the beach, And mornings whose white splendours daze and blind. You have brought word of ships and where they go, Their names like music, and the flags they fly: Steamer ... and barque ... and churning tug and tow, And a lone sail at sunset blowing by.

Shoreline and mist have still their ancient way: Through all your speech the sea's long rise and fall Sound their slow musics in the words you say:-- And I who sit and listen to it all, Am like an absent lover who would hear News of one loved, incalculably dear.

ATTENDANTS

The mild-eyed Oxen and the gentle Ass, By manger or in pastures that they graze, Lift their slow heads to watch us where we pass, A reminiscent wonder in their gaze. Their low humility is like a crown, A grave distinction they have come to wear,-- Their look gone past us--to a little Town, And a white miracle that happened there.

An old, old vision haunts those quiet eyes, Where proud remembrance drifts to them again, Of Something that has made them humbly wise, --These burden-bearers for the race of men-- And lightens every load they lift or pull, Something that chanced because the Inn was full.

RENDEZVOUS

... So she came back to you and me, She who had been the lovely third ... A little, blue ghost in time for tea;

Smiling and grave and with no word Of how things fare with such as she, But suddenly lonely when she heard,

In that still place, the fragile clink Of tea cups, and her own dear name, 'Twas like her to be touched, I think,

With smiling pity for you and me;-- So, in a breathless haste, she came, A little, blue ghost in time for tea.

SONNETS FROM A HOSPITAL

I

SPRING

Remembering sunlight on the steepled square, Remembering April's way with little streets, And pouter pigeons coasting down the air, Spilling a beauty, like white-crested fleets,-- I have imagined, in these pain-racked days, The look of grasses thrusting through the earth, Of tender shoots along green-bordered ways, Of hedges, and their first, frail blossoming mirth.

I have imagined, too, in some such wise Death may allow, within her darkened room, Some subtle intimation of wide skies, Of startled grasses, and the hedge in bloom,-- And we may know when some far spring comes down, Wearing her magic slippers through the town.

II

FEVER

The cool, sweet earth is cool and sweet indeed, To flesh that fever makes a cinder of,-- An angel with cool hands to cup his need, In ministrations, kinder yet than love. There, a cool cheek to lay against his own, And rest for that hot blood's too restless will, His hands to curve on root or clod or stone;-- And deep-dug earth is very, very still.

Yet some, remembering happiness he had Of living things, of leaf and sun and air, Could pity him his prison, and be sad,-- Not knowing how he is companioned there, Nor how, for such as he and his great need, The cool, sweet earth is cool and sweet indeed.

III

RUINS

The spring comes in to me like spring in Rome,-- As year by year those ruins, dead to mirth, Sense a strange quickening in the sweetened loam, Where new, returning Aprils take the earth; Something they lost, so many centuries gone, Something too swift and subtle for a word, Is half-remembered--in a shattered faun, A stained and broken bird-bath, and its bird.

But otherwise, all alien comes the Spring, Touching but not transforming what they are: Flowers in the cranny but a foolish thing, Grass in the pavements, foreign as a star ... Each reminiscent, half-insensate stone Mocked with new life it cannot call its own.

IV

VISITATION

All through my fevered nights, their grey ghosts came, The great, cool sailing ships blown softly by, More fair than any beauty that we name, Girdled of water, chrismed of the sky. I cannot tell what hidden bales of prize, What mystic spell may haunt the wraiths of ships, But these were secret healing on my eyes, And these were cooling water at my lips.

It may be, when the final fever ends, And flesh burns out, at last, and pulses fail, They will not know, my grieved and stricken friends, How in that instant I had given hail To one white ship come ghostwise in from sea, And how at last that it is well with me.

THIS LANE IN MAY

A fragrance lingers, though the rains be done; And apple-trees have shaken from their hair The thin and shining blossoms, one by one, Starring the roadway like a silver stair. And something softer than the rain comes by, Older and dearer than these bright, new days: An odour ... or a trick of lights that lie Familiar on these grass-grown, rutted ways.

This lane in May is such a haunted thing, For all the newness of the rain-wet trees: An old, old May, remembered of the Spring, Returning ghostwise on such days as these, Moves in the blowing odours where they pass, Trailing these scattered blossoms in the grass.

FUGITIVE

Behind these falling curtains of the rain, Beauty goes by, a phantom on the hill, A timid fugitive beyond the lane, In rainy silver,--and so shy and still That only peering eyes of some hid bird, Or furry ears that listened by a stone, Could guess at Something neither seen nor heard, Finding escape, and faring by, alone.

For eyes like ours, too faint a thing and fleet, Too lightly running for such ears to hear The stealthy going of those weightless feet; No thrilling sight or sound of her comes near, Only the shining grasses where they lie, Give hint of silver slippers hasting by.

AN OLD GARDENER

He has always a wise and knowing air: For him there is no mystery in the mould, Where seeds put on the shimmering things they wear, And come to birth in yellow, green, and gold. His quizzical, grey eyes can somehow mark The silver shaft of sunlight where it goes, Still radiant and undarkened in the dark, To find the seed room of the hidden rose.

For him the secret alchemies are plain; He tells most surely how these things befall, In words grown intimate with roots and rain; And yet, he is so tender of it all, So wise and kind in ways of leaf and sod, Sometimes I think him very like to God.

THE VEIL

Here where the snow comes whitely down, All worldiness is done; The saintly, silent little Town Is like a nun;

Most holy in her street and spire, Most perfectly at rest,-- Ah, God, who knows what hid desire Is in her breast,

Where peony or daffodil Or wayward rose begins, Burning her drifted bosom, still, Like secret sins.

THE YEAR IS OLD

Day fades with fading colours from the sky, And blue smoke blowing where the hills are gold, Is all a tale of loveliness gone by: Summer is ended, and the year is old, Beauty and bloom are wet leaves in the grass, And music is a lone wind on the hill, Crying that all things beautiful must pass, Crying that beauty is remembered still.

There will be wood-mist moving by the gate, There will be gathering to the fire by night, The greying ashes falling in the grate,-- And long remembering, in the failing light, Of ghosts returning for a wisp of fame, Cloudy and brief along the smoke and flame.

MARINERS

Men who have loved the ships they took to sea, Loved the tall masts, the prows that creamed with foam, Have learned, deep in their hearts, how it might be That there is yet a dearer thing than home. The decks they walk, the rigging in the stars, The clean boards counted in the watch they keep,-- These, and the sunlight on the slippery spars, Will haunt them ever, waking and asleep.

Ashore, these men are not as other men; They walk as strangers through the crowded street, Or, brooding by their fires, they hear again The drone astern, where gurgling waters meet, Or see again a wide and blue lagoon, And a lone ship that rides there with the moon.

AN ABANDONED INN

Along this stillness steals their ghostly laughter: The oaths they swore, the clamant song and jest, Are haunting still each oaken beam and rafter, That looked on many a gay, forgotten guest. The clink of cups, the muffled clang of swords, These, and the flapping cards, will not be stilled, Though dust has spread the long-abandoned boards, And hides at last the crimson wine they spilled.

And still, they say, on sullen nights of rain, A passer-by may hear, beyond the door, An old accounting for this ugly stain That makes an evil pattern on the floor-- A sound of dice--an oath--a crashing chair ... And sudden, grievous silence fallen there.

PRONE

Here where these grasses thrust between my fingers, And where the earth against my palms is cool, The hot day dies ... and only late light lingers Above the shadowed valley's misty pool. The trees have bent above me like tall lovers, The stars return their slow, familiar way, And a great, stirless quiet comes and covers The traveller resting at the end of day.

I think this body, with its foolish fears, May grow less foolish and less fearful so, Learning that at the end of wandering years, Waits but this house that it has come to know, Familiar in its sleepy-hearted mirth, The cool and kind and hospitable earth.

REVIVAL

This body, gathering slumber as it goes, Will come too full of sleep for wandering, And so lie down,--and yet it somehow knows It never could be careless of the Spring; But turning with the happy-minded earth, When straying Aprils stir the sentient mould, It still will know these festivals of mirth, These subtle sorceries of green and gold.

And we may yet discover, after all, How flesh is glory whitening on the hedge, Or wine-red tulips burning at a wall;-- And we may learn, by some wild-flowered ledge, How solemn dust at last turns gay again, To light the Spring for later, wandering men.

IMPOSTOR

This Autumn of the yellow lanes Is come a sorry vagabond, Grown tearful now and over-fond Of grey and melancholy rains.

He loves his griefs and broken sighs, His sorrows of a thousand years,-- And thinks we do not know those tears Are wood-smoke in his eyes.

If leaves go by us in a gust, He needs must clutch his heart, and say: "Alas" or else "Alack-a-day"-- And thinks we take it all on trust.

So sad and sad a rake he is!-- And yet so glad of being sad, Knowing no fellow ever had Such fine, becoming griefs as his.

SNOW DUSK

The iron twilight closes, and the steep Gates of the day where late the light was hurled, Swing to on silent hinges, and a sleep, A still, white sleep is fallen on the world. There is no stir these trackless miles around: The Earth is turned a grey cathedral close, Where is forgot all motion and all sound, Beneath these smooth, obliterating snows.

One burning taper trembles ... and the sky Curves like a dome where cloudy anthems are, Above immaculate distances that lie In thoughtful adoration of a star ... Earth has her veil, and takes her silent vow: Nothing save holiness is left her now.

MOOD

This grave, unlabouring beauty of the dusk, Stars and still fields and swallows in the sky, These cool, damp odours faint with earthen musk, The fading sheep like ghosts of sheep gone by,-- Have held so long the thought of brooding men, That something like a mood has gathered there, Piled deep and high, again and yet again, A moving, thoughtful presence on the air.

So when the last light passes from the hill, Leaving these fields a glimmering grey and blue, And the last bell has sounded and grown still,-- These blinking stars awake and tremble through, Re-blossomed from those gathering moods of time, Like brooding thoughts that flower into rhyme.

SHIPS IN HARBOUR

I have not known a quieter thing than ships, Nor any dreamers steeped in dream as these, For all that they have tracked disastrous seas, And winds that left their sails in flagging strips; Nothing disturbs them now, no stormy grips That once had hurt their sides, no crash or swell, Nor can the fretful harbour quite dispel This quiet that they learned on lonely trips.

They have no part in all the noisy noons; They are become as dreams of ships that go Back to the secret waters that they know, Each as she will to unforgot lagoons, Where nothing moves except the ghostly spars That mark the patient watches on the stars.

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Transcriber's note:

The following change was made to the text:

Page 13: "weight they bare" changed to "weight they bear".