“ Running along the shaken grass
To each dark hole that it can find—
The crystal wind, the Moon my lamp,
Have vanished in a wood that's blind.
High lies my small, my shadowy camp,
Crowded about by small dark hills;
With sudden small white flowers the sky
Above the woods' dark greenness fills;
And hosts of dark-browed, muttering trees
In trance the white Moon stills.
I move among their tall grey forms,
A thin moon-glimmering, wandering Ghost,
Who takes his lantern through the world
In search of life that he has lost,
While watching by that long lean gun
Upon his small hill post. ”

“ We are they who come faster than fate: we are they who ride early
or late:
We storm at your ivory gate: Pale Kings of the Sunset, beware!
Not on silk nor in samet we lie, not in curtained solemnity die
Among women who chatter and cry, and children who mumble a prayer.
But we sleep by the ropes of the camp, and we rise with a shout,
and we tramp
With the sun or the moon for a lamp, and the spray of the wind in
our hair.
From the lands, where the elephants are, to the forts of Merou
and Balghar,
Our steel we have brought and our star to shine on the ruins of Rum. ”

“ A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then
There is no sound at the top of the house of men
Or mice; and the cloud is blown, and the moon again
Dapples the apples with deep-sea light.
They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams;
On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams
Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams,
And quiet is the steep stair under.
In the corridors under there is nothing but sleep,
And stiller than ever on orchard boughs they keep
Tryst with the moon, and deep is the silence, deep
On moon-washed apples of wonder. ”

“ How the body's joy for more than body's use was made.
I knew then how the body is the body of the mind,
And how the mind's own fire beneath the cool skin played.
O shape that once to have seen is to see evermore,
Falling stream that falls to the deeps of the mind,
Fire that once lit burns while aught burns in the world,
Foot to head a flame moving in the spirit's wind! ”

“ No stars burned in their deeps, but through the dusk
I saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.
No star their secret ravished, no wasting moon
Mocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:
Only the soft unseeing heaven of June,
The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.
For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday now
Were silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,
Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough—
Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?
Was ever a moment meeter made for love?
Beautiful are your close lips beneath my kiss ”

“ I shall look up one night and see the Moon
For the last time shining above the hills,
And thou, silent, wilt ride
Over the dark hillside.
'Twill be, perchance, the time of daffodils—
"How come those bright immortals in the woods?
Their joy being young, did'st thou not drag them all
Into dark graves ere Fall?"
Shall life thus haunt me, wondering, as I go
[Pg 445] To thy deep solitudes?
There is a figure with a down-turned torch
Carved on a pillar in an olden time,
A calm and lovely boy
Who comes not to destroy
But to lead age back to its golden prime. ”

“ Water has the curve of her shoulder and breast,
Water falls as straight as her body rose,
Water her brightness has from neck to still feet,
Water crystal-cold as her cold body flows.
But not water has the colour I saw when I dreamed,
Nor water such strength has. I joyed to behold
How the blood lit her body with lamps of fire
And made the flesh glow that like water gleamed cold.
A flame in her arms and in each finger flame,
[Pg 213] And flame in her bosom, flame above, below,
The curve of climbing flame in her waist and her thighs;μ
From foot to head did flame into red flame flow. ”

“ Quickens our need.
All is reborn, but never any Spring
Can bring back this;
Nor any fullness of midsummer bring
The voice we miss.
The smiling eyes shall smile on us no more;
The laughter clear,
Too far away on the forbidden shore,
We shall not hear.
Bereft of these until the day we die,
We both must dwell;
Alone, alone, and haunted by the cry:
"Hail and farewell!
Yet when the scythe of Death shall near us hiss,
Through the cold air,
Then on the shuddering marge of the abyss
They will be there.
They will be there to lift us from sheer space
And empty night ”

“ I cried, seeing that wavering shape
That steadied and then wavered, as a cherry bough in June
Lifts and falls in the wind—each fruit a fruit of light;
And then she stood as clear as an unclouded moon.
[Pg 212] As clear and still she stood, moonlike remotely near;
I saw and heard her breathe, I years and years away.
Her light streamed through the years, I saw her clear and still,
Shape and spirit together mingling night with day.
Water falling, falling with the curve of time
Over green-hued rock, then plunging to its pool
Far, far below, a falling spear of light ”

“ Beside the fire! No man can ever be
The friend of that poor queen.
[Pg 403] THE GOAT PATHS
The crooked paths go every way
Upon the hill—they wind about
Through the heather in and out
Of the quiet sunniness.
And there the goats, day after day,
Stray in sunny quietness,
Cropping here and cropping there,
As they pause and turn and pass,
Now a bit of heather spray
Now a mouthful of the grass.
In the deeper sunniness,
In the place where nothing stirs,
Quietly in quietness,
In the quiet of the furze,
For a time they come and lie
Staring on the roving sky. ”

“ And yet no heaven is more near;
You shape huge deeds without event,
And half made men believe and fear.
Your worship is your furnaces,
Which, like old idols, lost obscenes,
Have molten bowels; your vision is
[Pg 68] Machines for making more machines.
O, you are buried in the night,
Preparing destinies of rust;
Iron misused must turn to blight
And dwindle to a tettered crust.
The grass, forerunner of life, has gone,
But plants that spring in ruins and shards
Attend until your dream is done:
I have seen hemlock in your yards. ”

“ Into a green flame bursting the hedgerows stand.
Soon, with banners flying, Spring will walk the land....
There is no day for thee, my soul, like this,
No spring of lovely words. Nay, even the kiss
Of mortal love that maketh man divine
This light cannot outshine:
Nay, even poets, they whose frail hands catch
The shadow of vanishing beauty, may not match
This leafy ecstasy. Sweet words may cull
Such magical beauty as time may not destroy;
But we, alas, are not more beautiful:
We cannot flower in beauty as in joy. ”

“ Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;
When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain,
Take no more solace from the palm-girt wells,
When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone. ”

“ No traveller has rest more blest
Than this moment brief between
Two lives, when the Night's first lights
And shades hide what has never been,
Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been.
[Pg 420] LIGHTS OUT
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink. ”

“ Knowing that beauty's self rose visible in the world
Over age that darkens, and griefs that destroy?
[Pg 214] STONE TREES
Last night a sword-light in the sky
Flashed a swift terror on the dark.
In that sharp light the fields did lie
Naked and stone-like; each tree stood
Like a tranced woman, bound and stark.
Far off the wood
With darkness ridged the riven dark.
The cows astonished stared with fear,
And sheep crept to the knees of cows,
And conies to their burrows slid,
And rooks were still in rigid boughs,
And all things else were still or hid. ”

“ Shoot arrows into the sky, thin moon-seeking needles:
Now you shall have a harvest, a belly-full rapture,
[Pg 450] There shall be many fat women, full grown, and smoother than honey,
Their limbs like ivory rounded, and firm as a berry,
Their lips full of food and their eyes full of hunger for men!
The heat of the earth arises, a faint love mist
Wan with over-desiring, and in the marshes
Blindly the mud stirs, clouding the dark shining water,
And troubling the still soft swarms of fallen stars. ”

“ They are oblivious as is stone or grass—The
clouds passed voiceless over, and the sun
Rose, and lit trees, and vanished utterly.
Then in the awful beauty of the world,
When stars are singing in dark ecstasy,
Those ox-like soldiers sit collected round
[Pg 447] A thin, metallic echo of human song:
And click their feet and clap their hands in time,
And wag their heads, and make the white ghost owl
Flit from its branch—but still those tree-like shapes
Stand like archangels dark-winged in the sky. ”

“ Treble their labour! still the happier they,
Who at this genial task wear out long hours,
Till vast night round them creeps,
[Pg 322] When soon the torch-light dance whirls them away;
For gods who love wine double all their powers.
Iacchus is the always grateful god!
His vineyards are more fair than gardens far;
Hanging, like those of Babylon, they nod
O'er each Ionian cliff and hill-side scar!
While Cypris lends him saltness, depth, and peace;
The brown earth yields him sap for richest green;
And he has borrowed laughter from the sky ”

“ Yet every spring my mind must cross the main
To hear and see that water-bird and star
That on the mountain sings, and shines so far.
[Pg 141] IN MAY
Yes, I will spend the livelong day
With Nature in this month of May;
And sit beneath the trees, and share
My bread with birds whose homes are there;
While cows lie down to eat, and sheep
Stand to their necks in grass so deep;
While birds do sing with all their might,
As though they felt the earth in flight. ”

“ The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze;
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light,
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
And who dies fighting has increase.
The fighting man shall from the sun
Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth ”

“ Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
They cry unto the night their battle-name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
They come shaking in triumph their long green hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. ”

“ The little path of gravel
Was overgrown with celandine,
[Pg 410] No other folk did travel
Along its weedy surface, but the nimble-footed mouse
Running from house to house.
So all among the vivid blades
Of soft and tender grass
We lay, nor heard the limber wheels
That pass and ever pass,
In noisy continuity until their stony rattle
Seems in itself a battle.
At length we rose up from this ease
Of tranquil happy mind,
And searched the garden's little length
A fresh pleasaunce to find;
And there, some yellow daffodils and jasmine hanging high
Did rest the tired eye. ”