Alcyone | Page 2

clanking hands
Obey a hideous
routine;
They are not flesh, they are not bone,
They see not with the
human eye,
And from their iron lips is blown
A dreadful and
monotonous cry;
And whoso of our mortal race
Should find that
city unaware,
Lean Death would smite him face to face,
And blanch
him with its venomed air:
Or caught by the terrific spell,
Each
thread of memory snapt and cut,
His soul would shrivel and its shell

Go rattling like an empty nut.
It was not always so, but once,
In days that no man thinks upon,

Fair voices echoed from its stones,
The light above it leaped and
shone:
Once there were multitudes of men,
That built that city in
their pride,
Until its might was made, and then
They withered age
by age and died.
But now of that prodigious race,
Three only in an
iron tower,
Set like carved idols face to face,
Remain the masters of
its power;
And at the city gate a fourth,
Gigantic and with dreadful
eyes,
Sits looking toward the lightless north,
Beyond the reach of
memories;
Fast rooted to the lurid floor,
A bulk that never moves a
jot,
In his pale body dwells no more,

Or mind, or soul,--an idiot!
But sometime in the end those three
Shall perish and their hands be
still,
And with the master's touch shall flee
Their incommunicable
skill.
A stillness absolute as death
Along the slacking wheels shall
lie,
And, flagging at a single breath,
The fires shall moulder out and
die.
The roar shall vanish at its height,
And over that tremendous
town
The silence of eternal night
Shall gather close and settle down.

All its grim grandeur, tower and hall,
Shall be abandoned utterly,


And into rust and dust shall fall
From century to century;
Nor
ever living thing shall grow,
Or trunk of tree, or blade of grass;
No
drop shall fall, no wind shall blow,
Nor sound of any foot shall pass:

Alone of its accursèd state,
One thing the hand of Time shall spare,

For the grim Idiot at the gate
Is deathless and eternal there.
THE SONG SPARROW
Fair little scout, that when the iron year
Changes, and the first fleecy
clouds deploy,
Comest with such a sudden burst of joy,
Lifting on
winter's doomed and broken rear
That song of silvery triumph blithe
and clear;
Not yet quite conscious of the happy glow,
We hungered
for some surer touch, and lo!
One morning we awake, and thou art
here.
And thousands of frail-stemmed hepaticas,
With their crisp
leaves and pure and perfect hues,
Light sleepers, ready for the golden
news,
Spring at thy note beside the forest ways--
Next to thy song,
the first to deck the hour--
The classic lyrist and the classic flower.
INTER VIAS
'Tis a land where no hurricane falls,
But the infinite azure regards

Its waters for ever, its walls
Of granite, its limitless swards;
Where
the fens to their innermost pool
With the chorus of May are aring,

And the glades are wind-winnowed and cool
With perpetual spring;
Where folded and half withdrawn
The delicate wind-flowers blow,

And the bloodroot kindles at dawn
Her spiritual taper of snow;

Where the limits are met and spanned
By a waste that no
husbandman tills,
And the earth-old pine forests stand
In the hollows of hills.
'Tis the land that our babies behold,
Deep gazing when none are

aware;
And the great-hearted seers of old
And the poets have
known it, and there
Made halt by the well-heads of truth
On their
difficult pilgrimage
From the rose-ruddy gardens of youth
To the summits of age.
Now too, as of old, it is sweet
With a presence remote and serene;

Still its byways are pressed by the feet
Of the mother immortal, its
queen:
The huntress whose tresses, flung free,
And her fillets of
gold, upon earth,
They only have honour to see
Who are dreamers from birth.
In her calm and her beauty supreme,
They have found her at dawn or
at eve,
By the marge of some motionless stream,
Or where shadows
rebuild or unweave
In a murmurous alley of pine,
Looking upward
in silent surprise,
A figure, slow-moving, divine,
With inscrutable eyes.
REFUGE
Where swallows and wheatfields are,
O hamlet brown and still,
O
river that shineth far,
By meadow, pier, and mill:
O endless sunsteeped plain,
With forests in dim blue shrouds,
And
little wisps of rain,
Falling from far-off clouds:
I come from the choking air
Of passion, doubt, and strife,
With a
spirit and mind laid bare
To your healing breadth of life:
O fruitful and sacred ground,
O sunlight and summer sky,
Absorb
me and fold me round,
For broken and tired am I.
APRIL NIGHT

How deep the April night is in its noon,
The hopeful, solemn,
many-murmured night!
The earth lies hushed with expectation; bright

Above the world's dark border burns the moon,
Yellow and large;
from forest floorways, strewn
With flowers, and fields that tingle
with new birth,
The moist smell of the unimprisoned earth
Comes
up, a sigh, a haunting promise. Soon,
Ah, soon, the teeming triumph!
At my feet
The river with its stately sweep and wheel
Moves on
slow-motioned, luminous, grey like steel.
From fields far off whose
watery hollows gleam,
Aye with blown throats that make the long
hours sweet,
The sleepless toads are murmuring in their dream.
PERSONALITY
O differing human heart,
Why is it that I tremble when thine eyes,

Thy human eyes and