Hawthorn and Lavender | Page 6

orts, and rags, and heeltaps--

This dream of being merely friends.
XL
'Dearest, when I am dead,
Make one last song for me:
Sing what I would have said--
Righting life's wrong for me.
'Tell them how, early and late,
Glad ran the days with me,
Seeing how goodly and great,
Love, were your ways with me.'
XLI
Dear hands, so many times so much
When the spent year was green and prime,
Come, take your fill, and
touch
This one poor time.
Dear lips, that could not leave unsaid
One sweet-souled syllable of delight,
Once more--and be as dead
In the dead night.
Dear eyes, so fond to read in mine
The message of our counted years,
Look your proud last, nor shine
Through tears--through tears.
XLII

When, in what other life,
Where in what old, spent star,
Systems
ago, dead vastitudes afar,
Were we two bird and bough, or man and
wife?
Or wave and spar?
Or I the beating sea, and you the bar
On
which it breaks? I know not, I!
But this, O this, my Very Dear, I
know:
Your voice awakes old echoes in my heart;
And things I say
to you now are said once more;
And, Sweet, when we two part,
I
feel I have seen you falter and linger so,
So hesitate, and turn, and
cling--yet go,
As once in some immemorable Before,
Once on some
fortunate yet thrice-blasted shore.
Was it for good?
O, these poor
eyes are wet;
And yet, O, yet,
Now that we know, I would not, if I
could,
Forget.
XLIII
The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain--
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart, they work the
brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.
What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,

And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise?
Ever the rain--the rain and the wind!
Come, hunch with me over the fire,
Dream of the dreams that leered
and grinned,
Ere the blood of the Year got chilled and thinned,
And the death came on desire!
XLIV

_He made this gracious Earth a hell_
_With Love and Drink_. _I
cannot tell_
_Of which he died_. _But Death was well_.
Will I die of drink?
Why not?
Won't I pause and think?
--What?
Why in seeming wise
Waste your breath?
Everybody dies--
And of death!
Youth--if you find it's youth
Too late?
Truth--and the back of truth?
Straight,
Be it love or liquor,
What's the odds,
So it slide you quicker
To the gods?
XLV
O, these long nights of days!
All the year's baseness in the ways,

All the year's wretchedness in the skies;
While on the blind,
disheartened sea
A tramp-wind plies
Cringingly and dejectedly!

And rain and darkness, mist and mud,
They cling, they close, they
sneak into the blood,
They crawl and crowd upon the brain:
Till in a
dull, dense monotone of pain
The past is found a kind of maze,
At
whose every coign and crook,
Broad angle and privy nook,
There
waits a hooded Memory,
Sad, yet with strange, bright, unreproaching
eyes.
XLVI

In Shoreham River, hurrying down
To the live sea,
By working,
marrying, breeding Shoreham Town,
Breaking the sunset's wistful
and solemn dream,
An old, black rotter of a boat
Past service to the
labouring, tumbling flote,
Lay stranded in mid-stream:
With a
horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line,
That made me think of
legs and a broken spine:
Soon, all-too soon,
Ungainly and forlorn to
lie
Full in the eye
Of the cynical, discomfortable moon
That, as I
looked, stared from the fading sky,
A clown's face flour'd for work.
And by and by
The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned;
The
lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing;
The poor old
hulk remained,
Stuck helpless in mid-ebb. And I knew why--
Why,
as I looked, my heart felt crying. {63}
For, as I looked, the good
green earth seemed dying--
Dying or dead;
And, as I looked on the
old boat, I said:--
'_Dear God_, _it's I_!'
XLVII
Come by my bed,
What time the gray ghost shrieks and flies;
Take
in your hands my head,
And look, O look, into my failing eyes;

And, by God's grace,
Even as He sunders body and breath,
The
shadow of your face
Shall pass with me into the run
Of the Beyond,
and I shall keep and save
Your beauty, as it used to be,
An absolute
part of me,
Lying there, dead and done,
Far from the sovran bounty
of the sun,
Down in the grisly colonies of the Grave.
XLVIII
Gray hills, gray skies, gray lights,
And still, gray sea--
O fond, O
fair,
The Mays that were,
When the wild days and wilder nights

Made it like heaven to be!
Gray head, gray heart, gray dreams--
O, breath by breath,

Night-tide and day
Lapse gentle and gray,
As to a murmur of tired
streams,
Into the haze of death.

XLIX
Silence, loneliness, darkness--
These, and of these my fill,
While God in the rush of the Maytide
Without is working His will.
Without are the wind and the wall-flowers,
The leaves and the nests and the rain,
And in all of them God is