Late Lyrics and Earlier | Page 7

.
Yet though my destiny
It was to miss your early sweet,
You still,
when turned to you my feet,
Had sweet enough to be
A prize for me!

THE WEST-OF-WESSEX GIRL
A very West-of-Wessex girl,
As blithe as blithe could be,
Was once well-known to me,
And she
would laud her native town,
And hope and hope that we
Might sometime study up and down
Its charms in company.
But never I squired my Wessex girl
In jaunts to Hoe or street
When hearts were high in beat,
Nor saw
her in the marbled ways
Where market-people meet
That in her bounding early days
Were friendly with her feet.
Yet now my West-of-Wessex girl,
When midnight hammers slow
From Andrew's, blow by blow,
As
phantom draws me by the hand
To the place--Plymouth Hoe--
Where side by side in life, as planned,
We never were to go!
Begun in Plymouth, March 1913.
WELCOME HOME
To my native place
Bent upon returning,
Bosom all day burning

To be where my race
Well were known, 'twas much with me
There
to dwell in amity.
Folk had sought their beds,
But I hailed: to view me
Under the

moon, out to me
Several pushed their heads,
And to each I told my
name,
Plans, and that therefrom I came.
"Did you? . . . Ah, 'tis true
I once heard, back a long time,
Here had
spent his young time,
Some such man as you . . .
Good-night." The
casement closed again,
And I was left in the frosty lane.
GOING AND STAYING
I
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook
was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,
These were the
things we wished would stay;
But they were going.
II
Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world
decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,
These were the things
we wished would go;
But they were staying.
III
Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms
revolving
To sweep off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister
with things sublime
Alike dissolving.
READ BY MOONLIGHT
I paused to read a letter of hers

By the moon's cold shine,
Eyeing it in the tenderest way,
And
edging it up to catch each ray
Upon her light-penned line.
I did not know what years would flow
Of her life's span and mine
Ere I read another letter of hers
By the moon's cold shine!
I chance now on the last of hers,
By the moon's cold shine;
It is the one remaining page
Out of the
many shallow and sage
Whereto she set her sign.
Who could foresee there were to be
Such letters of pain and pine
Ere I should read this last of hers
By the moon's cold shine!
AT A HOUSE IN HAMPSTEAD
SOMETIME THE
DWELLING OF JOHN KEATS
O poet, come you haunting here
Where streets have stolen up all
around,
And never a nightingale pours one
Full-throated sound?
Drawn from your drowse by the Seven famed Hills,
Thought you to
find all just the same
Here shining, as in hours of old,
If you but came?
What will you do in your surprise
At seeing that changes wrought in
Rome
Are wrought yet more on the misty slope
One time your home?

Will you wake wind-wafts on these stairs?
Swing the doors open
noisily?
Show as an umbraged ghost beside
Your ancient tree?
Or will you, softening, the while
You further and yet further look,

Learn that a laggard few would fain
Preserve your nook? . . .
--Where the Piazza steps incline,
And catch late light at eventide,
I
once stood, in that Rome, and thought,
"'Twas here he died."
I drew to a violet-sprinkled spot,
Where day and night a pyramid
keeps
Uplifted its white hand, and said,
"'Tis there he sleeps."
Pleasanter now it is to hold
That here, where sang he, more of him

Remains than where he, tuneless, cold,
Passed to the dim.
July 1920.
A WOMAN'S FANCY
"Ah Madam; you've indeed come back here?
'Twas sad--your husband's so swift death,
And you away! You
shouldn't have left him:
It hastened his last breath."
"Dame, I am not the lady you think me;

I know not her, nor know her name;
I've come to lodge here--a
friendless woman;
My health my only aim."
She came; she lodged. Wherever she rambled
They held her as no other than
The lady named; and told how her
husband
Had died a forsaken man.
So often did they call her thuswise
Mistakenly, by that man's name,
So much did they declare about him,
That his past form and fame
Grew on her, till she pitied his sorrow
As if she truly had been the cause--
Yea, his deserter; and came to
wonder
What mould of man he was.
"Tell me my history!" would exclaim she;
"OUR history," she said mournfully.
"But YOU know, surely,
Ma'am?" they would answer,
Much in perplexity.
Curious, she crept to his grave one evening,
And a second time in the dusk of the morrow;
Then a third time, with
crescent emotion
Like a bereaved wife's sorrow.

No gravestone rose by the rounded hillock;
--"I marvel