Poems | Page 9

an apple wasps had undermined;
Or a sentry of dark betonies,?The stateliest of small flowers on earth,?At the forest verge; or crocuses?Pale purple as if they had their birth
In sunless Hades fields. The war?Came back to mind with the moonrise?Which soldiers in the east afar?Beheld then. Nevertheless, our eyes
Could as well imagine the Crusades?Or Caesar's battles. Everything?To faintness like those rumours fades--?Like the brook's water glittering
Under the moonlight--like those walks?Now--like us two that took them, and?The fallen apples, all the talks?And silences--like memory's sand
When the tide covers it late or soon,?And other men through other flowers?In those fields under the same moon?Go talking and have easy hours.
OCTOBER
THE green elm with the one great bough of gold?Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one,--?The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,?Harebell and scabious and tormentil,?That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,?Bow down to; and the wind travels too light?To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;?The gossamers wander at their own will.?At heavier steps than birds' the squirrels scold.
The rich scene has grown fresh again and new?As Spring and to the touch is not more cool?Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might?As happy be as earth is beautiful,?Were I some other or with earth could turn?In alternation of violet and rose,?Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,?And gorse that has no time not to be gay.?But if this be not happiness,--who knows??Some day I shall think this a happy day,?And this mood by the name of melancholy?Shall no more blackened and obscured be.
THE LONG SMALL ROOM
THE long small room that showed willows in the west?Narrowed up to the end the fireplace filled,?Although not wide. I liked it. No one guessed?What need or accident made them so build.
Only the moon, the mouse and the sparrow peeped?In from the ivy round the casement thick.?Of all they saw and heard there they shall keep?The tale for the old ivy and older brick.
When I look back I am like moon, sparrow and mouse?That witnessed what they could never understand?Or alter or prevent in the dark house.?One thing remains the same--this my right hand
Crawling crab-like over the clean white page,?Resting awhile each morning on the pillow,?Then once more starting to crawl on towards age.?The hundred last leaves stream upon the willow.
LIBERTY
THE last light has gone out of the world, except?This moonlight lying on the grass like frost?Beyond the brink of the tall elm's shadow?It is as if everything else had slept?Many an age, unforgotten and lost?The men that were, the things done, long ago,?All I have thought; and but the moon and I?Live yet and here stand idle over the grave?Where all is buried. Both have liberty?To dream what we could do if we were free?To do some thing we had desired long,?The moon and I. There's none less free than who?Does nothing and has nothing else to do,?Being free only for what is not to his mind,?And nothing is to his mind. If every hour?Like this one passing that I have spent among?The wiser others when I have forgot?To wonder whether I was free or not,?Were piled before me, and not lost behind,?And I could take and carry them away?I should be rich; or if I had the power?To wipe out every one and not again?Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.?And yet I still am half in love with pain,?With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,?With things that have an end, with life and earth,?And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.
NOVEMBER
NOVEMBER'S days are thirty:?November's earth is dirty,?Those thirty days, from first to last;?And the prettiest things on ground are the paths?With morning and evening hobnails dinted,?With foot and wing-tip overprinted?Or separately charactered,?Of little beast and little bird.?The fields are mashed by sheep, the roads?Make the worst going, the best the woods?Where dead leaves upward and downward scatter.?Few care for the mixture of earth and water,?Twig, leaf, flint, thorn,?Straw, feather, all that men scorn,?Pounded up and sodden by flood,?Condemned as mud.
But of all the months when earth is greener?Not one has clean skies that are cleaner.?Clean and clear and sweet and cold,?They shine above the earth so old,?While the after-tempest cloud?Sails over in silence though winds are loud,?Till the full moon in the east?Looks at the planet in the west?And earth is silent as it is black,?Yet not unhappy for its lack.?Up from the dirty earth men stare:?One imagines a refuge there?Above the mud, in the pure bright?Of the cloudless heavenly light:?Another loves earth and November more dearly?Because without them, he sees clearly,?The sky would be nothing more to his eye?Than he, in any case, is to the sky;?He loves even the mud whose dyes?Renounce all brightness to the skies.
THE SHEILING
IT stands alone?Up in a land of stone?All worn like ancient stairs,?A