The Five Books of Youth | Page 8

hair,?And laid you prone beneath a weight of woes??The trees upon the hill will soon be bare,?A yellow blight is on the garden close,?But you, you need not mourn the vanished rose,?For many springs will find you just as fair.
Weep not for summer, she is past all weeping,?Fear not the winter, she in turn will pass,?And with the spring love waits for you, perchance,?When, with the morn, faint wings stir from their sleeping,?And the first petals scatter on the grass,?Under the orchards and the vines of France.
Recicourt, 1917
XVI
The dull-eyed girl in bronze implores Apollo?To warm these dying satyrs and to raise?Their withered wreaths that rot in every hollow?Or smoulder redly in the pungent haze.?The shining reapers, gone these many days,?Have left their fields disconsolate and sear,?Like bony sand uncovered to the gaze,?In this, the ebb-tide of the year.
My wisest comrade turns into a swallow?And flashes southward as the thickets blaze?In awful splendour; I, who cannot follow,?Confront the skies' unmitigated greys.?The cynic faun whom I have known betrays?A dangerous mood at night, and seems austere?Beneath the autumn noon's distempered rays,?In this, the ebb-tide of the year.
Ice quenches all reflection in the shallow?Lagoon whose trampled margin still displays?Upheaval where the centaurs used to wallow;?And where my favourite unicorns would graze,?A few wild ducks scream lamentable lays?Of shrill derision desperate with fear,?Bleak note on note, phrase on discordant phrase,?In this, the ebb-tide of the year.
Poor girl, how soon our garden world decays,?Our metals tarnish, our loves disappear;?Dull-eyed we haunt these unfrequented ways,?In this, the ebb-tide of the year.
Cambridge, 1920
XVII
The winter night is hard as glass;?The frozen stars hang stilly down;?I sit inside while people pass?From the dead-hearted town.
The tavern hearth is deep and wide,?The flames caress my glowing skin;?The icicles hang cold outside,?But I sit warm within.
The faces pass in blurring white?Outside the frosted window, lifting?Eyes against my cheerful night,?From their night of dreadful drifting.
Sharp breaths blow fast in a smoky gale,?Rags wander through the dull lamp light;?O my veins run gold with Christmas ale,?And the tavern fire is bright.
The midnight sky is clear as glass,?The stars hang frozen on the town,?I watch the dying people pass,?And I wrap me warm in my gown.
Brussels, 1919
XVIII
Chords, tremendous chords,?Over the stricken plain,?The night is calling her ancient lords?Back to their own again.
Vast, unhappy song,?From incalculable space,?Calling the heavy-browed, the strong,?Out of their resting-place.
Far from the lighted town,?Over the snow and ice,?Their dreadful feet go up and down?Seeking a sacrifice.
And can you find a way?Where They will not come after??The vast chords hesitate and sway?Into a sudden laughter.
Sheffield, 1917
XIX
I have known the lure of cities and the bright gleam
of golden things,?Spires, towers, bridges, rivers, and the crowd that
flows as a river,?Lights in the midnight streets under the rain,
and the stings?Of joys that make the spirit reel and shiver.
But I see bleak moors and marshes and sparse grasses,?And frozen stalks against the snow;?Dead forests, ragged pines and dark morasses?Under the shadows of the mountains where no men go.?The crags untenanted and spacious cry aloud as clear?As the drear cry of a lost eagle over uncharted lands,?No thought that man has ever framed in words is spoken here, And the language of the wind, no man understands.
Only the sifting wind through the grasses, and the hissing sleet, And the shadow of the changeless rocks over the frozen wold, Only the cold,?And the fierce night striding down with silent feet.
Chambery, 1918
XX
We wove a fillet for thy head,?And from a flaming lyre?Struck a song that shall not die?Until the echoing stars be dead,?Until the world's last word be said,?Until on tattered wings we fly?Upward and expire.
And calm with night thou watchest till?Long after we are gone,?Not knowing how we worshipped thee;?Serene, unfathomably still,?Gazing to the western hill?Where pales the moon's hushed mystery,?White in the white dawn.
Cambridge, 1915
BOOK III?EROS
I
Now the sick earth revives, and in the sun?The wet soil gives a fragrance to the air;?The days of many colours are begun,?And early promises of meadows fair?With starry petals, and of trees now bare?Soon to be lyric with the trilling choir,?And lovely with new leaves, spread everywhere?A subtle flame that sets the heart on fire?With thoughts of other springs and dreams of new desire.
The mind will never dwell within the present,?It weeps for vanished years or hopes for new;?This morn of wakened warmth, so calm, so pleasant,?So gaily gemmed with diadems of dew,?When buds swell on the bough, and robins woo?Their loves with notes bell-like and crystal-clear,?The spirit stirs from sleep, yet wonders, too,?Whence comes the hint of sorrow or of fear?Making it move rebellious within its narrow sphere.
This flash of sun, this flight of wings in riot,?This festival of sound, of sight, of smell,?Wakes in the spirit a profound disquiet,?And greeting seems the foreword of farewell.?Budding like all the world, the soul would swell?Out of its withering mortality;?Flower immortal, burst from