The Five Books of Youth | Page 7

head,
And you will wish you
never came.
O never mind, go on, go on,--
There is a brook where willows lean;

To weave deep caverns from the sun,
And there the grass grows cool and green.
And there is one as cool as
grass,
Lying beneath the willow tree,
Counting the dragon flies that
pass,
And talking to the humble bee.
She has not stirred since morning came,
She does not know how in
the town
The earth shakes dizzily with flame,
And all the curtains
are drawn down.
Sit down beside her; she can tell
The strangest secrets you would hear,

And cool as water in a well,
Her words flow down upon your ear....
She speaks no more, but in your hair
Her fingers soft as lullabies

Fold up your senses unaware,
Into a poppy paradise.
And when you wake, the evening mist
Is rising up to float the hill,

And you will say, "The mouth I kissed,
The voice I heard...a
dream...but still
"The grass is matted where she lay,
I feel her fingers in my hair"...

But your lamp is bright across the way,
And your mother knits in the
rocking chair.

Paris, 1919
IX
The trees have never seemed so green
Since I remember,
As in
these groves and gardens of September,
And yet already comes the
chill
That bodes the world's last garden ill,
And in the shadow I
have seen
A spectre,--even thine,
O Vandal, O November.
The wind leaps up with sudden screams
In gusts of chaff.
Two boys
with blowing hair listen and laugh.
We hear the same wind, they and
I,
Under the dark autumnal sky;
It blows strange music through
their dreams.
Keenly it blows through mine,
Singing their epitaph.
Tours, 1918
X
The green canal is mottled with falling leaves,
Yellow leaves,
fluttering silently;
A whirling gust ripples the woods, and heaves

The stricken branches with a sigh,
Then all is still again.
Unmoving,
the green waterway receives
Ghosts of the dying forest to its breast;

Loneliness...quiet...not a wing has stirred
In the cold glades; no
fish has leaped away
From the heavy waters; not a drop of rain

Distils from the pervading mist.
Sluggishly out of the west
A grey
canal-boat glides, half-seen, unheard;
The sweating horses on the
towpath sway
Backward and forward in a rhythmic strain;
It passes
by, a dream within a dream,
Down the dark corridor of leaning
boughs,
Down the long waterways of endless fall.
A shiver stirs the
woods; a fitful gleam
Of sun gilds the sky's overhanging brows;

Then shadowy silence, and the yellow stream
Of dead leaves
dropping to the green canal.
Moret-sur-Loing, 1918

XI
They who have gone down the hill are far away;
From the still
valleys I can hear them call;
Their distant laughter faintly floats

Through the unmoving air and back to me.
I am alone with the
declining day
And the declining forest where the notes
Of all the
happy minstrelsy,
Birds and leaf-music and the rest,
Sink separately
in the hush of fall.
The sun and clouds conflicting in the west
Swirl
into smoky light together and fade
Under the unbroken shadow;

Under the shadowed peace that is the night;
Under the night's great
quietude of shade.
The sheep below me in the meadow
Seem
drifting on the haze, serene and white,
Pale pastured dreams,
unearthly herds that roam
Where the dead reign and phantoms make
their home.
They also pass, even as the clear ring
Of the sad
Angelus through the vales echoing.
Montigny, 1918
XII
Where two roads meet amid the wood,
There stands a white
sepulchral rood,
Beneath whose shadow, wayfarers
Would pause to
offer up their prayers.
There is no house for miles around,
No sound
of beast, no human sound,
Only the trees like sombre dreams
From
whose bare boughs the water drips;
And the pale memory of death.

The haze hangs heavy without breath,
It hangs so heavy that it seems

To hold a silent finger to its lips.
In after years the spectral cross
Will be quite overgrown with moss,

And wayfarers will go their way
Nor stop to meditate and pray.
The
spring will nest in all the trees
Unblighted by the memories
Of
autumn and the god of pain.
The leaves will whisper in the sun,

Life will crown death with snowy flowers,
Long hence...but now the
autumn lowers,
The sky breaks into gusts of rain,
Turn thee to sleep,

the day is nearly done.
Forest of Fontainebleau, 1918
XIII
The boy is late tonight binding his sheaves,
The twilight of these
autumn eyes
Falls early now and chill.
The murky sun has set
An
hour ago behind the overhanging hill.
Great piles of fallen leaves

Smoulder in every street
And through the columned smoke a scarlet
jet
Of flame darts out and disappears.
The boy leans motionless upon his staff,
With all the sorrows of his
fifteen years
Gazing out of his eyes into the fall,
A memory
ineffable and sweet
Half tinged with voiceless passion, half

Plaintive with sad imaginings that drift
Like echoes of far-off
autumnal bells.
He starts up with a laugh,
Binds up the last gaunt
sheaf and turns away;
Out of the dusk an inarticulate call
Rings
keen across the solemn Berkshire woods,
And then the answer.
Impotent farewells
That eager voices lift
Into the hush of the
receding day;
Full soon the silence surges in again,
Peaceful,
inevitable, deep as death.
The boy has lingered late in the grey fields,
Knowing