Offend them all,Even if they saw your warm devotion
Would hold your life’s blood at their call.
You lacked the eye to understand
Those friends offhand
Whose mode was crude, though whose dim purport
Outpriced the courtesies of the bland.
I am now the only being who
Remembers you
It may be. What a waste that Nature
Grudged soul so dear the art its due!
SHE, I, AND THEY
I was sitting,
She was knitting,
And the portraits of our fore-folk hung around;
When there struck on us a sigh;
“Ah – what is that?” said I:
“Was it not you?” said she. “A sigh did sound.”
I had not breathed it,
Nor the night-wind heaved it,
And how it came to us we could not guess;
And we looked up at each face
Framed and glazed there in its place,
Still hearkening; but thenceforth was silentness.
Half in dreaming,
“Then its meaning,”
Said we, “must be surely this; that they repine
That we should be the last
Of stocks once unsurpassed,
And unable to keep up their sturdy line.”
1916.
NEAR LANIVET, 1872
There was a stunted handpost just on the crest,
Only a few feet high:
She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
At the crossways close thereby.
She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
And laid her arms on its own,
Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
Her sad face sideways thrown.
Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
Made her look as one crucified
In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
And hurriedly “Don’t,” I cried.
I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
As she stepped forth ready to go,
“I am rested now. – Something strange came into my head;
I wish I had not leant so!”
And wordless we moved onward down from the hill
In the west cloud’s murked obscure,
And looking back we could see the handpost still
In the solitude of the moor.
“It struck her too,” I thought, for as if afraid
She heavily breathed as we trailed;
Till she said, “I did not think how ’twould look in the shade,
When I leant there like one nailed.”
I, lightly: “There’s nothing in it. For you, anyhow!”
– “O I know there is not,” said she.
“Yet I wonder.. If no one is bodily crucified now,
In spirit one may be!”
And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
In the running of Time’s far glass
Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
Some day. – Alas, alas!
JOYS OF MEMORY
When the spring comes round, and a certain day
Looks out from the brume by the eastern copsetrees
And says, Remember,
I begin again, as if it were new,
A day of like date I once lived through,
Whiling it hour by hour away;
So shall I do till my December,
When spring comes round.
I take my holiday then and my rest
Away from the dun life here about me,
Old hours re-greeting
With the quiet sense that bring they must
Such throbs as at first, till I house with dust,
And in the numbness my heartsome zest
For things that were, be past repeating
When spring comes round.
TO THE MOON
“What have you looked at, Moon,
In your time,
Now long past your prime?”
“O, I have looked at, often looked at
Sweet, sublime,
Sore things, shudderful, night and noon
In my time.”
“What have you mused on, Moon,
In your day,
So aloof, so far away?”
“O, I have mused on, often mused on
Growth, decay,
Nations alive, dead, mad, aswoon,
In my day!”
“Have you much wondered, Moon,
On your rounds,
Self-wrapt, beyond Earth’s bounds?”
“Yea, I have wondered, often wondered
At the sounds
Reaching me of the human tune
On my rounds.”
“What do you think of it, Moon,
As you go?
Is Life much, or no?”
“O, I think of it, often think of it
As a show
God ought surely to shut up soon,
As I go.”
COPYING
