Now since they plucked them for your grave,
And left the garden bare
As a great house of candlelight,
Oh, nothing else so fair!
I knew before that they were white.
In April by a wall,
A dozen or more. That people died
I did not know at all.
Into the world you sent her, mother,
Fashioned her body of coral and foam,
Combed a wave in her hair’s warm smother,
And drove her away from home.
In the dark of the night she crept to the town
And under a doorway she laid her down,
The little blue child in the foam-fringed gown.
And never a sister and never a brother
To hear her call, to answer her cry.
Her face shone out from her hair’s warm smother
Like a moonkin up in the sky.
She sold her corals; she sold her foam;
Her rainbow heart like a singing shell
Broke in her body: she crept back home.
Peace, go back to the world, my daughter,
Daughter, go back to the darkling land;
The silence of unlaboured fields
Lies like a judgment on the air:
A human voice is never heard:
The sighing grass is everywhere--
The sighing grass, the shadowed sky,
The cattle crying wearily!
Where are the lowland people gone?
Where are the sun-dark faces now?
The love that kept the quiet hearth,
The strength that held the speeding plough?
Grasslands and lowing herds are good,
But better human flesh and blood!
If only this fear would leave me I could dream of Crickley Hill
And a hundred thousand thoughts of home would visit my heart in sleep;
But here the peace is shattered all day by the devil’s will,
And the guns bark night-long to spoil the velvet silence deep.
O who could think that once we drank in quiet inns and cool
And saw brown oxen trooping the dry sands to slake
Their thirst at the river flowing, or plunged in a silver pool
To shake the sleepy drowse off before well awake?
We are stale here, we are covered body and soul and mind
With mire of the trenches, close clinging and foul.
We have left our old inheritance, our Paradise behind,
And clarity is lost to us and cleanness of soul.
The breaking dead leaves 'neath my feet
A plaintive melody repeat,
Recalling shattered hopes that lie
As relics of a bygone sky.
Again I thread the mazy past,
Back where the mounds are scattered fast -
Oh! foolish tears, why do you start,
To break of dead leaves in the heart?
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o'er life's turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
My little stone
Sinks quickly
Into the bosom of this deep, dark pool
Of oblivion ...
I have troubled its breast but little
Yet those far shores
That knew me not
Will feel the fleeting, furtive kiss
Of my tiny concentric ripples....
White clouds that change and pass,
And stars that shine awhile,
Dew water on the grass,
A fox upon a stile.
A river broad and deep,
A slow boat on the waves,
My sad thoughts on the sleep
That hollows out the graves.
I saw you sit waiting with your sewing on your knees,
Till a man should claim the comfort of your body
And your industry and presence for his own.
I saw you sit waiting with your sewing on your knees,
Till the child growing hidden in your body
Should become a living creature in the light.
I saw you sit waiting with your sewing on your knees,
Till your child who had ventured to the city
Should return to the shelter of his home.
I saw you sit waiting with your sewing on your knees
--Your unreturning son was in the city--
Till Death should come along the cobbled street.
I saw you sit waiting with your sewing on your knees.
The sudden knowledge that you are not there,
That I live on alone,
Seems still too vast and desolate to bear,
My dear, my own.
The merciful slow years, that rend and rob,
But yet restore again,
Are shattered suddenly by one great throb
Of the old pain.
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
The first rose on my rose-tree
Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
Nothing mattered.
Grief of grief has drained me clean;
Still it seems a pity
No one saw,--it must have been
Very pretty.