When the day took me for a walk
towards the twilight,
I saw my son sowing a kiss on a young lady’s lips.
I felt old.
As if by magic, a grandfather grew within me.
After two minutes’ walk, my mother phoned,
‘How are you my son’, she asked;
and I felt young again, like a child.
I did not expect
to meet you here,
gazing
from this horizon.
You ask advice as
if I were a parent not a lover.
With calculating
eyes, you talk of career goals not love.
Like an autumn wind
bending trees, a chaos of leaves, you rush
to change the world
questioning how experience is gained
and ask, is youth a
barrier to life. I answer, is age
a fence to living.
And think of all the things we have in common
and all the things we don't.
It will not hurt me when I am old,
A running tide where moonlight burned
Will not sting me like silver snakes;
The years will make me sad and cold,
It is the happy heart that breaks.
The heart asks more than life can give,
When that is learned, then all is learned;
The waves break fold on jewelled fold,
But beauty itself is fugitive,
It will not hurt me when I am old.
When, in the gold October dusk, I saw you near to setting,
Arcturus, bringer of spring,
Lord of the summer nights, leaving us now in autumn,
Having no pity on our withering;
Oh then I knew at last that my own autumn was upon me,
I felt it in my blood,
Restless as dwindling streams that still remember
The music of their flood.
There in the thickening dark a wind-bent tree above me
Loosed its last leaves in flight--
I saw you sink and vanish, pitiless Arcturus,
You will not stay to share our lengthening night.
Hyacinth dreams in the arbour ...
Just a crumpled mass of gray ...
Soft ashen hair and colourless skin,
Small, delicate hands blue-veined and thin ...
Hyacinth dreams in the arbour
And who shall say
What Hyacinth dreams to-day?
Hyacinth dreams in the arbour
And the stealthy pussy-cat creeps
To her silken lap in the soft green gloom.
Room for the pussy-cat, Hyacinth ... room!
Hyacinth dreams, in the arbour,
Of Life ... that steals and leaps
Like a panther out of the shadows ...
Hyacinth sleeps.
Hyacinth! Hyacinth! Open your eyes!
The woman who has grown old
And knows desire must die,
Yet turns to love again,
Hears the crows' cry.
She is a stem long hardened,
A weed that no scythe mows.
The heart's laughter will be to her
The crying of the crows.
Who slide in the air with the same voice
Over what yields not, and what yields,
Alike in spring, and when there is only bitter
Winter-burning in the fields.
Old women think of old roofs, and the things
That made these comely in the ancient sun ;
Old men think of their wars, their wayfarings done.
Both of first love; of fair, dispersed springs.
Old women and old men — God rest them all! —
To hear the dark, slow waters lap about;
To see their last of candle spluttering out; —
It is too poor an ending to befall.
But ours this golden earth from sky to sky ;
And all my thoughts of you, and yours of me;
About us memorable April set. —
Sudden I feel the fleet years tumbling by;
Age stares at me behind each rosy tree! —
Oh, snatch me to your heart ! I would forget.
When first Love came, then was I but a boy
Swept with delirium of undreamt joy.
Now Love comes to a man serious with change
Of life and death--and makes the world dark and strange.
Behind their veils of clinging mist,
Elusive as a dream,
In changing rose and amethyst
The mountains stood supreme.
Consumed as by some inward fire
Of brooding mystery,
They held the heart of his desire —
His love and poetry.
And always, ever, some dear time —
So ran his hidden hopes —
He meant to leave his task and climb
Their beckoning emerald slopes,
To scale their precipices bold,
And watch the rose-wreaths rise,
To see the gates of Heaven unrolled
Before his longing eyes.
We'll fill a Provence bowl and pledge us deep
The memory of the far ones, and between
The soothing pipes, in heavy-lidded sleep,
Perhaps we'll dream the things that once have been.
'Tis only noon and still too soon to die,
Yet we are growing old, my heart and I.
A hundred books are ready in my head
To open out where Beauty bent a leaf.
What do we want with Beauty? We are wed
Like ancient Proserpine to dismal grief.
And we are changing with the hours that fly,
And growing odd and old, my heart and I.
Across a bed of bells the river flows,
And roses dawn, but not for us; we want
The new thing ever as the old thing grows
Spectral and weary on the hills we haunt.
The fields are full of summer still
And breathe again upon the air
From brown dry side of hedge and hill
More sweetness than the sense can bear.
So some old couple, who in youth
With love were filled and over-full,
And loved with strength and loved with truth,
In heavy age are beautiful.