The holy mountains,
The gay streams,
Heavy shadows,
And tall, trembling trees;
The light that sleeps
Between the heavy shadows,
Wind that creeps
Faintly, from far-off seas----
The mountains' light,
Waters' noise,
Trees' shadows,
Clear, slow, calm air,
Are dreams, dreams,
And far, far-fallen echoes
Of secret worlds
And inconceivable dark seas.
Full moon rising on the waters of my heart,
Lakes and moon and fires,
Cloine tires,
Holding her lips apart.
Promises of slumber leaving shore to charm the moon,
Miracle made vesper-keeps,
Cloine sleeps,
And I’ll be sleeping soon.
Cloine, curled like the sleepy waters where the moon-waves start,
Radiant, resplendently she gleams,
Cloine dreams,
Lips pressed against my heart.
O small dear things for which we fight--
Red roofs, ricks crowned with early gold,
Orchards that hedges thick enfold--
O visit us in dreams to-night!
Who watch the stars through broken walls
And ragged roofs, that you may be
Still kept our own and proudly free
While Severn from the Welsh height falls.
Sweet smelling, sweet to handle, fair of hue
Tobacco is. The soldier everywhere
Takes it as friend, its friendliness to share,
Whether in fragrant wreaths it mount faint blue
In dug-out low, or surreptitiously to
Parapet in rimy night, from hidden lair
Of sentry; staying hunger, stilling fear--
The old dreams of comfort bringing anew.
For from that incense grows the stuff of dreams,
And in those clouds a drowsing man may find
All that was ever sweet to his starved mind,
Heart long denied--dear friends, hills, horses, trees,
Slopes of brown ploughland, sunset’s fading gleams ...
The bane of care, the spur to memories.
When the sun’s fire and gold
Sets the bee humming,
I will not write to tell
Him that I’m coming,
But ride out unawares
On that old road,
Of Minsterworth, of Peace,
Of Framilode,
And walk, not looked for, in
That cool, dark passage.
Never a single word;
Myself my message.
And then; well ... O we’ll drift
And stand and gaze,
And wonder how we could
In those Bad Days
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.
I was sewing a seam one day —
Just this way —
Flashing four silver stitches there
With thread, like this, fine as a hair.
And then four here, and there again,
When
The seam I sewed dropped out of sight
I saw the sea come rustling in,
Big and grey, windy and bright . . .
Then my thread that was as thin
As hair, tangled up like smoke
And broke.
I threaded up my needle, then —
Four here, four there, and here again.
Dreams — and an old, old waking,
An unspent vision gone;
Night, clean with silence, breaking
Into loud dawn.
A wonder that is blurring
The new day's strange demands,
The indomitable stirring
Of folded hands.
Then only the hours' pageant
And the drowsing sound of their creep,
Bringing at last the vagrant
Dreams of new sleep.
Dreams are eyes fixed on closed doors
And on threshold-lights lighting cold floors.
Dreams are doors swung strangely back
On the wonder of a ribbony track.
Dreams are voices, echoed and thinned,
Calling . . . drowned out in the wind.
Dreams are feet on the edge of lands
Feeling the suck of hidden sands.
Feet, I am weary of your beat;
All day, all year, all life you pass
Below me on the street,
Driven upon my hearing as the grass
Before wild rain and sleet.
You snatch up in your tidal tone
The reaching rhythms of my peace
And substitute your drone.
Until intimidated dreams release
The visions they have known.
Feet, I am weary of your stave —
The little course your sounds pursue —
Weary that I must waive
My reaches in subservience to you,
Who seek only a grave.
One road leads out to the country-side;
One road goes by on its way to town;
And always, as long as the sun is guide,
The feet that love them go up and down.
After the evening star's white light
Has lured from the hills or the lighted town.
There are other feet all through the night.
Following dreams up and down.
I should have thought
in a dream you would have brought
some lovely, perilous thing,
orchids piled in a great sheath,
as who would say (in a dream)
I send you this,
who left the blue veins
of your throat unkissed.
Why was it that your hands
(that never took mine)
your hands that I could see
drift over the orchid heads
so carefully,
your hands, so fragile, sure to lift
so gently, the fragile flower stuff--
ah, ah, how was it