So much I had of you, yet not enough;
Some vague of loveliness you kept from me,
Some trick of April laughter, some grey stuff
Of grief, woven of lost sun and a lost sea.
I crooked my hand to reach you — you were gone!
And I was left as one without a wall —
Behind which white quince shows its veils of lawn —
A wayfarer, your lover not at all.
But now, I know you even as I am known;
Your foot makes stir of music in the air;
I pluck a wayside flower; upon mine own
Your fingers clasp; its small blue pomp we share;
And when life cumbers, and the hard tears start,
It is enough to run, straight to your heart!
The road is left; the yard;
And the old sycamore;
Larkspurs tall in the grass
Just at the door;
And the thick gusty wind that breaks
The clothes-props down;
She has a bed to make; for her tall girl
A buff-sprigged gown.
But oh, to have him back again
Flashing and young;
To sit in yonder chair,
And with delicate tongue
To talk to her of love,
And things that last —
Go call him from his grave
Where he lies fast!
Heap slumber on your eyes;
Stop your mouth with dust
Be all that you were not,
As dead folk must.
Be all that you were not,
Unmindful, cold, apart—
The kiss you gave that dusk
Tears at your heart!
Oh, for a world empty of you,
Quite bare of anything.
With any likeness to the old.
For wild remembering!
A world so wholly different,
I would be different too.
And read, or mend, or plant the bulbs,
Without a thought of you.
But this can never be at all;
Some small thing thereabout
Would bring that same hurt back again,
And tear my wild heart out.
Perhaps the smell of yarrow flowers,
Of yarrow flowers set
In a lost field. White: yarrow flowers.
Out in the August wet.
Three sycamores down the road,
High, blotched, shaken in the cold
A field; cut in its grass,
A pool, like small, wild gold.
And this was all I saw.
As you came by with me
A day last week. Now you are dead.
What is it that I see?
Three sycamores down the road.
High, blotched, shaken in the cold;
A field; cut in its grass,
A pool, like small, wild gold.
Once I forgot all, everything,
In any day of fall or spring;
And even when I went to bed.
The little prayer I should have said.
I cannot now forget at all
Anything of spring or fall; —
The splutter of wind within a hedge;
Or smell of hyssop from the edge
Of a hot field; the field itself
Dry as a bone upon a shelf;
Or deer that fleet across a wood;
Or an old woman in a hood.
My prayers rise up, each like a spear,
So sharp that God cannot but hear.
As one, who comes back to a house of yore,
Some high old house in legendary trees.
And misses blue flower here; there, at the door.
Notes thinning bush, a difference in the bees;
Then enters, halts, and of a sudden knows
A face gone out, a step lost on the stair.
So I, in England. Every buffet shows
Upon her cheek; her every bone lies bare.
Yet comes not still the bloom to urban bough?
Yet pluck not girls the country thorn and sigh?
Folks buy, and sow, and neighbors go about?
Oh, different! Oh, more worth loving now.
Spent loveliness, that hurts me like a cry; —
The step lost on the stair, the face gone out!
A HUNDRED strange things
Looked in at the door;
There went a soft foot
Across the old floor.
Oh, lovely and lost,
It was you who were there.
Wrapped round in the cloak
Of your golden long hair!
The house grew as sweet
As a just-lit flower.
On the edge of the rain.
In an April hour.
Wrapped round in the cloak
Of your golden long hair.
Oh, lovely and lost.
It was you who were there!
An old and quiet house set down
A windy field or two from town.
And a great clump of lavender,
All day with cross, small bees astir.
Larkspur, hot-blue as with a sting;
And mint, so brief and sharp a thing.
Tall, well-thumbed books upon a shelf;
A green, white-flowered jug of delf.
Old friends, who from the village walk
On Sunday afternoons, to talk
Of the new shop; the guests from town;
The wind that blew the apples down.
They go; the dusk comes from afar,
Like music blown from out a star.
Those Others drift across the dew;
My early love — and you — and you!
As I came down the Old York Road
Saint John's began to ring,
Across the Dead Folk in the grass,
The wide new dusk of spring.
Each window was a half-blown flower,
The pool beneath the hedge
Looked like a scrap of Tyrian gold
Dropped thinly in the sedge.
I think that never in the world
Blew there a tree so white
As the wild cherry by the wall,
So lonely to the sight.
As I came down the Old York Road
Not any soul was near,
Except two lovers going by
Within the fleet of year.
The rector's attic window is a light,
Set high on shelf for all the folk to see ;
His garden's windy-dim as it can be,
Where grow tall flags, some purple and some white.
The next house, too, holds one pane clearly red;
Three roofs beyond, the vane's a rosy flare;
Milk-heavy, slow, through the exquisite air,
The cows go tankling-tinkling to the shed.
Lost loveliness is broken down the wind;
Lost laughters fleet along the blur of wall; —
The cows go tankling to the barnyard near; —
And cloudy-pale, the shaken flowers behind,
The rector sees, through tears that aching fall,
His little daughter, dead this many a year.
The jar is sealed:
Memories — mourners — close the tomb.
Turn from the unechoing gloom
Into the sounding day:
Soul, freed and healed.
Away!
The jar is sealed.