NOT the end: but there's nothing more.
Sweet Summer and Winter rude
I have loved, and friendship and love,
The crowd and solitude:
But I know them: I weary not;
But all that they mean I know.
I would go back again home
Now. Yet how should I go?
This is my grief. That land,
My home, I have never seen;
No traveller tells of it,
However far he has been.
Afid could I discover it,
I fear my happiness there,
Or my pain, might be dreams of return
Here, to these things that were.
THAT girl's clear eyes utterly concealed all
Except that there was something to reveal.
And what did mine say in the interval?
No more: no less. They are but as a seal
Not to be broken till after I am dead;
And then vainly. Every one of us
This morning at our tasks left nothing said,
In spite of many words. We were sealed thus,
Like tombs. Nor until now could I admit
That all I cared for was the pleasure and pain
I tasted in the stony square sunlit,
Or the dark cloisters, or shade of airy plane,
While music blazed and children, line after line,
Marched past, hiding the "SEVENTEEN THIRTY-
NINE."
WHEN Winter's ahead,
What can you read in November
That you read in April
When Winter's dead?
I hear the thrush, and I see
Him alone at the end of the lane
Near the bare poplar's tip,
Singing continuously.
Is it more that you know
Than that, even as in April,
So in November,
Winter is gone that must go?
Or is all your lore
Not to call November November,
And April April,
And Winter Winter--no more?
HALF of the grove stood dead, and those that yet
lived made
Little more than the dead ones made of shade.
If they led to a house, long before they had seen
its fall:
But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause
and delayed.
Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the
Interval--
Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles--but
nothing at all,
Not even the spirits of memory and fear with
restless wing,
Could climb down in to molest me over the wall
That I passed through at either end without
noticing.
THE last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm's shadow
It is as if everything else had slept
Many an age, unforgotten and lost
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over the grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
To dream what we could do if we were free
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There's none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind. If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
WHEN we two walked in Lent
We imagined that happiness
Was something different
And this was something less.
But happy were we to hide
Our happiness, not as they were
Who acted in their pride
Juno and Jupiter:
For the Gods in their jealousy
Murdered that wife and man,
And we that were wise live free
To recall our happiness then.
LIKE the touch of rain she was
On a man's flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:
With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her "Go now."
Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.
As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed an angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
The blizzard felled the elm whose crestI sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. "When will they take it away?"
"When the war's over." So the talk began--
One minute and an interval of ten,
THAT'S the cuckoo, you say. I cannot hear it.
When last I heard it I cannot recall; but I know
Too well the year when first I failed to hear it--
It was drowned by my man groaning out to his
sheep "Ho! Ho!"
Ten times with an angry voice he shouted
"Ho! Ho!" but not in anger, for that was his
way.
He died that Summer, and that is how I remember
The cuckoo calling, the children listening, and me
saying, "Nay."
And now, as you said, "There it is," I was hearing
Not the cuckoo at all, but my man's "Ho! Ho!"
instead.
And I think that even if I could lose my deafness
The cuckoo's note would be drowned by the voice
THE green roads that end in the forest
Are strewn with white goose feathers this June,
Like marks left behind by some one gone to the forest
To show his track. But he has never come back.
Down each green road a cottage looks at the forest.
Round one the nettle towers; two are bathed in flowers.
An old man along the green road to the forest
Strays from one, from another a child alone.
In the thicket bordering the forest,
All day long a thrush twiddles his song.
It is old, but the trees are young in the forest,
All but one like a castle keep, in the middle deep.
That oak saw the ages pass in the forest:
They were a host, but their memories are lost,
For the tree is dead: all things forget the forest
THE clouds that are so light,
Beautiful, swift and bright,
Cast shadows on field and park
Of the earth that is so dark,
And even so now, light one!
Beautiful, swift and bright one!
You let fall on a heart that was dark,
Unillumined, a deeper mark.
But clouds would have, without earth
To shadow, far less worth:
Away from your shadow on me
Your beauty less would be,
And if it still be treasured
An age hence, it shall be measured
By this small dark spot
Without which it were not.
WOMEN he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob,
Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he
Loved horses. He himself was like a cob,
And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree.
For the life in them he loved most living things,
But a tree chiefly. All along the lane
He planted elms where now the stormcock sings
That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train.
Till then the track had never had a name
For all its thicket and the nightingales
That should have earned it. No one was to blame.
To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails.
Many years since, Bob Hayward died, and now
None passes there because the mist and the rain
Out of the elms have turned the lane to slough
And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob's Lane.