I lay by your side last night.
By you, in my dreams,
I felt the damp of the grave.
I was dead with you--
And my bones still ache with Death.
For my hand went out and I touched your lips,
And I found them fallen away,
Wasted and lost!
Those lips once warm with life
Were eaten and gone!
And my soul screamed out in the dark
At the intimate blackness of Death.
And then I arose from the dead
And returned to the day;
And my bones and my heart still ache with it all,
And I hunger to hear the relieving babble of life,
My heart stood empty and bare,
So I hung it with thoughts of a woman.
The remembered ways of this woman
Hung sweet in my heart.
So I followed where thought should lead,
And it led to her feet.
But the mouth of this woman was pain,
And the love of this woman, regret;
And now only the thought
Of all those remembered thoughts
Of remembered ways,
Is shut in my heart!
You stood alone
In the dusky window,
Watching the racing river.
Touched with a vague unrest,
And if tired of loving too much
More troubled at heart to find
That the flame of love could wither
And the wonder of love could pass,
You kneeled at the window-ledge
And stared through the black-topped maples
Where an April robin fluted,--
Stared idly out
At the flood-time sweep of the river,
Silver and paling gold
In the ghostly April twilight.
Shadowy there in the dusk
I caught the smell of ether
From the glass-roofed room
Where the hospital stood.
Suddenly all about me
I felt a mist of anguish
And the old, old hour of dread
When Death had shambled by.
Yellow with time it is,
This letter on which I look;
But up from it comes a perfume
That stabs me still to the heart;
And suddenly, at the odour,
Through a ghost-like mist I know
Rapture and love and wild regret
When Life, and You, went by.
The blue, blue sea,
And the drone of waves,
And the wheeling swallows,
And the sun on the opal sails,
And the misty and salt-bleached headlands,
And the milkweed thick at my feet,
And the milkweed held in the hand of a child
Who dreams on the misty cliff-edge,
Watching the fading sails
And the noonday blue
Of the lonely sea!
Was it all years ago,
Or was it but yesterday?
I only know that the scent
Of the milkweed brings it back,
Back with a strangle of tears:
A tree is more than a shadow
Blurred against the sky,
More than ink spilled on the fringe
Of white clouds floating by.
A tree is more than an April design
Or a blighted winter bough
Where love and music used to be.
A tree is something in me,
Very still and lonely now.
The hills are wroth; the stones have scored you bitterly
Because you looked upon the naked sun
Oblivious of them, because you did not see
The trees you touched or mountains that you walked upon.
But there will come a day of darkness in the land,
A day wherein remembered sun alone comes through
To mark the hills; then perhaps you’ll understand
Just how it was you drew from them and they from you.
For there will be a bent old woman in that day
Who, feeling something of this country in her bones,
Will leave her house tapping with a stick, who will (they say)
Come back to seek the girl she was in these familiar stones.
I WEEP for happy-sweet days
When your love was near me
Strong in its magical ways,
To hold and cheer me!
To my sad broken life,
Your love had given,
For endless, hopeless strife,
Peace of high Heaven.
I thought your charmed cure
Could have no ending.
And shall no spell endure
Of your dear befriending?
As a dead miser yearns
For earth-stored treasure,
So fiercely my soul burns
For old sweet pleasure
When first I saw the old man dead,
I laid a curious hand upon his head,
To steal that little left in the soul's mould,
The knowledge of the rigour and the cold.
I asked no pardon of the Clay,
For the dead eyes had wandered in their day.
And kneeling ceremonious at his side,
I found a book he'd dropt the day he died.
Verses — which I repeated to dead ears in lieu of prayers.
I stole the book, regardless of his heirs.
Asking no pardon of the Clay,
For the dead man had loved me in his day.
Time was, when I recalled your words, your looks, your deeds.
As a rapt nun counts over her blest beads;
Then was my mind so filled with memory
Love had no room to work his change in me,
And I was faithless from my faith's continuance,
Since being changeless I gave no obedience.
I have forgotten you, for these long days,
All unsustained by you I went my ways,
Now at the end I take you back to thought
To find my action was the thing you taught.
And so in faithlessness is faith's continuance.
Since in a change I do you all obedience.
When I come to the end of the land,
I find the sea,
With edges of cliff and breadths of sand
To pleasure me.
When I raise my town-tired eyes
There is blue and white,
Or kings and castles of stormy skies.
Or joy of night.
When I weary of all I see
And tire even of space,
I hold your love in memory.
And your dear face.
When I saw you, you went to my head,
You were like wine to my brain,
I walked in London through the rain,
To see a man who had been ten years dead.
For pleasure I forgot the years,
Old time, old death, old tears.