I have gone back in boyish wonderment
To things that I had foolishly put by....
Have found an alien and unknown content
In seeing how some bits of cloud-filled sky
Are framed in bracken pools; through chuckling hours
Have watched the antic frogs, or curiously
Have numbered all the unnamed, vagrant flowers,
That fleck the unkempt meadows, lavishly.
Or where a headlong toppling stream has stayed
Its racing, lulled to quiet by the song
Bursting from out the thickleaved oaken shade,
There I have lain while hours sauntered past--
I have found peacefulness somewhere at last,
Have found a quiet needed for so long.
At sunset, when the high sea span
About the rocks a web of foam,
I saw the ghost of a Cornishman
Come home.
I saw the ghost of a Cornishman
Run from the weariness of war,
I heard him laughing as he ran
Across his unforgotten shore.
The great cliff, gilded by the west,
Received him as an honoured guest.
The green sea, shining in the bay,
Did drown his dreadful yesterday.
Come home, come home, you million ghosts,
The honest years shall make amends,
The sun and moon shall be your hosts,
The everlasting hills your friends.
When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.
A wind is blowing over my soul,
I hear it cry the whole night through--
Is there no peace for me on earth
Except with you?
Alas, the wind has made me wise,
Over my naked soul it blew,--
There is no peace for me on earth
Even with you.
Steely stars and moon of brass,
How mockingly you watch me pass!
You know as well as I how soon
I shall be blind to stars and moon,
Deaf to the wind in the hemlock tree,
Dumb when the brown earth weighs on me.
With envious dark rage I bear,
Stars, your cold complacent stare;
Heart-broken in my hate look up,
Moon, at your clear immortal cup,
Changing to gold from dusky red--
Age after age when I am dead
To be filled up with light, and then
Emptied, to be refilled again.
What has man done that only he
Is slave to death--so brutally
Oh to be free of myself,
With nothing left to remember,
To have my heart as bare
As a tree in December;
Resting, as a tree rests
After its leaves are gone,
Waiting no more for a rain at night
Nor for the red at dawn;
But still, oh so still
While the winds come and go,
With no more fear of the hard frost
Or the bright burden of snow;
And heedless, heedless
If anyone pass and see
On the white page of the sky
Its thin black tracery.
The rain that falls upon my heart
And on my eyes so wistfully,
Will fall again; I shall not start.
For it will drop so restfully
On eyes that will be pools of quiet,
Upon a heart that will not stir
At memories of ancient riot
Within the rain's sad dulcimer.
Even as it falls upon the ground,
Nor makes the tiniest pebble start,
The rain will fall, nor make a sound
Of anything within my heart —
Neither of the bitter nor the sweet
Of loving you, my dear, my dear —
Though all our moments it repeat,
I, who have loved you, shall not hear.
This is the debt I pay
Just for one riotous day,
Years of regret and grief,
Sorrow without relief.
Pay it I will to the end--
Until the grave, my friend,
Gives me a true release--
Gives me the clasp of peace.
Slight was the thing I bought,
Small was the debt I thought,
Poor was the loan at best--
God! but the interest!
There is something very wonderful
In the posting of a letter--
So few acts have the clarity of this.
A clear-cut, forceful and far-reaching act
Of pain or bliss,
So it may be:
Irrevocable in the subtlest way--
To-day--
You see?
The post box flashes red
A sign and seal of dominating law
Through April green, or hard and glittering white
Of winter snow.
One may have vacillated day and night,
Longing to end the turmoil, stress and strain,
Questioning what is best or wise or right--
I wonder
how it would be here with you,
where the wind
that has shaken off its dust in low valleys
touches one cleanly,
as with a new-washed hand,
and pain
is as the remote hunger of droning things,
and anger
but a little silence
sinking into the great silence.
Summer comes to the stricken earth.
Lays clement fingers of bud and leaf
On broken hedge and field's brown dearth
And the bare hills' rocky grief;
Brings her comfort of May and June,
Pours on red wounds the blackbird's tune,
Bids with her gallant, imperious green
Anger and vengeance and fevered hate
Abate.
Deep in my heart is a faded pain
None knows:
Summer, put there a rose
Red as its one-time scar!
Bid it flame to a grief again,
Bid it sing like the morning star —
Shining song of a fresh young woe
From the French of Massillon Coicou (Haiti)
I hope when I am dead that I shall lie
In some deserted grave--I cannot tell you why,
But I should like to sleep in some neglected spot
Unknown to every one, by every one forgot.
There lying I should taste with my dead breath
The utter lack of life, the fullest sense of death;
And I should never hear the note of jealousy or hate,
The tribute paid by passersby to tombs of state.
To me would never penetrate the prayers and tears
That futilely bring torture to dead and dying ears;
There I should lie annihilate and my dead heart would bless
Oblivion--the shroud and envelope of happiness.