Do you remember the two old people we passed on the road to Kérity,
Resting their sack on the stones, by the drenched wayside,
Looking at us with their lightless eyes through the driving rain,
and then out again
To the rocks, and the long white line of the tide:
Frozen ghosts that were children once, husband and wife, father,
and mother,
Looking at us with those frozen eyes; have you ever seen anything
quite so chilled or so old?
But we--with our arms about each
other,
We did not feel the cold!
They have painted and sung
the women washing their hair,
and the plaits and strands in the sun,
and the golden combs
and the combs of elephant tusks
and the combs of buffalo horn and hoof.
The sun has been good to women,
drying their heads of hair
as they stooped and shook their shoulders
and framed their faces with copper
and framed their eyes with dusk or chestnut.
The rain has been good to women.
If the rain should forget,
if the rain left off for a year —
the heads of women would wither,
the copper, the dusk and chestnuts, go.
For a woman's face remembered as a spot of quick light
on the flat land of dark night,
For this memory of one mouth and a forehead they go
on in the gray rain and the mud, they go on among
the boots and guns.
The horizon ahead is a thousand fang flashes, it is a row
of teeth that bite on the flanks of night, the horizon
sings of a new kill and a big kill.
The horizon behind is a wall of dark etched with a
memory, fixed with a woman's face — they fight on
and on, boots in the mud and heads in the gray
rain — for the women they hate and the women they
love — for the women they left behind, they fight on.
The monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.
The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.
A face I know is beautiful —
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And the peace of long warm rain.
Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the
workmen are beginning the fence.
The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that
can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.
As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble
and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering
children looking for a place to play.
Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go
nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.
The owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo
From building and battered paving-stone;
The headlight scoffs at the mist
And fixes its yellow rays in the cold slow rain;
Against a pane I press my forehead
And drowsily look on the walls and sidewalks.
The headlight finds the way
And life is gone from the wet and the welter —
Only an old woman, bloated, disheveled and bleared.
Far-wandered waif of other days,
Huddles for sleep in a doorway,
Homeless.
Remote, in some dim room,
On this dark April morning soft with rain,
I hear her pensive touch
Fall aimless on the keys,
And stop, and play again.
And as the music wakens
And the shadowy house is still,
How all my troubled soul cries out
For things I know not of!
Ah, keen the quick chords fall,
And weighted with regret,
Fade through the quiet rooms;
And warm as April rain
The strange tears fall,
And life in some way seems
Too deep to bear!
In the white-walled room
Where the white bed waits
Stand banks of meaningless flowers;
In the rain-swept street
Are a ghost-like row of cabs;
And along the corridor-dusk
Phantasmal feet repass.
Through the warm, still air
The odour of ether hangs;
And on this slenderest thread
Of one thin pulse
Hangs and swings
The hope of life--
The life of her
I love!
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.
Knowledge, to me, is wearisome from books,
I learn so readily from words and looks.
Give me yourself as free as air and rain.
I'll drink, I'll think, and send you flowers again.
The sky was blue, so blue that day
And each daisy white, so white,
O, I knew that no more could rains fall grey
And night again be night.
I knew, I knew. Well, if night is night,
And the grey skies greyly cry,
I have in a book for the candle light,
A daisy dead and dry.
The rain gullies the garden paths
And tinkles on the broad sides of grass blades.
A tree, at the end of my arm, is hazy with mist.
Even so, I can see that it has red berries,
A scarlet fruit,
Filmed over with moisture.
It seems as though the rain,
Dripping from it,
Should be tinged with colour.
I desire the berries,
But, in the mist, I only scratch my hand on the thorns.
Probably, too, they are bitter.