How near I walked to Love,
How long, I cannot tell.
I was like the Alde that flows
Quietly through green level lands,
So quietly, it knows
Their shape, their greenness and their shadows well;
And then undreamingly for miles it goes
And silently, beside the sea.
Seamews circle over,
The winter wildfowl wings,
Long and green the grasses wave
Between the river and the sea.
The sea's cry, wild or grave,
From, bank to low bank of the river rings;
But the uncertain river though it crave
The sea, knows not the sea.
"Hallo, hallo!" impatiently he cried,
And I replied,
Sleepily, "Hallo--hallo!"
No sound then; and I stretched
My hand for the receiver, all my nerves
Tingling and listening.
My hand clutched nothing, and I lit
The candle--strange!
I could have sworn it was the shouting wire....
But no!
Besides, a bare and unfamiliar room
And he, why, long-forgotten, maybe dead.
Yet all around,
Filling the silence up with tiny sound,
A million tremulous thin echoings,
"Hallo--hallo--
There always is a noise when it is
dark ;
It is the noise of silence and the noise
Of blindness.
The noise of silence and the noise of
blindness
Do frighten me,
They hold me stark and rigid as a
tree !
These frighten me,
These hold me stark and rigid as a
tree !
Because at last their tumult is more
loud
Than thunder.
Because at last
How shall I keep April
When my songs are done —
How can I be silent
And still feel the sun?
I, who dreaded silence,
I, who April-long
Kept my heart from breaking
With the cry of song.
How can I hold sunlight
In my hands, like gold.
And bear the pain of silence
When my songs are old?
My song that was a sword is still.
Like a scabbard I have made
A covering with my will
To sheathe its blade.
It had a flashing tongue of steel
That made old shadows start;
It would not let the darkness heal
About my heart.
If I listen shall I hear
Sounds that seem to hover near?
Speech of ship calling to ship
Through dark tides that twist and grip,
Dash of spray on a splintered coast,
The whisper-flutter of a host
Of sun-coloured butterflies
Wheeling under marbled skies;
The jabber of a little wind
Where the meadows' grass is thinned —
Or where trees forget their prides
To sway in unison like tides;
All the city's formal din;
All the hush where big streets thin
To little crooked lanes and lose
Themselves as the green distance blues
Sometimes when I am long alone
I wonder what is loneliness —
This silence like a deep bell's tone,
These moments, motionless?
This hush above the nervous street?
Removed as is the tree that stands,
Hill-high, with burrowing root-feet
And boughs like reaching hands.
As in my blood I feel life press.
Like sap into the frailest bough,
I think if such is loneliness
Then I am lonely now.
Day-long I hear life's sounds beat like the sea ;
Day-long, day-long
They sweep their deep tide-rhythms over me,
And as a song
Reiterated, fall unmeaningly.
Where once I bent life's echoes to my will,
Day after day
Following wings of sound over the sill
Far, far away.
Now my sick fancy lies inert and still.
Silence that slowly wraps me with the ease
Of dreamed-out sleep.
Quenches the sound of vague realities
Whose echoes keep
Their rhythms like old winds in drying seas.
You whom the shadows beckoned
Long and long ago,
Who taught me the flaming utterance
Of words, now strange and slow
On my lips that loved them
Long — Oh, long ago . . .
Why have you stirred the silence
That flowered from my pain?
Just now your anxious footstep
Sounded above the rain;
Just now your eyes, beseeching,
Shadowed my windowpane.
Silence is the sound of footsteps
Hushed upon a stair,
The fluttering of ruffled garments,
A song's forgotten air —
All the old, forbidden echoes
That quenched their fevers there.
When first you sang a song to me
With laughter shining from your eyes,
You trolled your music liltingly
With cadences of glad surprise.
In after years I heard you croon
In measures delicately slow
Of trees turned silver by the moon
And nocturnes sprites and lovers know.
And now I cannot hear you sing,
But love still holds your melody
For silence is a sounding thing
To one who listens hungrily.
We stand mute!
No words can paint such fragile imagery,
Those prismic gossamers that roll
Beyond the sky-line of the soul;
We stand mute!