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My lovely one, be near to me to-night.For now I need you most, since I have goneThrough the sparse woodland in the fading light,Where in time past we two have walked alone,Heard the loud nightjar spin his pleasant note,And seen the wild rose folded up for sleep,And whispered, though the soft word choked my throat,Your dear name out across the valley deep.Be near to me, for now I need you most.To-night I saw an unsubstantial flameFlickering along those shadowy paths, a ghostThat turned to me and answered to your name,Mocking me with a wraith of far delight.... My lovely one, be near to me to-night.
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The pale road winds faintly upward into the dark skies,And beside it on the rough grass that the wind invisibly stirs,Sheltered by sharp-speared gorse and the berried junipers,Shining steadily with a green light, the glow-worm lies.We regard it; and this hill and all the other hillsThat fall in folds to the river, very smooth and steep,And the hangers and brakes that the darkness thickly fillsFade like phantoms round the light, and night is deep, so deep, —That all the world is emptiness about the still flame,And we are small shadows standing lost in the huge night.We gather up the glow-worm, stooping with dazzled sight,And carry it to the little enclosed garden whence we came,And place it on the short grass. Then the shadowy flowers fade,The walls waver and melt and the houses disappearAnd the solid town trembles into insubstantial shadeRound the light of the burning glow-worm, steady and clear.
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When a great wave disturbs the ocean coldAnd throws the bottom waters to the sky,Strange apparitions on the surface lie,Great battered vessels, stripped of gloss and gold,And, writhing in their pain, sea-monsters old,Who stain the waters with a bloody dye,With unaccustomed mouths bellow and cryAnd vex the waves with struggling fin and fold.And with these too come little trivial thingsTossed from the deeps by the same casual hand;A faint sea flower, dragged from the lowest sand,That will not undulate its luminous wingsIn the slow tides again, lies dead and swingsAlong the muddy ripples to the land.
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What hast thou not withstood,Tempest-despising tree,Whose bloat and riven woodGapes now so hollowly,What rains have beaten thee through many years,What snows from off thy branches dripped like tears?Calmly thou standest nowUpon thy sunny mound;The first spring breezes flowPast with sweet dizzy sound;Yet on thy pollard top the branches fewStand stiffly out, disdain to murmur too.The children at thy footOpen new-lighted eyes,Where, on gnarled bark and root,The soft warm sunshine lies —Dost thou, upon thine ancient sides, resentThe touch of youth, quick and impermanent?These at the beck of springLive in the moment still:Thy boughs unquivering,Remembering winter's chill,And many other winters past and gone,Are mocked, not cheated, by the transient sun.Hast thou so much withstood,Tempest-despising tree,That now thy hollow woodStiffens disdainfullyAgainst the soft spring airs and soft spring rain,Knowing too well that winter comes again?
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Aristonoë, the fading shepherdess,Gathers the young girls round her in a ring,Teaching them wisdom of love,What to say, how to dress,How frown, how smile,How suitors to their dancing feet to bring,How in mere walking to beguile,What words cunningly said in what a wayWill draw man's busy fancy astray,All the alphabet, grammar and syntax of love.The garden smells are sweet,Daisies spring in the turf under the high-heeled feet,Dense, dark banks of laurel growBehind the wavering rowOf golden, flaxen, black, brown, auburn heads,Behind the light and shimmering dressesOf these unreal, modern shepherdesses;And gaudy flowers in formal patterned bedsVary the dim long vistas of the park,Far as the eye can see,Till at the forest's edge the ground grows darkAnd the flowers vanish in the obscurity.The young girls gather round her,Remembering eagerly how their fathers found herFresh as a spring-like wind in February,Subtler in her moving heart than sun-motes that varyAt every waft of an opening and shutting door;They gather chattering near,Hush, break out in laughter, whisper aside,Grow silent more and more,Though she will never chide.Now through the silence sounds her voice still clear,And all give ear.Like a silver thread through the golden afternoon,Equably the voice disclosesAll that age-old wisdom; like an endless tuneAristonoë's voice wavers among the roses,Level and unimpassioned,Telling them how of nothing love is fashioned,How it is but a movement of the mind,Bidding Celia markThat light skirts fluttering in the wind,Or white flowers stuck in darkGlistening hair, have fired the dull beholder,Or telling AnaisThat faint indifference ere now hath bred a kissDenied to flaunted snowy breast or shoulder.The girls attend,Each thinking on her friend,Whether he be real or imaginary,Whether he be loving or cold;For each ere she grows oldMeans to pursue her joy, and the whole unwaryTroop of their wishes has this wild quarry in cry,That draws them ineluctably,More and more as the summer slippeth by.And Celia leans asideTo contemplate her black-silked ankle on the grass;In remote dreaming pride,Rosalind recalls the image in her glass;Phillis through all her body feelsHow divine energy steals,Quiescent power and resting speed,Stretches her arms out, feels the warm blood runReady for pursuit, for strife and deed,And turns her glowing face up to the sun.Phillida smiles,And lazily trusts her lazy wit,A slow arrow that hath often hit;Chloe, bemused by many subtle wiles,Grows not more dangerous for all of it,But opens her red lips, yawning drowsily,And shows her small white teeth,Dimpling the round chin beneath,And stretches, moving her young body deliciously.And still the lesson goes on,For this is an old story that is never done;And now the precept is of ribbon and shoe,What with linens and silks love finds to do,And how man's heart is tangled in a stringOr taken in gauze like a weak and helpless thing.Chloe falls asleep; and the long summer dayDrifts slowly past the girls and the warm roses,Giving in dreams its hours away.Now Stella throws her head back, and Phillis disposesHer strong brown hands quietly in her lap,And Rose's slender feet grow restless and tapThe turf to an imaginary tune.Now all this grace of youthful bodies and facesIs wrought to a glow by the golden weather of June;Now, Love, completing grace of all the graces,Strong in these hearts thy pure streams rise,Transmuting what they learn by heavenly alchemies.Swift from the listeners the spell vanishes,And through the tinkling, empty words,True thoughts of true love press,Flying and wheeling nearer;As through a sunny sky a flock of birdsAgainst the throbbing blue grows clearer and clearer,So closer come these thoughts and dearer.Helen rises with a laugh;Chloe wakes;All the enchantment scatters off like chaff;The cord is loosened and the spell breaks.RosalindResolves that to-night she will be kind to her lover,Unreflecting, warm and kind.Celia tells the lessons over,Counting on her fingers — one and two ...Ribbon and shoe,Skirts, flowers, song, dancing, laughter, eyes ...Through the whole catalogue of formal gallantryAnd studious coquetries,Counting to herself maliciously.But the old, the fading shepherdess, Aristonoë,Rises stiffly and walks aloneDown the broad path where densely the laurels grow,And over a little lawn, not closely mown,Where wave the flowering grass and the rich meadowsweet.She seems to walk painfully now and slow,And drags a little on her high-heeled feet.She stops at last belowAn old and twisted plum-tree, whose last petal is gone,Leans on the comfortable, rugged bole,And stares through the green leaves at the drooping sun.The tree and the warm light comfort her ageing soul.On the other lawn behind her, out of sight,The girls at playDrive out melancholy by lively delight,And the wind carries their songs and laughter away.Some begin dancing and seriously treadA modern measure up and down the grass,Turn, slide with bending knees, and passWith dipping hand and poising head,Float through the sun in pairs, like newly shedAnd golden leaves astrayUpon the warm wind of an autumn day,When the Indian summer rules the air.Others, having found,Lying idly on the sun-hot ground,Shuttlecocks and battledores,Play with the buoyant feathers and stareDazzled at the plaything as it soars,Vague against the shining sky,Where light yet throbs and confuses the eye,Then see it again, white and clear,As slowly, poisèdly it falls byThe dark green foliage and floats near.But Celia, apart, is pensive and must sigh,And Anais but faintly pursues the game.An encroaching, inner flameBurns in their hearts with the acrid smoke of unrest;But gaiety runs like quicksilver in Rose's breast,And Phillis, rising,Walks by herself with high and springy tread,All her young blood racing from heels to head,Breeding new desires and a new surprisingStrength and determination,Whereof are bredConfidence and joy and exultation.The long day closes;Rosalind's hour draws near, and Chloe's and Rose's,The hour that Celia has prayed,The hour for which Anais and Stella have stayed,When Helen shall forget her wit,And Phillida by a sure arrow at length be hit,And Phillis, the fleet runner, be at length overtaken;When this bough of young blossomsBy the rough, eager gatherers shall be shaken.Their eyes grow dim,Their hearts flutter like taken birds in their bosoms,As the light dies out of heaven,And a faint, delicious tremor runs through every limb,And faster the volatile blood through their veins is driven.The long day closes;The last light fades in the amber sky;Warm through the warm dusk glow the roses,And a heavier shade drops slowly from the trees,While through the garden as all colours dieThe scents come livelier on the quickening breeze.The world grows larger, vaguer, dimmer,Over the dark laurels a few faint stars glimmer;The moon, that was a pallid ghost,Hung low on the horizon, faint and lost,Comes up, a full and splendid golden roundBy black and sharp-cut foliage overcrossed.The girls laugh and whisper now with hardly a soundTill all sound vanishes, dispersed in the night,Like a wisp of cloud that fades in the moon's light,And the garden grows silent and the shadows growDeeper and blacker belowThe mysteriously moving and murmuring trees,That stand out darkly against the star-luminous sky;Huge stand the trees,Shadowy, whispering immensities,That rain down quietude and darkness on heart and eye.None move, none speak, none sighBut from the laurels comes a leaping voiceCrying in tones that seem not man's nor boy's,But only joy's,And hard behind a loud tumultuous crying,A tangled skein of noise,And the girls see their lovers come, each vyingAgainst the next in glad and confident poise,Or softly movingTo the side of the chosen with gentle words and lovingGifts for her pleasure of sweetmeats and jewelled toys.Dear Love, whose strength no pedantry can stir,Whether in thine iron enemies,Or in thine own strayed followerBemused with subtleties and sophistries,Now dost thou rule the garden, nowThe gatherers' hands have grasped the scented bough.Slow the sweet hours resolve, and one by one are sped.The garden lieth empty. OverheadA nightjar rustles by, wing touching wing,And passes, utteringHis hoarse and whirring note.The daylight birds long since are fled,Nor has the moon yet touched the brown bird's throat.All's quiet, all is silent, all aroundThe day's heat rises gently from the ground,And still the broad moon travels up the sky,Now glancing through the trees and now so highThat all the garden through her rays are shed,And from the laurels one can just descryWhere in the distance looms enormouslyThe old house, with all its windows black and dead.
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As I lay in the early sun,Stretched in the grass, I thought uponMy true love, my dear love,Who has my heart for ever,Who is my happiness when we meet,My sorrow when we sever.She is all fire when I do burn,Gentle when I moody turn,Brave when I am sad and heavyAnd all laughter when I am merry.And so I lay and dreamed and dreamed,And so the day wheeled on,While all the birds with thoughts like mineWere singing to the sun.
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Now when I sleep the thrush breaks through my dreamsWith sharp reminders of the coming day:After his call, one minute I remainUnwaked, and on the darkness which is MeThere springs the image of a daffodil,Growing upon a grassy bank alone,And seeming with great joy his bell to fillWith drops of golden dew, which on the lawnHe shakes again, where they lie bright and chill.His head is drooped; the shrouded winds that singBend him which way they will: never on earthWas there before so beautiful a ghost.Alas! he had a less than flower-birth,And like a ghost indeed must shortly glideFrom all but the sad cells of memory,Where he will linger, an imprisoned beam,Or fallen shadow of the golden world,Long after this and many another dream.
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I wish this world and its green hills were mine,But it is not; the wandering shepherd starIs not more distant, gazing from afarOn the unreapèd pastures of the sea,Than I am from the world, the world from me.At night the stars on milky way that shineSeem things one might possess, but this round greenIs for the cows that rest, these and the sheep:To them the slopes and pastures offer sleep;My sleep I draw from the far fields of blue,Whence cold winds come and go among the fewBright stars we see and many more unseen.Birds sing on earth all day among the flowers,Taking no thought of any other thingBut their own hearts, for out of them they sing:Their songs are kindred to the blossom heads,Faint as the petals which the blackthorn sheds,And like the earth — not alien songs as ours.To them this greenness and this island peaceAre life and death and happiness in one;Nor are they separate from the white sun,Or those warm winds which nightly wash the deepOr starlight in the valleys, or new sleep;And from these things they ask for no release.But we can never call this world our own,Because we long for it, and yet we knowThat should the great winds call us, we should go;Should they come calling out across the cold,We should rise up and leave the sheltered foldAnd follow the great road to the unknown,We should pass by the barns and haystacks brown,Should leave the wild pool and the nightingale;Across the ocean we should set a sailAnd, coming to the world's pale brim, should flyOut to the very middle of the sky,On past the moon; nor should we once look down.
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'And he, casting away his garment, rose and came to Jesus.'
And he cast it down, down, on the green grass,Over the young crocuses, where the dew was —He cast the garment of his flesh that was full of death,And like a sword his spirit showed out of the cold sheath.He went a pace or two, he went to meet his Lord,And, as I said, his spirit looked like a clean sword,And seeing him the naked trees began shivering,And all the birds cried out aloud as it were late spring.And the Lord came on, He came down, and sawThat a soul was waiting there for Him, one without flaw,And they embraced in the churchyard where the robins play,And the daffodils hang down their heads, as they burn away.The Lord held his head fast, and you could seeThat he kissed the unsheathed ghost that was gone free —As a hot sun, on a March day, kisses the cold ground;And the spirit answered, for he knew well that his peace was found.The spirit trembled, and sprang up at the Lord's word —As on a wild, April day, springs a small bird —So the ghost's feet lifting him up, he kissed the Lord's cheek,And for the greatness of their love neither of them could speak.But the Lord went then, to show him the way,Over the young crocuses, under the green mayThat was not quite in flower yet — to a far-distant land;And the ghost followed, like a naked cloud holding the sun's hand.
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I sat in heaven like the sunAbove a storm when winter was:I took the snowflakes one by oneAnd turned their fragile shapes to glass:I washed the rivers blue with rainAnd made the meadows green again.I took the birds and touched their springs,Until they sang unearthly joys:They flew about on golden wingsAnd glittered like an angel's toys:I filled the fields with flowers' eyes,As white as stars in Paradise.And then I looked on man and knewHim still intent on death — still proud;Whereat into a rage I flewAnd turned my body to a cloud:In the dark shower of my soulThe star of earth was swallowed whole.
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Rivers I have seen which were beautiful,Slow rivers winding in the flat fens,With bands of reeds like thronged green swordsGuarding the mirrored sky;And streams down-tumbling from the chalk hillsTo valleys of meadows and watercress-beds,And bridges whereunder, dark weed-coloured shadows,Trout flit or lie,I know those rivers that peacefully glidePast old towers and shaven gardens,Where mottled walls rise from the waterAnd mills all streaked with flour;And rivers with wharves and rusty shipping,That flow with a stately tidal motionTowards their destined estuariesFull of the pride of power;Noble great rivers, Thames and Severn,Tweed with his gateway of many grey arches,Clyde, dying at sunset westwardIn a sea as red as blood;Rhine and his hills in close procession,Placid Elbe, Seine slaty and swirling,And Isar, son of the Alpine snows,A furious turquoise flood.All these I have known, and with slow eyesI have walked on their shores and watched them,And softened to their beauty and loved themWherever my feet have been;And a hundred others alsoWhose names long since grew into me,That, dreaming in light or darkness,I have seen, though I have not seen.Those rivers of thought: cold Ebro,And blue racing Guadiana,Passing white houses, high-balconiedThat ache in a sun-baked land,Congo, and Nile and Colorado,Niger, Indus, Zambesi,And the Yellow River, and the Oxus,And the river that dies in sand.What splendours are theirs, what continents,What tribes of men, what basking plains,Forests and lion-hided deserts,Marshes, ravines and falls:All hues and shapes and tempersWandering they take as they wanderFrom those far springs that endlesslyThe far sea calls.O in reverie I know the VolgaThat turns his back upon Europe,And the two great cities on his banks,Novgorod and Astrakhan;Where the world is a few soft colours,And under the dove-like eveningThe boatmen chant ancient songs,The tenderest known to man.And the holy river Ganges,His fretted cities veiled in moonlight,Arches and buttresses silver-shadowyIn the high moon,And palms grouped in the moonlightAnd fanes girdled with cypresses,Their domes of marble softly shiningTo the high silver moon.And that aged BrahmapootraWho beyond the white HimalayasPasses many a lamasseryOn rocks forlorn and frore,A block of gaunt grey stone wallsWith rows of little barred windows,Where shrivelled young monks in yellow silkAre hidden for evermore....But O that great river, the Amazon,I have sailed up its gulf with eyelids closed,And the yellow waters tumbled round,And all was rimmed with sky,Till the banks drew in, and the trees' heads,And the lines of green grew higherAnd I breathed deep, and there above meThe forest wall stood high.Those forest walls of the AmazonAre level under the blazing blueAnd yield no sound but the whistles and shrieksOf the swarming bright macaws;And under their lowest drooping boughsMud-banks torpidly bubble,And the water drifts, and logs in the waterDrift and twist and pause.And everywhere, tacitly joining,Float noiseless tributaries,Tall avenues paved with water:And as I silent flyThe vegetation like a painted scene,Spars and spikes and monstrous fansAnd ferns from hairy sheaths up-springing,Evenly passes by.And stealthier stagnant channelsUnder low niches of drooping leavesCoil into deep recesses:And there have I entered, thereTo heavy, hot, dense, dim placesWhere creepers climb and sweat and climb,And the drip and splash of oozing waterLoads the stifling air.Rotting scrofulous steaming trunks,Great horned emerald beetles crawling,Ants and huge slow butterfliesThat had strayed and lost the sun;Ah, sick I have swooned as the air thickenedTo a pallid brown ecliptic glow,And on the forest, fallen with languor,Thunder has begun.Thunder in the dun dusk, thunderRolling and battering and cracking,The caverns shudder with a terrible glareAgain and again and again,Till the land bows in the darkness,Utterly lost and defenceless,Smitten and blinded and overwhelmedBy the crashing rods of rain.And then in the forests of the Amazon,When the rain has ended, and silence come,What dark luxuriance unfoldsFrom behind the night's drawn bars:The wreathing odours of a thousand treesAnd the flowers' faint gleaming presences,And over the clearings and the still watersSoft indigo and hanging stars.* * * * *O many and many are rivers,And beautiful are all rivers,And lovely is water everywhereThat leaps or glides or stays;Yet by starlight, moonlight, or sunlight,Long, long though they look, these wandering eyes,Even on the fairest waters of dream,Never untroubled gaze.For whatever stream I stand by,And whatever river I dream of,There is something still in the back of my mindFrom very far away;There is something I saw and see not,A country full of riversThat stirs in my heart and speaks to meMore sure, more dear than they.And always I ask and wonder(Though often I do not know it):Why does this water not smell like water?Where is the moss that grewWet and dry on the slabs of graniteAnd the round stones in clear brown water?— And a pale film rises before themOf the rivers that first I knew.Though famous are the rivers of the great world,Though my heart from those alien waters drinksDelight however pure from their loveliness,And awe however deep,Would I wish for a moment the miracle,That those waters should come to Chagford,Or gather and swell in Tavy CleaveWhere the stones cling to the steep?No, even were they Ganges and AmazonIn all their great might and majesty,League upon league of wonders,I would lose them all, and more,For a light chiming of small bells,A twisting flash in the granite,The tiny thread of a pixie waterfallThat lives by Vixen Tor.Those rivers in that lost country,They were brown as a clear brown bead isOr red with the earth that rain washed down,Or white with china-clay;And some tossed foaming over boulders,And some curved mild and tranquil,In wooded vales securely setUnder the fond warm day.Okement and Erme and Avon,Exe and his ruffled shallows,I could cry as I think of those riversThat knew my morning dreams;The weir by Tavistock at eveningWhen the circling woods were purple,And the Lowman in spring with the lent-lilies,And the little moorland streams.For many a hillside streamletThere falls with a broken tinkle,Falling and dying, falling and dying,In little cascades and pools,Where the world is furze and heatherAnd flashing plovers and fixed larks,And an empty sky, whitish blue,That small world rules.There, there, where the high waste bog-landsAnd the drooping slopes and the spreading valleys,The orchards and the cattle-sprinkled pasturesThose travelling musics fill,There is my lost Abana,And there is my nameless PharpharThat mixed with my heart when I was a boy,And time stood still.And I say I will go there and die there:But I do not go there, and sometimesI think that the train could not carry me there,And it's possible, maybe,That it's farther than Asia or Africa,Or any voyager's harbour,Farther, farther, beyond recall....O even in memory!
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The leaves fall gently on the grass,And all the willow trees and poplar trees and elder treesThat bend above her where she sleeps,O all the willow trees, the willow treesBreathe sighs above her tomb.O pause and pity as you pass.She loved so tenderly, so quietly, so hopelessly;And sometimes comes one here and weeps —She loved so tenderly, so tenderly,And never told them whom.
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There was an Indian, who had known no change,Who strayed content along a sunlit beachGathering shells. He heard a sudden strangeCommingled noise: looked up; and gasped for speech.For in the bay, where nothing was before,Moved on the sea, by magic, huge canoes,With bellying cloths on poles, and not one oar,And fluttering coloured signs and clambering crews.And he, in fear, this naked man alone,His fallen hands forgetting all their shells,His lips gone pale, knelt low behind a stone,And stared, and saw, and did not understand,Columbus's doom-burdened caravelsSlant to the shore, and all their seamen land.
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Within mankind's duration, so they say,Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday.Asia had no name till man was oldAnd long had learned the use of iron and gold;And æons had passed, when the first corn was planted,Since first the use of syllables was granted.Men were on earth while climates slowly swung,Fanning wide zones to heat and cold, and longSubsidence turned great continents to sea,And seas dried up, dried up interminably,Age after age; enormous seas were driedAmid wastes of land. And the last monsters died.Earth wore another face. O since that primeMan with how many works has sprinkled time!Hammering, hewing, digging tunnels, roads;Building ships, temples, multiform abodes.How, for his body's appetites, his toilsHave conquered all earth's products, all her soils;And in what thousand thousand shapes of artHe has tried to find a language for his heart!Never at rest, never content or tired:Insatiate wanderer, marvellously fired,Most grandly piling and piling into the airStones that will topple or arch he knows not where.And yet did I, this spring, think it more strange,More grand, more full of awe, than all that change,And lovely and sweet and touching unto tears,That through man's chronicled and unchronicled years,And even into that unguessable beyondThe water-hen has nested by a pond,Weaving dry flags, into a beaten floor,The one sure product of her only lore.Low on a ledge above the shadowed waterThen, when she heard no men, as nature taught her,Plashing around with busy scarlet billShe built that nest, her nest, and builds it still.O let your strong imagination turnThe great wheel backward, until Troy unburn,And then unbuild, and seven Troys belowRise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow,Till all have passed, and none has yet been there:Back, ever back. Our birds still crossed the air;Beyond our myriad changing generationsStill built, unchanged, their known inhabitations.A million years before Atlantis wasOur lark sprang from some hollow in the grass,Some old soft hoof-print in a tussock's shade;And the wood-pigeon's smooth snow-white eggs were laid,High, amid green pines' sunset-coloured shafts,And rooks their villages of twiggy raftsSet on the tops of elms, where elms grew then,And still the thumbling tit and perky wrenPopped through the tiny doors of cosy ballsAnd the blackbird lined with moss his high-built walls;A round mud cottage held the thrush's young,And straws from the untidy sparrow's hung.And, skimming forktailed in the evening air,When man first was were not the martens there?Did not those birds some human shelter crave,And stow beneath the cornice of his caveTheir dry tight cups of clay? And from each doorPeeped on a morning wiseheads three or four.Yes, daw and owl, curlew and crested hern,Kingfisher, mallard, water-rail and tern,Chaffinch and greenfinch, warbler, stonechat, ruff,Pied wagtail, robin, fly-catcher and chough,Missel-thrush, magpie, sparrow-hawk, and jay,Built, those far ages gone, in this year's way.And the first man who walked the cliffs of Rame,As I this year, looked down and saw the sameBlotches of rusty red on ledge and cleftWith grey-green spots on them, while right and leftA dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying,Wheeling and crossing and darting, crying and crying,Circling and crying, over and over and over,Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover.And below on a rock against the grey sea fretted,Pipe-necked and stationary and silhouetted,Cormorants stood in a wise, black, equal rowAbove the nests and long blue eggs we know.O delicate chain over all the ages stretched,O dumb tradition from what far darkness fetched:Each little architect with its one designPerpetual, fixed and right in stuff and line,Each little ministrant who knows one thing,One learned rite to celebrate the spring.Whatever alters else on sea or shore,These are unchanging: man must still explore.
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It was bright day and all the trees were stillIn the deep valley, and the dim Sun glowed;The clay in hard-baked fire along the hillLeapt through dark trunks to apples green and gold,Smooth, hard and cold, they shone like lamps of stone:They were bright bubbles bursting from the trees,Swollen and still among the dark green boughs;On their bright skins the shadows of the leavesSeemed the faint ghosts of summers long since gone,Faint ghosts of ghosts, the dreams of ghostly eyes.There was no sound between those breathless hills.Only the dim Sun hung there, nothing moved;The thronged, massed, crowded multitude of leavesHung like dumb tongues that loll and gasp for air:The grass was thick and still, between the trees.There were big apples lying on the ground,Shining, quite still, as though they had been stunnedBy some great violent spirit stalking through,Leaving a deep and supernatural calmRound a dead beetle upturned in a furrow.A valley filled with dark, quiet, leaf-thick trees,Loaded with green, cold, faintly shining suns;And in the sky a great dim burning disc! —Madness it is to watch these twisted trunksAnd to see nothing move and hear no sound!Let's make a noise, Hey!... Hey!... Hullo! Hullo!
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The pebbly brook is cold to-night,Its water soft as air,A clear, cold, crystal-bodied windShadowless and bare,Leaping and running in this worldWhere dark-horned cattle stare:Where dark-horned cattle stare, hoof-firmOn the dark pavements of the sky,And trees are mummies swathed in sleepAnd small dark hills crowd wearily;Soft multitudes of snow-grey cloudsWithout a sound march by.Down at the bottom of the roadI smell the woody dampOf that cold spirit in the grass,And leave my hill-top camp —Its long gun pointing in the sky —And take the Moon for lamp.I stop beside the bright cold glintOf that thin spirit in the grass,So gay it is, so innocent!I watch its sparkling footsteps passLightly from smooth round stone to stone,Hid in the dew-hung grass.My lamp shines in the globes of dew,And leaps into that crystal windRunning along the shaken grassTo each dark hole that it can find —The crystal wind, the Moon my lamp,Have vanished in a wood that's blind.High lies my small, my shadowy camp,Crowded about by small dark hills;With sudden small white flowers the skyAbove the woods' dark greenness fills;And hosts of dark-browed, muttering treesIn trance the white Moon stills.I move among their tall grey forms,A thin moon-glimmering, wandering Ghost,Who takes his lantern through the worldIn search of life that he has lost,While watching by that long lean gunUp on his small hill post.