OLD ROADS
I have been glad in such unlikely places
That now I walk in the same ways alone
The very stones are thronged by vanished faces
And echoes of dead laughter’s undertone.
Mellow stone courts, a bridge across a river,
A frosty road whose flints strike leaping fire—
The dead days stab me till I stand and shiver,
Because of rose-light over a gray spire.
And there’s a cliff-road with the white gulls wheeling,
Where ev’ry time, they catch me unaware;
And still the happy ghosts come stealing, stealing,
At just one corner of Trafalgar Square....
At city crossings and in heather spaces,
There’s not a pathway that my feet have known
But mocks me, with its throng of vanished faces
And echoes of dead laughter’s undertone.