When you slowly emerged from the den of Time,
And gained percipience as you grew,
And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,

Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you
The unhappy need of creating me—
A form like your own—for praying to?

My virtue, power, utility,
Within my maker must all abide,
Since none in myself can ever be,

One thin as a shape on a lantern-slide
Shown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet,
And by none but its showman vivified.

“Such a forced device,” you may say, “is meet
For easing a loaded heart at whiles:
Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat

—But since I was framed in your first despair
The doing without me has had no play
In the minds of men when shadows scare;

And now that I dwindle day by day
Beneath the deicide eyes of seers
In a light that will not let me stay,

And to-morrow the whole of me disappears,
The truth should be told, and the fact be faced
That had best been faced in earlier years:

The fact of life with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close and graced

With loving-kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.

1909–10.

I

   I saw a slowly-stepping train—
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar—
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

II

   And by contagious throbs of thought
Or latent knowledge that within me lay
And had already stirred me, I was wrought
To consciousness of sorrow even as they.

III

   The fore-borne shape, to my blurred eyes,
At first seemed man-like, and anon to change
To an amorphous cloud of marvellous size,
At times endowed with wings of glorious range.

   And this phantasmal variousness
Ever possessed it as they drew along:
Yet throughout all it symboled none the less
Potency vast and loving-kindness strong.

V

   Almost before I knew I bent
Towards the moving columns without a word;
They, growing in bulk and numbers as they went,
Struck out sick thoughts that could be overheard:—

VI

   “O man-projected Figure, of late
Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive?
Whence came it we were tempted to create
One whom we can no longer keep alive?

VII

   “Framing him jealous, fierce, at first,
We gave him justice as the ages rolled,
Will to bless those by circumstance accurst,
And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.

   “And, tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem,
And what we had imagined we believed.

IX

   “Till, in Time’s stayless stealthy swing,
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

X

   “So, toward our myth’s oblivion,
Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope
Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon,
Whose Zion was a still abiding hope.

XI

   “How sweet it was in years far hied
To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,
To lie down liegely at the eventide
And feel a blest assurance he was there!

   “And who or what shall fill his place?
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
Towards the goal of their enterprise?” . . .

XIII

   Some in the background then I saw,
Sweet women, youths, men, all incredulous,
Who chimed as one: “This figure is of straw,
This requiem mockery!  Still he lives to us!”

XIV

   I could not prop their faith: and yet
Many I had known: with all I sympathized;
And though struck speechless, I did not forget
That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

XV

   Still, how to bear such loss I deemed
The insistent question for each animate mind,
And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed
A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,

   Whereof to lift the general night,
A certain few who stood aloof had said,
“See you upon the horizon that small light—
Swelling somewhat?”  Each mourner shook his head.

XVII

   And they composed a crowd of whom
Some were right good, and many nigh the best . . .
Thus dazed and puzzled ’twixt the gleam and gloom
Mechanically I followed with the rest.

1908–10.

“It is not death that harrows us,” they lipped,
“The soundless cell is in itself relief,
For life is an unfenced flower, benumbed and nipped
At unawares, and at its best but brief.”

The speakers, sundry phantoms of the gone,
Had risen like filmy flames of phosphor dye,
As if the palest of sheet lightnings shone
From the sward near me, as from a nether sky.

And much surprised was I that, spent and dead,
They should not, like the many, be at rest,
But stray as apparitions; hence I said,
“Why, having slipped life, hark you back distressed?

“We are stript of rights; our shames lie unredressed,
Our deeds in full anatomy are not shown,
Our words in morsels merely are expressed
On the scriptured page, our motives blurred, unknown.”

Then all these shaken slighted visitants sped
Into the vague, and left me musing there
On fames that well might instance what they had said,
Until the New-Year’s dawn strode up the air.

“Ah, are you digging on my grave
   My loved one?—planting rue?”
—“No: yesterday he went to wed
One of the brightest wealth has bred.
‘It cannot hurt her now,’ he said,
   ‘That I should not be true.’”

“Then who is digging on my grave?
   My nearest dearest kin?”
—“Ah, no; they sit and think, ‘What use!
What good will planting flowers produce?
No tendance of her mound can loose
   Her spirit from Death’s gin.’”

“But some one digs upon my grave?
   My enemy?—prodding sly?”
—“Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate
That shuts on all flesh soon or late,
She thought you no more worth her hate,
   And cares not where you lie.”

“Ah, yes!  You dig upon my grave . . .
   Why flashed it not on me
That one true heart was left behind!
What feeling do we ever find
To equal among human kind
   A dog’s fidelity!”

“Mistress, I dug upon your grave
   To bury a bone, in case
I should be hungry near this spot
When passing on my daily trot.
I am sorry, but I quite forgot
   It was your resting-place.”

The kettle descants in a cozy drone,
And the young wife looks in her husband’s face,
And then at her guest’s, and shows in her own
Her sense that she fills an envied place;
And the visiting lady is all abloom,
And says there was never so sweet a room.

And the happy young housewife does not know
That the woman beside her was first his choice,
Till the fates ordained it could not be so . . .
Betraying nothing in look or voice
The guest sits smiling and sips her tea,
And he throws her a stray glance yearningly.

“And now to God the Father,” he ends,
And his voice thrills up to the topmost tiles:
Each listener chokes as he bows and bends,
And emotion pervades the crowded aisles.
Then the preacher glides to the vestry-door,
And shuts it, and thinks he is seen no more.

The door swings softly ajar meanwhile,
And a pupil of his in the Bible class,
Who adores him as one without gloss or guile,
Sees her idol stand with a satisfied smile
And re-enact at the vestry-glass
Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show
That had moved the congregation so.

“Sixpence a week,” says the girl to her lover,
“Aunt used to bring me, for she could confide
In me alone, she vowed.  ’Twas to cover
The cost of her headstone when she died.
And that was a year ago last June;
I’ve not yet fixed it.  But I must soon.”

“And where is the money now, my dear?”
“O, snug in my purse . . . Aunt was so slow
In saving it—eighty weeks, or near.” . . .
“Let’s spend it,” he hints.  “For she won’t know.
There’s a dance to-night at the Load of Hay.”
She passively nods.  And they go that way.

“Would it had been the man of our wish!”
Sighs her mother.  To whom with vehemence she
In the wedding-dress—the wife to be—
“Then why were you so mollyish
As not to insist on him for me!”
The mother, amazed: “Why, dearest one,
Because you pleaded for this or none!”

“But Father and you should have stood out strong!
Since then, to my cost, I have lived to find
That you were right and that I was wrong;
This man is a dolt to the one declined . . .
Ah!—here he comes with his button-hole rose.
Good God—I must marry him I suppose!”

They sit and smoke on the esplanade,
The man and his friend, and regard the bay
Where the far chalk cliffs, to the left displayed,
Smile sallowly in the decline of day.
And saunterers pass with laugh and jest—
A handsome couple among the rest.

“That smart proud pair,” says the man to his friend,
“Are to marry next week . . . How little he thinks
That dozens of days and nights on end
I have stroked her neck, unhooked the links
Of her sleeve to get at her upper arm . . .
Well, bliss is in ignorance: what’s the harm!”

“You see those mothers squabbling there?”
Remarks the man of the cemetery.
One says in tears, ‘’Tis mine lies here!’
Another, ‘Nay, mine, you Pharisee!’
Another, ‘How dare you move my flowers
And put your own on this grave of ours!’
But all their children were laid therein
At different times, like sprats in a tin.

“And then the main drain had to cross,
And we moved the lot some nights ago,
And packed them away in the general foss
With hundreds more.  But their folks don’t know,
And as well cry over a new-laid drain
As anything else, to ease your pain!”

“My stick!” he says, and turns in the lane
To the house just left, whence a vixen voice
Comes out with the firelight through the pane,
And he sees within that the girl of his choice
Stands rating her mother with eyes aglare
For something said while he was there.

“At last I behold her soul undraped!”
Thinks the man who had loved her more than himself;
“My God—’tis but narrowly I have escaped.—
My precious porcelain proves it delf.”
His face has reddened like one ashamed,
And he steals off, leaving his stick unclaimed.

He enters, and mute on the edge of a chair
Sits a thin-faced lady, a stranger there,
A type of decayed gentility;
And by some small signs he well can guess
That she comes to him almost breakfastless.

“I have called—I hope I do not err—
I am looking for a purchaser
Of some score volumes of the works
Of eminent divines I own,—
Left by my father—though it irks
My patience to offer them.”  And she smiles
As if necessity were unknown;
“But the truth of it is that oftenwhiles
I have wished, as I am fond of art,
To make my rooms a little smart.”
And lightly still she laughs to him,
As if to sell were a mere gay whim,
And that, to be frank, Life were indeed
To her not vinegar and gall,
But fresh and honey-like; and Need
No household skeleton at all.

“My bride is not coming, alas!” says the groom,
And the telegram shakes in his hand.  “I own
It was hurried!  We met at a dancing-room
When I went to the Cattle-Show alone,
And then, next night, where the Fountain leaps,
And the Street of the Quarter-Circle sweeps.

“Ay, she won me to ask her to be my wife—
’Twas foolish perhaps!—to forsake the ways
Of the flaring town for a farmer’s life.
She agreed.  And we fixed it.  Now she says:
‘It’s sweet of you, dear, to prepare me a nest,
But a swift, short, gay life suits me best.
What I really am you have never gleaned;
I had eaten the apple ere you were weaned.’”

“O that mastering tune?”  And up in the bed
Like a lace-robed phantom springs the bride;
“And why?” asks the man she had that day wed,
With a start, as the band plays on outside.
“It’s the townsfolks’ cheery compliment
Because of our marriage, my Innocent.”

“O but you don’t know!  ’Tis the passionate air
To which my old Love waltzed with me,
And I swore as we spun that none should share
My home, my kisses, till death, save he!
And he dominates me and thrills me through,
And it’s he I embrace while embracing you!”

“But hear.  If you stay, and the child be born,
It will pass as your husband’s with the rest,
While, if we fly, the teeth of scorn
Will be gleaming at us from east to west;
And the child will come as a life despised;
I feel an elopement is ill-advised!”

“O you realize not what it is, my dear,
To a woman!  Daily and hourly alarms
Lest the truth should out.  How can I stay here,
And nightly take him into my arms!
Come to the child no name or fame,
Let us go, and face it, and bear the shame.”

“I stood at the back of the shop, my dear,
   But you did not perceive me.
Well, when they deliver what you were shown
   I shall know nothing of it, believe me!”

And he coughed and coughed as she paled and said,
   “O, I didn’t see you come in there—
Why couldn’t you speak?”—“Well, I didn’t.  I left
   That you should not notice I’d been there.

“You were viewing some lovely things.  ‘Soon required
   For a widow, of latest fashion’;
And I knew ’twould upset you to meet the man
   Who had to be cold and ashen

“And screwed in a box before they could dress you
   ‘In the last new note in mourning,’
As they defined it.  So, not to distress you,
   I left you to your adorning.”

“I’ll tell—being past all praying for—
Then promptly die . . . He was out at the war,
And got some scent of the intimacy
That was under way between her and me;
And he stole back home, and appeared like a ghost
One night, at the very time almost
That I reached her house.  Well, I shot him dead,
And secretly buried him.  Nothing was said.

“The news of the battle came next day;
He was scheduled missing.  I hurried away,
Got out there, visited the field,
And sent home word that a search revealed
He was one of the slain; though, lying alone
And stript, his body had not been known.

“But she suspected.  I lost her love,
   Yea, my hope of earth, and of Heaven above;
And my time’s now come, and I’ll pay the score,
Though it be burning for evermore.”

They stand confronting, the coffin between,
His wife of old, and his wife of late,
And the dead man whose they both had been
Seems listening aloof, as to things past date.
—“I have called,” says the first.  “Do you marvel or not?”
“In truth,” says the second, “I do—somewhat.”

“Well, there was a word to be said by me! . . .
I divorced that man because of you—
It seemed I must do it, boundenly;
But now I am older, and tell you true,
For life is little, and dead lies he;
I would I had let alone you two!
And both of us, scorning parochial ways,
Had lived like the wives in the patriarchs’ days.”

“O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave there were?

“If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon,
Maybe you’ll raise her phantom soon!”

“Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is no such joy for me!”

“Ah—she was one you loved, no doubt,
Through good and evil, through rain and drought,
And when she passed, all your sun went out?”

“Nay: she was the woman I did not love,
Whom all the others were ranked above,
Whom during her life I thought nothing of.”

   Along the way
   He walked that day,
Watching shapes that reveries limn,
   And seldom he
   Had eyes to see
The moment that encompassed him.

   Bright yellowhammers
   Made mirthful clamours,
And billed long straws with a bustling air,
   And bearing their load
   Flew up the road
That he followed, alone, without interest there.

   From bank to ground
   And over and round
They sidled along the adjoining hedge;
   Sometimes to the gutter
   Their yellow flutter
Would dip from the nearest slatestone ledge.

   Yes, round him were these
   Earth’s artistries,
But specious plans that came to his call
   Did most engage
   His pilgrimage,
While himself he did not see at all.

   Dead now as sherds
   Are the yellow birds,
And all that mattered has passed away;
   Yet God, the Elf,
   Now shows him that self
As he was, and should have been shown, that day.

   O it would have been good
   Could he then have stood
At a focussed distance, and conned the whole,
   But now such vision
   Is mere derision,
Nor soothes his body nor saves his soul.

   I wandered to a crude coast
      Like a ghost;
   Upon the hills I saw fires—
      Funeral pyres
   Seemingly—and heard breaking
Waves like distant cannonades that set the land shaking.

   And so I never once guessed
      A Love-nest,
   Bowered and candle-lit, lay
      In my way,
   Till I found a hid hollow,
Where I burst on her my heart could not but follow.

“It is a foolish thing,” said I,
“To bear with such, and pass it by;
Yet so I do, I know not why!”

And at each clash I would surmise
That if I had acted otherwise
I might have saved me many sighs.

But now the only happiness
In looking back that I possess—
Whose lack would leave me comfortless—

Is to remember I refrained
From masteries I might have gained,
And for my tolerance was disdained;

For see, a tomb.  And if it were
I had bent and broke, I should not dare
To linger in the shadows there.

I

Looking forward to the spring
One puts up with anything.
On this February day,
Though the winds leap down the street,
Wintry scourgings seem but play,
And these later shafts of sleet
—Sharper pointed than the first—
And these later snows—the worst—
Are as a half-transparent blind
Riddled by rays from sun behind.

II

Shadows of the October pine
Reach into this room of mine:
On the pine there stands a bird;
He is shadowed with the tree.
Mutely perched he bills no word;
Blank as I am even is he.
For those happy suns are past,
Fore-discerned in winter last.
When went by their pleasure, then?
I, alas, perceived not when.

The ten hours’ light is abating,
   And a late bird flies across,
Where the pines, like waltzers waiting,
   Give their black heads a toss.

Beech leaves, that yellow the noon-time,
   Float past like specks in the eye;
I set every tree in my June time,
   And now they obscure the sky.

And the children who ramble through here
   Conceive that there never has been
A time when no tall trees grew here,
   A time when none will be seen.

How do you know that the pilgrim track
Along the belting zodiac
Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds
Is traced by now to the Fishes’ bounds
And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud
Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,
And never as yet a tinct of spring
Has shown in the Earth’s apparelling;
   O vespering bird, how do you know,
      How do you know?

How do you know, deep underground,
Hid in your bed from sight and sound,
Without a turn in temperature,
With weather life can scarce endure,
That light has won a fraction’s strength,
And day put on some moments’ length,
Whereof in merest rote will come,
Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;
   O crocus root, how do you know,
      How do you know?

February 1910.

“Whenever I plunge my arm, like this,
In a basin of water, I never miss
The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day
Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray.
   Hence the only prime
   And real love-rhyme
   That I know by heart,
   And that leaves no smart,
Is the purl of a little valley fall
About three spans wide and two spans tall
Over a table of solid rock,
And into a scoop of the self-same block;
The purl of a runlet that never ceases
In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;
With a hollow boiling voice it speaks
And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks.”

“And why gives this the only prime
Idea to you of a real love-rhyme?
And why does plunging your arm in a bowl
Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?”

   “I mean to build a hall anon,
      And shape two turrets there,
      And a broad newelled stair,
And a cool well for crystal water;
   Yes; I will build a hall anon,
   Plant roses love shall feed upon,
      And apple trees and pear.”

   He set to build the manor-hall,
      And shaped the turrets there,
      And the broad newelled stair,
And the cool well for crystal water;
   He built for me that manor-hall,
   And planted many trees withal,
      But no rose anywhere.

   And as he planted never a rose
      That bears the flower of love,
      Though other flowers throve
A frost-wind moved our souls to sever
   Since he had planted never a rose;
   And misconceits raised horrid shows,
      And agonies came thereof.

   But I was called from earth—yea, called
      Before my rose-bush grew;
      And would that now I knew
What feels he of the tree I planted,
   And whether, after I was called
   To be a ghost, he, as of old,
      Gave me his heart anew!

   Perhaps now blooms that queen of trees
      I set but saw not grow,
      And he, beside its glow—
Eyes couched of the mis-vision that blurred me—
   Ay, there beside that queen of trees
   He sees me as I was, though sees
      Too late to tell me so!

   Slip back, Time!
Yet again I am nearing
Castle and keep, uprearing
   Gray, as in my prime.

   At the inn
Smiling close, why is it
Not as on my visit
   When hope and I were twin?

   Groom and jade
Whom I found here, moulder;
Strange the tavern-holder,
   Strange the tap-maid.

   Here I hired
Horse and man for bearing
Me on my wayfaring
   To the door desired.

   Evening gloomed
As I journeyed forward
To the faces shoreward,
   Till their dwelling loomed.

   Why waste thought,
When I know them vanished
Under earth; yea, banished
   Ever into nought.

Veteris vestigia flammae

Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
   Where I could not follow
   With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!

   Never to bid good-bye,
   Or give me the softest call,
Or utter a wish for a word, while I
Saw morning harden upon the wall,
   Unmoved, unknowing
   That your great going
Had place that moment, and altered all.

Why do you make me leave the house
And think for a breath it is you I see
At the end of the alley of bending boughs
Where so often at dusk you used to be;
   Till in darkening dankness
   The yawning blankness
Of the perspective sickens me!

Why, then, latterly did we not speak,
Did we not think of those days long dead,
And ere your vanishing strive to seek
That time’s renewal?  We might have said,
   “In this bright spring weather
   We’ll visit together
Those places that once we visited.”

   Well, well!  All’s past amend,
   Unchangeable.  It must go.
I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon . . . O you could not know
   That such swift fleeing
   No soul foreseeing—
Not even I—would undo me so!

December 1912.

Here by the moorway you returned,
And saw the borough lights ahead
That lit your face—all undiscerned
To be in a week the face of the dead,
And you told of the charm of that haloed view
That never again would beam on you.

And on your left you passed the spot
Where eight days later you were to lie,
And be spoken of as one who was not;
Beholding it with a cursory eye
As alien from you, though under its tree
You soon would halt everlastingly.

I drove not with you . . . Yet had I sat
At your side that eve I should not have seen
That the countenance I was glancing at
Had a last-time look in the flickering sheen,
Nor have read the writing upon your face,
“I go hence soon to my resting-place;

True: never you’ll know.  And you will not mind.
But shall I then slight you because of such?
Dear ghost, in the past did you ever find
The thought “What profit?” move me much
Yet the fact indeed remains the same,
You are past love, praise, indifference, blame.

December 1912.

   You did not walk with me
   Of late to the hill-top tree
      By the gated ways,
      As in earlier days;
      You were weak and lame,
      So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.

   I walked up there to-day
   Just in the former way:
      Surveyed around
      The familiar ground
      By myself again:
      What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning thence.

Clouds spout upon her
   Their waters amain
   In ruthless disdain,—
Her who but lately
   Had shivered with pain
As at touch of dishonour
If there had lit on her
So coldly, so straightly
   Such arrows of rain.

She who to shelter
   Her delicate head
Would quicken and quicken
   Each tentative tread
If drops chanced to pelt her
   That summertime spills
   In dust-paven rills
When thunder-clouds thicken
   And birds close their bills.

Soon will be growing
   Green blades from her mound,
And daises be showing
   Like stars on the ground,
Till she form part of them—
Ay—the sweet heart of them,
Loved beyond measure
With a child’s pleasure
   All her life’s round.

Jan. 31, 1913.

I found her out there
On a slope few see,
That falls westwardly
To the salt-edged air,
Where the ocean breaks
On the purple strand,
And the hurricane shakes
The solid land.

I brought her here,
And have laid her to rest
In a noiseless nest
No sea beats near.
She will never be stirred
In her loamy cell
By the waves long heard
And loved so well.

And would sigh at the tale
Of sunk Lyonnesse,
As a wind-tugged tress
Flapped her cheek like a flail;
Or listen at whiles
With a thought-bound brow
To the murmuring miles
She is far from now.

Yet her shade, maybe,
Will creep underground
Till it catch the sound
Of that western sea
As it swells and sobs
Where she once domiciled,
And joy in its throbs
With the heart of a child.

It was your way, my dear,
To be gone without a word
When callers, friends, or kin
Had left, and I hastened in
To rejoin you, as I inferred.

And when you’d a mind to career
Off anywhere—say to town—
You were all on a sudden gone
Before I had thought thereon,
Or noticed your trunks were down.

So, now that you disappear
For ever in that swift style,
Your meaning seems to me
Just as it used to be:
“Good-bye is not worth while!”

How she would have loved
A party to-day!—
Bright-hatted and gloved,
With table and tray
And chairs on the lawn
Her smiles would have shone
With welcomings . . . But
She is shut, she is shut
   From friendship’s spell
   In the jailing shell
   Of her tiny cell.

Or she would have reigned
At a dinner to-night
With ardours unfeigned,
And a generous delight;
All in her abode
She’d have freely bestowed
On her guests . . . But alas,
She is shut under grass
   Where no cups flow,
   Powerless to know
   That it might be so.

And we are here staying
Amid these stale things
Who care not for gaying,
And those junketings
That used so to joy her,
And never to cloy her
As us they cloy! . . . But
She is shut, she is shut
   From the cheer of them, dead
   To all done and said
   In a yew-arched bed.

He does not think that I haunt here nightly:
   How shall I let him know
That whither his fancy sets him wandering
   I, too, alertly go?—
Hover and hover a few feet from him
   Just as I used to do,
But cannot answer his words addressed me—
   Only listen thereto!

When I could answer he did not say them:
   When I could let him know
How I would like to join in his journeys
   Seldom he wished to go.
Now that he goes and wants me with him
   More than he used to do,
Never he sees my faithful phantom
   Though he speaks thereto.

What a good haunter I am, O tell him,
   Quickly make him know
If he but sigh since my loss befell him
   Straight to his side I go.
Tell him a faithful one is doing
   All that love can do
Still that his path may be worth pursuing,
   And to bring peace thereto.

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear?  Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever consigned to existlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

   Thus I; faltering forward,
   Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward
   And the woman calling.

December 1912.

I come across from Mellstock while the moon wastes weaker
To behold where I lived with you for twenty years and more:
I shall go in the gray, at the passing of the mail-train,
And need no setting open of the long familiar door
   As before.

The change I notice in my once own quarters!
A brilliant budded border where the daisies used to be,
The rooms new painted, and the pictures altered,
And other cups and saucers, and no cozy nook for tea
   As with me.

So I don’t want to linger in this re-decked dwelling,
I feel too uneasy at the contrasts I behold,
And I make again for Mellstock to return here never,
And rejoin the roomy silence, and the mute and manifold
   Souls of old.

1913.

As “legal representative”
I read a missive not my own,
On new designs the senders give
   For clothes, in tints as shown.

Here figure blouses, gowns for tea,
And presentation-trains of state,
Charming ball-dresses, millinery,
   Warranted up to date.

And this gay-pictured, spring-time shout
Of Fashion, hails what lady proud?
Her who before last year was out
   Was costumed in a shroud.

Why go to Saint-Juliot?  What’s Juliot to me?
   I was but made fancy
   By some necromancy
That much of my life claims the spot as its key.

Yes.  I have had dreams of that place in the West,
   And a maiden abiding
   Thereat as in hiding;
Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.

And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago,
   There lonely I found her,
   The sea-birds around her,
And other than nigh things uncaring to know.

But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see;
   Can she ever have been here,
   And shed her life’s sheen here,
The woman I thought a long housemate with me?

Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist?
   Or a Vallency Valley
   With stream and leafed alley,
Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?

February 1913.

Hereto I come to interview a ghost;
   Whither, O whither will its whim now draw me?
Up the cliff, down, till I’m lonely, lost,
   And the unseen waters’ ejaculations awe me.
Where you will next be there’s no knowing,
   Facing round about me everywhere,
      With your nut-coloured hair,
And gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

Yes: I have re-entered your olden haunts at last;
   Through the years, through the dead scenes I have tracked you;
What have you now found to say of our past—
   Viewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you?
Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division?
   Things were not lastly as firstly well
      With us twain, you tell?
But all’s closed now, despite Time’s derision.

Ignorant of what there is flitting here to see,
   The waked birds preen and the seals flop lazily,
Soon you will have, Dear, to vanish from me,
   For the stars close their shutters and the dawn whitens hazily.
Trust me, I mind not, though Life lours,
   The bringing me here; nay, bring me here again!
      I am just the same as when
Our days were a joy, and our paths through flowers.

Pentargan Bay.

Beeny did not quiver,
   Juliot grew not gray,
Thin Valency’s river
   Held its wonted way.
Bos seemed not to utter
   Dimmest note of dirge,
Targan mouth a mutter
   To its creamy surge.

Yet though these, unheeding,
   Listless, passed the hour
Of her spirit’s speeding,
   She had, in her flower,
Sought and loved the places—
   Much and often pined
For their lonely faces
   When in towns confined.

I

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free—
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.

II

The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away
In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say,
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.

A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain,
And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain,
And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main.

IV

—Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky,
And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,
And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?

V

What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore,
The woman now is—elsewhere—whom the ambling pony bore,
And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will see it nevermore.

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
   And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
   And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
      Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
   In dry March weather.  We climb the road
Beside a chaise.  We had just alighted
   To ease the sturdy pony’s load
      When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
   Matters not much, nor to what it led,—
Something that life will not be balked of
   Without rude reason till hope is dead,
      And feeling fled.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
   And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
   But what they record in colour and cast
      Is—that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
   In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
   Remains on the slope, as when that night
      Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
   I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
   And I shall traverse old love’s domain
      Never again.

March 1913.

Nobody says: Ah, that is the place
Where chanced, in the hollow of years ago,
What none of the Three Towns cared to know—
The birth of a little girl of grace—
The sweetest the house saw, first or last;
   Yet it was so
   On that day long past.

Nobody thinks: There, there she lay
In a room by the Hoe, like the bud of a flower,
And listened, just after the bedtime hour,
To the stammering chimes that used to play
The quaint Old Hundred-and-Thirteenth tune
   In Saint Andrew’s tower
   Night, morn, and noon.

Nay: one there is to whom these things,
That nobody else’s mind calls back,
Have a savour that scenes in being lack,
And a presence more than the actual brings;
To whom to-day is beneaped and stale,
   And its urgent clack
   But a vapid tale.

Plymouth, March 1913.

I

Queer are the ways of a man I know:
   He comes and stands
   In a careworn craze,
   And looks at the sands
   And the seaward haze,
   With moveless hands
   And face and gaze,
   Then turns to go . . .
And what does he see when he gazes so?

II

They say he sees as an instant thing
   More clear than to-day,
   A sweet soft scene
   That once was in play
   By that briny green;
   Yes, notes alway
   Warm, real, and keen,
   What his back years bring—
A phantom of his own figuring.

Of this vision of his they might say more:
   Not only there
   Does he see this sight,
   But everywhere
   In his brain—day, night,
   As if on the air
   It were drawn rose bright—
   Yea, far from that shore
Does he carry this vision of heretofore:

IV

A ghost-girl-rider.  And though, toil-tried,
   He withers daily,
   Time touches her not,
   But she still rides gaily
   In his rapt thought
   On that shagged and shaly
   Atlantic spot,
   And as when first eyed
Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide.