SEGESTA
High in the secret places of the hills
Cliff-girt it stands, in grassy solitude,
No ruin but a vision unachieved.
This temple is a house not made with hands
But born of man’s incorrigible need
For permanence and beauty in the scud
And wreckage of mortality—as though
Great thoughts, communing in the noise of towns
With inward isolation and deep peace,
And dreams gold-paven for celestial feet,
Had wrought the sudden wonder; and behold,
The sky, the hills, the awful colonnade,
And, night-long woven through the fane’s august
Intercolumniations, all the stars
Processionally wheeling—
Then it was
That, having reared their wonder, it would seem
The makers feared their God might prove less great
Than man’s heart dreaming on him—and so left
The shafts unroofed, untenanted the shrine.
THE TRYST
[1914]
I said to the woman: Whence do you come,
With your bundle in your hand?
She said: In the North I made my home,
Where slow streams fatten the fruitful loam,
And the endless wheat-fields run like foam
To the edge of the endless sand.
I said: What look have your houses there,
And the rivers that glass your sky?
Do the steeples that call your people to prayer
Lift fretted fronts to the silver air,
And the stones of your streets, are they washed and fair
When the Sunday folk go by?
My house is ill to find, she said,
For it has no roof but the sky;
The tongue is torn from the steeple-head,
The streets are foul with the slime of the dead,
And all the rivers run poison-red
With the bodies drifting by.
I said: Is there none to come at your call
In all this throng astray?
They shot my husband against a wall,
And my child (she said), too little to crawl,
Held up its hands to catch the ball
When the gun-muzzle turned its way.
I said: There are countries far from here
Where the friendly church-bells call,
And fields where the rivers run cool and clear,
And streets where the weary may walk without fear,
And a quiet bed, with a green tree near,
To sleep at the end of it all.
She answered: Your land is too remote,
And what if I chanced to roam
When the bells fly back to the steeples’ throat,
And the sky with banners is all afloat,
And the streets of my city rock like a boat
With the tramp of her men come home?
I shall crouch by the door till the bolt is down,
And then go in to my dead.
Where my husband fell I will put a stone,
And mother a child instead of my own,
And stand and laugh on my bare hearth-stone
When the King rides by, she said.
BATTLE SLEEP
[1915]
Somewhere, O sun, some corner there must be
Thou visitest, where down the strand
Quietly, still, the waves go out to sea
From the green fringes of a pastoral land.
Deep in the orchard-bloom the roof-trees stand,
The brown sheep graze along the bay.
And through the apple-boughs above the sand
The bees’ hum sounds no fainter than the spray.
There through uncounted hours declines the day
To the low arch of twilight’s close,
And, just as night about the moon grows gray,
One sail leans westward to the fading rose.
Giver of dreams, O thou with scatheless wing
Forever moving through the fiery hail,
To flame-seared lids the cooling vision bring
And let some soul go seaward with that sail.
ELEGY
[1918]
Ah, how I pity the young dead who gave
All that they were, and might become, that we
With tired eyes should watch this perfect sea
Reweave its patterning of silver wave
Round scented cliffs of arbutus and bay.
No more shall any rose along the way,
The myrtled way that wanders to the shore,
Nor jonquil-twinkling meadow any more,
Nor the warm lavender that takes the spray,
Smell only of the sea-salt and the sun,
But, through recurring seasons, every one
Shall speak to us with lips the darkness closes,
Shall look at us with eyes that missed the roses,
Clutch us with hands whose work was just begun,
Laid idle now beneath the earth we tread—
And always we shall walk with the young dead—
Ah, how I pity the young dead, whose eyes
Strain through the sod to see these perfect skies,
Who feel the new wheat springing in their stead,
And the lark singing for them overhead!
WITH THE TIDE
[6th January 1919]
Somewhere I read, in an old book whose name
Is gone from me, I read that when the days
Of a man are counted and his business done,
There comes up the shore at evening, with the tide,
To the place where he sits, a boat—
And in the boat, from the place where he sits, he sees
Dim in the dusk, dim and yet so familiar,
The faces of his friends long dead; and knows
They come for him, brought in upon the tide,
To take him where men go at set of day.
Then, rising, with his hands in theirs, he goes
Between them his last steps, that are the first
Of the new life; and with the tide they pass,
Their shaken sail grown small upon the moon.
Often I thought of this, and pictured me
How many a man that lives with throngs about him,
Yet straining in the twilight for that boat
Shall scarce make out one figure in the stern,
And that so faint, its features shall perplex him
With doubtful memories—and his heart hang back.
But others, rising as they see the sail
Increase upon the sunset, hasten down,
Hands out and eyes elated; for they see,
Head over head, crowding from bow to stern,
Repeopling their long loneliness with smiles,
The faces of their friends—and such go out
Content upon the ebb-tide, with safe hearts.
But never
To worker summoned when his day was done
Did mounting tide bear such a freight of friends
As stole to you up the white wintry shingle
That night while those that watched you thought you slept.
Softly they came, and beached the boat, and stood
In the still cove, under the icy stars,
Your last-born and the dear loves of your heart,
And with them all the friends you called by name,
And all men that have loved right more than ease,
And honour above honours; all who gave
Free-handed of their best for other men,
And thought the giving taking; they who knew
Man’s natural state is effort: up and up—
All these were there, so great a company
Perchance you marvelled, wondering what great craft
Had brought that throng unnumbered to the cove
Where the boys used to beach their light canoe
After old happy picnics.
But these your friends and children, to whose hands
Committed in the silent night you rose
And took your last faint steps—
These led you down, O great American,
Down to the winter night and the white beach;
And there you saw that the huge hull that waited
Was not as are the boats of the other dead,
Frail craft for a light passage;
But first of a long line of towering ships,
Storm-worn and Ocean-weary every one,
The ships you launched, the ships you manned, the ships
That now, returning from their sacred quest
With the thrice-sacred burden of their dead,
Lay waiting there to take you forth with them,
Out on the flood-tide, to some farther quest.