When the mists divide with the dawn o'er those glittering waters,
Do they gaze over unoared seas—
Naiad and nymph and the woodland's rose-crowned daughters
And the Oceanides?
Do they sing together, perchance, in that diamond splendour,
That world of dawn and dew,
With eyelids twitching to tears and with eyes grown tender
The sweet old songs they knew,
The songs of Greece? Ah, with harp-strings mute do they falter
As the earth like a small star pales?
When the heroes launch their ship by the smoking altar
Does a memory lure their sails? Far, far away, do their hearts resume the story
That never on earth was told,
When all those urgent oars on the waste of glory
Cast up its gold?
Are not the forest fringes wet
With tears? Is not the voice of all regret
Breaking out of the dark earth's heart?
She too, she too, has loved and lost; and though
She turned last night in disdain
Away from the sunset-embers,
From her soul she can never depart;
She can never depart from her pain.
Vainly she strives to forget;
Beautiful in her woe,
She awakes in the dawn and remembers.
THE SWIMMER'S RACE
I
Between the clover and the trembling sea
They stand upon the golden-shadowed shore
In naked boyish beauty, a strenuous three,
Hearing the breakers' deep Olympic roar;
Three young athletes poised on a forward limb,
Mirrored like marble in the smooth wet sand,
Three statues moulded by Praxiteles:
The blue horizon rim
Recedes, recedes upon a lovelier land,
And England melts into the skies of Greece.
II
The dome of heaven is like one drop of dew,
Quivering and clear and cloudless but for one
Crisp bouldered Alpine range that blinds the blue
With snowy gorges glittering to the sun:
Forward the runners lean, with outstretched hand
Waiting the word—ah, how the light relieves
The silken rippling muscles as they start
Spurning the yellow sand,
Then skimming lightlier till the goal receives
The winner, head thrown back and lips apart.
III
Now at the sea-marge on the sand they lie
At rest for a moment, panting as they breathe,
And gazing upward at the unbounded sky
While the sand nestles round them from beneath;
And in their hands they gather up the gold
And through their fingers let it lazily stream
Over them, dusking all their limbs' fair white,
Blotting their shape and mould,
Till, mixed into the distant gazer's dream
Of earth and heaven, they seem to sink from sight.