But otherwise, all alien comes the Spring,
Touching but not transforming what they are:
Flowers in the cranny but a foolish thing,
Grass in the pavements, foreign as a star ...
Each reminiscent, half-insensate stone
Mocked with new life it cannot call its own.
IV
VISITATION
All through my fevered nights, their grey ghosts came,
The great, cool sailing ships blown softly by,
More fair than any beauty that we name,
Girdled of water, chrismed of the sky.
I cannot tell what hidden bales of prize,
What mystic spell may haunt the wraiths of ships,
But these were secret healing on my eyes,
And these were cooling water at my lips.
It may be, when the final fever ends,
And flesh burns out, at last, and pulses fail,
They will not know, my grieved and stricken friends,
How in that instant I had given hail
To one white ship come ghostwise in from sea,
And how at last that it is well with me.
THIS LANE IN MAY
A fragrance lingers, though the rains be done;
And apple-trees have shaken from their hair
The thin and shining blossoms, one by one,
Starring the roadway like a silver stair.
And something softer than the rain comes by,
Older and dearer than these bright, new days:
An odour ... or a trick of lights that lie
Familiar on these grass-grown, rutted ways.
This lane in May is such a haunted thing,
For all the newness of the rain-wet trees:
An old, old May, remembered of the Spring,
Returning ghostwise on such days as these,
Moves in the blowing odours where they pass,
Trailing these scattered blossoms in the grass.