11
Turfed roads that curve away to Madaket,
Dim roads that wind the valleys to Gibbs Pond,
Grass roads that dream to Polpis, we have yet
To find your subtle ends, what lies beyond!
You wind to wind the world; the simple ways
Of faith and trust and nobleness and love;
We only guess the towers beyond your haze,
We only glimpse the ends toward which you move!
12
Yet rutted roads, whose mild evasions lie
Seemingly blind or tortuous or dense,
Ye are most human in your subtlety,
Human in all your gentle evidence.
For though you pause and double, turn again
And seem to curve and hesitate, your moods
Are human moods; tired women and worn men
Follow in dream your errant solitudes.
13
They come for shriving by the hedgerow things
Where life, obedient to great moving laws
Brilliantly dies, or in birth scatterings
Writes mystical trail with myriad seeds and spores;
Where the dried weeds with hoary tresses blown
Quiver in brittle faith and stand serene,
Where in a tidal sunshine, every cone
Smells of sea-tree-branch, balsam-broomed and clean.
14
Solitude on the moors and to one’s self—!
The blessing comes in spite of torturings;
In spite of all the gods upon the shelf
And all the false gods of material things.
Here where the thistle sends its wayward floss
Or where the marsh hawk swirls for meadow-food,
Alone on cloistered roads redeem thy loss
Of Spirit, in a bay-bushed solitude!
15
Oh, Spirit of ours, whom we have so betrayed,
As round these swimming hills our footsteps dream,
We see thy fugitive shimmer on the blade
Of every spear of grass; and by the gleam
Of sea light out at Pocomo and glade
Of twisted beech by rambling Polpis farm,
Or by the reedy pool where cattle strayed
Far from the fields stir up the midgy swarm.