ALOES AND MYRRH
Dead, with the dew on your brow,
Dead, with the may in your face,
Dead: and here, true to my vow,
I, who have won in the race,
Weave you a chaplet of song
Wet with the spray and the rime
Blown from your love that was strong—
Stronger than Time.
August it was, and the sun
Streamed through the pines of the west;
There were two then—there is one;
Flown is the bird from the nest;
And it is August again,
But, from this uttermost sea,
Rises the mist of my pain—
You are set free.
“Tell him I see the tall pines,
Out through the door as I lie—
Red where the setting sun shines—
Waving their hands in good-bye;
Tell him I hold to my breast,
Dying, the flowers he gave;
Glad as I go I shall rest
Well in my grave.”
This is the message they send,
Warm with your ultimate breath;
Saying, “And this is the end;
She is the bride but of death.”
Is death the worst of all things?
What but a bursting of bands,
Then to the First of All Things
Stretching out hands!
Under the grass and the snow
You will sleep well till I come;
And you will feel me, I know,
Though you are motionless, dumb.
I shall speak low overhead—
You were so eager to hear—
And even though you are dead,
You will be near.
Dead, with the dew on your brow,
Dead, with the May in your face,
Dead: and here, true to my vow,
I, who have won in the race,
Weave you a chaplet of song
Wet with the spray and the rime
Blown from your love that was strong—
Stronger than Time.
IN WASTE PLACES
The new life is fief to the old life,
And giveth back pangs at the last;
The new strife is like to the old strife
A token and tear of the Past.
We change, but the changes are only
New forms of the old forms again,
We die and some spaces are lonely,
But men live in lives of new men.
We hate, and old wrongs lift their faces,
To fill up the ranks of the new;
We love, and the early love’s graces
Are signs of the false and the true;
We clasp the white hands that are given
To greet us in devious ways,
But meet the old sins, all unshriven,
To sadden the burden of days.
Though we lose the green leaves of the first days,
Though the vineyards be trampled and red,
We know, in the gloom of our worst days,
That the dead are not evermore dead:
December is only December,
A space, not the infinite whole;
Though the hearthstone bear but the one ember,
There still is the fire of the soul.
The end comes as came the beginning,
And shadows fail into the past;
And the goal, is it not worth the winning,
If it brings us but home at the last?
While over the pain of waste places
We tread, ‘tis a blossoming rod
That drives us to grace from disgraces,
From the plains to the Gardens of God.
LAST OF ALL
Wave, walls to seaward,
Storm-clouds to leeward,
Beaten and blown by the winds of the West,
Sail we encumbered
Past isles unnumbered,
But never to greet the green island of Rest.
Lips that now tremble,
Do you dissemble
When you deny that the human is best?
Love, the evangel,
Finds the Archangel—
Is that a truth when this may be a jest?
Star-drifts that glimmer
Dimmer and dimmer,
What do ye know of my weal or my woe?
Was I born under
The sun or the thunder?
What do I come from, and where do I go?
Rest, shall it ever
Come? Is endeavour
Still a vain twining and twisting of cords?
Is faith but treason;
Reason, unreason,
But a mechanical weaving of words?
What is the token,
Ever unbroken,
Swept down the spaces of querulous years,—
Weeping or singing—
That the Beginning
Of all things is with us, and sees us, and hears?
What is the token?
Bruised and broken,
Bend I my life to a blossoming rod?
Shall then the worst things
Come to the first things,
Finding the best of all, last of all, God?