PROPHECY
MY eyes look out across the dim grey wold,
The grey sky and the grey druidic trees,
Knowing they keep inviolate the gold
Memories of summer and the prophecies
That lie imprisoned in the buried seeds
Of all the lyric gaiety of Spring....
The sun shall ride again his flaming steeds;
The dragon-fly dance past on diamond wing;
The earth distil to music; and the rose
Flaunt her impassioned loveliness and be
A symbol of the singing hour that blows
The tall ship and my gladness home to me—
When I shall cry: Awake, my heart, awake,
And deck yourself in beauty for her sake!
THE SINGER TO HIS LADY
IF any song I sing for you should be
But made to please a poet’s vanity,
A richly jewelled and an empty cup
In which no hallowed wine is offered up,
A thing of chosen rhyme and cunning phrase,
Fashioned that it may bring its maker praise;
If love in me grow only soft and sweet,
Remembering not with what worn and weary feet
It journeyed to your fields of golden grain,
The quiet orchards folded in the rain,
The twilight gardens and the morning birds;
If love remembers not and brings you words,
Words as your thanks; if in an idle hour
It breaks its sword and plays the troubadour—
Then may high God, the Universal Lord,
Break me, as I false knight have broken my sword,
If I who have touched your hands should bring eclipse
To love’s nobility with lying lips,
Having seen more terrible than gleaming spears
Your gentleness, your sorrow and your tears!
CERTAINTIES
ACROSS the fields of unforgotten days
I see the gorgeous pearl-white morning burst
Through her fine gauze of dreamy summer haze
Beyond the rolling flats of Staplehurst,
To bless the hours with songs of nesting birds,
And the wild hedge rose and the apple tree,
And laughter and the ring of friendly words,
And the noon’s pageant moving languidly.
I walk again with boys now grown to men,
And see far off with reminiscent eyes,
How in the tangled woods of Horsmonden
The mighty sun, a blood-red dragon, dies....
Some things there are as rooted as the grass
In a man’s mind—and these shall never pass.