If it’s ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I when
Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,
Seeing me not, amid their flounder,
Standing with my arm around her;
If it’s ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I then.
If it’s ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime,
And the cuckoos—two—in rhyme,
As they used to be, or seemed to,
We shall do as long we’ve dreamed to,
If it’s ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay, and bees achime.
THE TWO HOUSES
In the heart of night,
When farers were not near,
The left house said to the house on the right,
“I have marked your rise, O smart newcomer here.”
Said the right, cold-eyed:
“Newcomer here I am,
Hence haler than you with your cracked old hide,
Loose casements, wormy beams, and doors that jam.
“Modern my wood,
My hangings fair of hue;
While my windows open as they should,
And water-pipes thread all my chambers through.
“Your gear is gray,
Your face wears furrows untold.”
“—Yours might,” mourned the other, “if you held, brother,
The Presences from aforetime that I hold.
“You have not known
Men’s lives, deaths, toils, and teens;
You are but a heap of stick and stone:
A new house has no sense of the have-beens.
“Void as a drum
You stand: I am packed with these,
Though, strangely, living dwellers who come
See not the phantoms all my substance sees!
“Visible in the morning
Stand they, when dawn drags in;
Visible at night; yet hint or warning
Of these thin elbowers few of the inmates win.