ON A HEATH
I could hear a gown-skirt rustling
Before I could see her shape,
Rustling through the heather
That wove the common’s drape,
On that evening of dark weather
When I hearkened, lips agape.
And the town-shine in the distance
Did but baffle here the sight,
And then a voice flew forward:
“Dear, is’t you? I fear the night!”
And the herons flapped to norward
In the firs upon my right.
There was another looming
Whose life we did not see;
There was one stilly blooming
Full nigh to where walked we;
There was a shade entombing
All that was bright of me.
AN ANNIVERSARY
It was at the very date to which we have come,
In the month of the matching name,
When, at a like minute, the sun had upswum,
Its couch-time at night being the same.
And the same path stretched here that people now follow,
And the same stile crossed their way,
And beyond the same green hillock and hollow
The same horizon lay;
And the same man pilgrims now hereby who pilgrimed here that day.
Let so much be said of the date-day’s sameness;
But the tree that neighbours the track,
And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness,
Knew of no sogged wound or windcrack.
And the joints of that wall were not enshrouded
With mosses of many tones,
And the garth up afar was not overcrowded
With a multitude of white stones,
And the man’s eyes then were not so sunk that you saw the socket-bones.
Kingston-Maurward Ewelease.
“BY THE RUNIC STONE”
(Two who became a story)
By the Runic Stone
They sat, where the grass sloped down,
And chattered, he white-hatted, she in brown,
Pink-faced, breeze-blown.