While the olden voices calling, One by one behind are falling; Into silence dread, appalling, Drift we to the dark.
Far behind, the sad eyes yearning, Hands that wring for our returning, Lamps of love yet vainly burning: Past the headlands stark! Through the wintry snows and sleeting, On our pallid faces beating, Through the phantom twilight fleeting. Drive we to the dark.
Without knowledge, without warning, Drive we to no lands of morning; Far ahead no signals horning Hail our nightward bark.
Hopeless, helpless, weird, outdriven, Fateless, friendless, dread, unshriven, For some race-doom unforgiven, Drive we to the dark.
Not one craven or unseemly; In the flare-light gleaming dimly, Each ghost-face is watching grimly: Past the headlands stark! Hearts wherein no hope may waken, Like the clouds of night wind-shaken, Chartless, anchorless, forsaken, Drift we to the dark.
WINTER.
Over these wastes, these endless wastes of white, Rounding about far, lonely regions of sky, Winter the wild-tongued cometh with clamorous might; Deep-sounding and surgent, his armies of storm sweep by, Wracking the skeleton woods and opens that lie Far to the seaward reaches that thunder and moan, Where barrens and mists and beaches forever are lone.
Morning shrinks closer to night, and nebulous noon Hangs, a dull lanthorn, over the windings of snows; And like a pale beech-leaf fluttering upward, the moon Out of the short day, wakens and blossoms and grows, And builds her wan beauty like to the ghost of a rose Over the soundless silences, shrunken, that dream Their prisoned deathliness under the gold of her beam.