Upon the hollow stream whose bed

Is channelled by the foamless years;
And with the white the gold-haired head
Mixed running locks, and in Time's ears
Youth's dreams hung singing, and Time's truth
Was half not harsh in the ears of Youth.

Between the bud and the blown flower
Youth talked with joy and grief an hour,
With footless joy and wingless grief
And twin-born faith and disbelief
Who share the seasons to devour;

And long ere these made up their sheaf
Felt the winds round him shake and shower
The rose-red and the blood-red leaf,
Delight whose germ grew never grain,
And passion dyed in its own pain.

Then he stood up, and trod to dust
Fear and desire, mistrust and trust,

And dreams of bitter sleep and sweet,
And bound for sandals on his feet
Knowledge and patience of what must

And what things may be, in the heat
And cold of years that rot and rust

And alter; and his spirit's meat
Was freedom, and his staff was wrought

10

And doubt they had better not been born,
And fain would lure or scare off fate
And charm their doomsman from their doom
And make fear dig its own false tomb.

He builds not half of doubts and half
Of dreams his own soul's cenotaph,

60

Whence hopes and fears with helpless eyes,
Wrapt loose in cast-off cerecloths, rise
And dance and wring their hands and laugh,
And weep thin tears and sigh light sighs,
And without living lips would quaff

The living spring in man that lies,
And drain his soul of faith and strength
It might have lived on a life's length.
He hath given himself and hath not sold
20 To God for heaven or man for gold,
Or grief for comfort that it gives,
Or joy for grief's restoratives.
He hath given himself to time, whose fold
Shuts in the mortal flock that lives

On its plain pasture's heat and cold
And the equal year's alternatives.
Earth, heaven, and time, death, life, and he,
Endure while they shall be to be.

"Yet between death and life are hours

Of strength, and his cloak woven of thought. 30 To flush with love and hide in flowers;

What profit save in these?'' men cry:
"Ah, see, between soft earth and sky,
What only good things here are ours!''
They say, "What better wouldst thou try,
What sweeter sing of? or what powers
Serve, that will give thee ere thou die
More joy to sing and be less sad,

70

80

More heart to play and grow more glad?" 90

Play then and sing; we too have played,
We likewise, in that subtle shade.

We too have twisted through our hair
Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,
And heard what mirth the Mænads1 made,
Till the wind blew our garlands bare
And left their roses disarrayed,

And smote the summer with strange air, And disengirdled and discrowned

99

The limbs and locks that vine-wreaths bound.

We too have tracked by star-proof trees

The tempest of the Thyiades1

Scare the loud night on hills that hid

50

120 A little time we gain from time
To set our seasons in some chime,
For harsh or sweet or loud or low,
With seasons played out long ago
And souls that in their time and prime
Took part with summer or with snow,
Lived abject lives out or sublime,

Such grace befell not ever man on earth
As crowns this One.

Of God nor man was ever this thing said:
That he could give

20

Life back to her who gave him, whence his dead

Mother might live.

Is she a queen, having great gifts to give? -Yea, these: that whoso hath seen her shall not live

Except he serve her sorrowing, with strange pain,

Travail and bloodshedding and bitterer tears; And when she bids die he shall surely die.

But this man found his mother dead and slain, And he shall leave all things under the sky,

With fast-sealed eyes,

And bade the dead rise up and live again,

And she did rise:

And go forth naked under sun and rain,
And work and wait and watch out all his

-Hath she on earth no place of habitation?
-Age to age calling, nation answering nation,
Cries out, Where is she? and there is none to
say;

For if she be not in the spirit of men,

For if in the inward soul she hath no place,
In vain they cry unto her, seeking her face,

Life and the clouds are vanished; hate and fear In vain their mouths make much of her; for

Have had their span

But highest of all that heaven and earth be--And ye shall die before your thrones be won. -Yea, and the changed world and the liberal

hold,

But somewhat in it of our blood once shed
Shall quiver and quicken, as now in us the dead
Blood of men slain and the old same life's de-
sire

Plants in their fiery footprints our fresh
feet.

48

Not therefore were the whole world's high hope rootless;

80

But man to man, nation would turn to nation, And the old life live, and the old great word be great. -Pass on, then, and pass by us, and let us be, -But ye that might be clothed with all things For what light think ye after life to see? pleasant,

Ye are foolish that put off the fair soft present, That clothe yourselves with the cold future air;

And if the world fare better will ye know?

And if man triumph who shall seek you and say?

-Enough of light is this for one life's span,

When mother and father, and tender sister That all men born are mortal, but not man;
and brother
And we men bring death lives by night to sow,
That men may reap and eat and live by
day.

And the old live love that was shall be as ye,
Dust, and no fruit of loving life shall be.
-She shall be yet who is more than all these
were,

Than sister or wife or father unto us or
mother.

56

A FORSAKEN GARDEN

88

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down's edge between windward
and lee,

Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

Even this your dream, that by much tribulation
Ye shall make whole flawed hearts, and Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls

bowed necks straight?

-Nay, though our life were blind, our death

were fruitless,

not;

As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are

dry;

From the thicket of thorns whence the nightin Here death may deal not again forever; Here change may come not till all change end.

gale calls not,

Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.

Over the meadows that blossom and wither,

Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song.
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.

The sun burns sere, and the rain dishevels

From the graves they have made they shall rise up never,

Who have left naught living to ravage and rend.

32 Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing,

One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath. Only the wind here hovers and revels

In a round where life seems barren as death. Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping,

Haply, of lovers none ever will know, Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping

Years ago.

40

Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,

Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,

Heart handfast in heart as they stood, "Look Till the strength of the waves of the high tides

thither,"

Did he whisper? "Look forth from the flowers to the sea;

For the foam-flowers endure when the rose

blossoms wither,

humble

The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,

And men that love lightly may die-But As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,

we?"

What love was ever as deep as a grave? They are loveless now as the grass above them Or the wave.

56

Death lies dead.

A BALLAD OF DREAMLAND

80

Does the fang still fret thee of hope deferred?
What bids the lids of thy sleep dispart?

All are at one now, roses and lovers,
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the Only the song of a secret bird.

sea.

Not a breath of the time that has been hovers
In the air now soft with a summer to be.
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons
hereafter

Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now
or weep,

16

The green land's name that a charm encloses,
It never was writ in the traveller's chart,
And sweet on its trees as the fruit that grows is,
It never was sold in the merchant's mart.
The swallows of dreams through its dim fields
dart,

When, as they that are free now of weeping And sleep's are the tunes in its tree-tops heard; No hound's note wakens the wildwood hart,

and laughter,

We shall sleep.

64 Only the song of a secret bird.

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