Chapter IV: Visitation

All through my fevered nights, their grey ghosts came,
The great, cool sailing ships blown softly by,
More fair than any beauty that we name,
Girdled of water, chrismed of the sky.
I cannot tell what hidden bales of prize,
What mystic spell may haunt the wraiths of ships,
But these were secret healing on my eyes,
And these were cooling water at my lips.

It may be, when the final fever ends,
And flesh burns out, at last, and pulses fail,
They will not know, my grieved and stricken friends,
How in that instant I had given hail
To one white ship come ghostwise in from sea,
And how at last that it is well with me.

THIS LANE IN MAY

A fragrance lingers, though the rains be done;
And apple-trees have shaken from their hair
The thin and shining blossoms, one by one,
Starring the roadway like a silver stair.
And something softer than the rain comes by,
Older and dearer than these bright, new days:
An odour ... or a trick of lights that lie
Familiar on these grass-grown, rutted ways.

This lane in May is such a haunted thing,
For all the newness of the rain-wet trees:
An old, old May, remembered of the Spring,
Returning ghostwise on such days as these,
Moves in the blowing odours where they pass,
Trailing these scattered blossoms in the grass.

FUGITIVE

Behind these falling curtains of the rain,
Beauty goes by, a phantom on the hill,
A timid fugitive beyond the lane,
In rainy silver,--and so shy and still
That only peering eyes of some hid bird,
Or furry ears that listened by a stone,
Could guess at Something neither seen nor heard,
Finding escape, and faring by, alone.

For eyes like ours, too faint a thing and fleet,
Too lightly running for such ears to hear
The stealthy going of those weightless feet;
No thrilling sight or sound of her comes near,
Only the shining grasses where they lie,
Give hint of silver slippers hasting by.

AN OLD GARDENER

He has always a wise and knowing air:
For him there is no mystery in the mould,
Where seeds put on the shimmering things they wear,
And come to birth in yellow, green, and gold.
His quizzical, grey eyes can somehow mark
The silver shaft of sunlight where it goes,
Still radiant and undarkened in the dark,
To find the seed room of the hidden rose.

For him the secret alchemies are plain;
He tells most surely how these things befall,
In words grown intimate with roots and rain;
And yet, he is so tender of it all,
So wise and kind in ways of leaf and sod,
Sometimes I think him very like to God.

THE VEIL

Here where the snow comes whitely down,
All worldiness is done;
The saintly, silent little Town
Is like a nun;

Most holy in her street and spire,
Most perfectly at rest,--
Ah, God, who knows what hid desire
Is in her breast,

Where peony or daffodil
Or wayward rose begins,
Burning her drifted bosom, still,
Like secret sins.

THE YEAR IS OLD

Day fades with fading colours from the sky,
And blue smoke blowing where the hills are gold,
Is all a tale of loveliness gone by:
Summer is ended, and the year is old,
Beauty and bloom are wet leaves in the grass,
And music is a lone wind on the hill,
Crying that all things beautiful must pass,
Crying that beauty is remembered still.

There will be wood-mist moving by the gate,
There will be gathering to the fire by night,
The greying ashes falling in the grate,--
And long remembering, in the failing light,
Of ghosts returning for a wisp of fame,
Cloudy and brief along the smoke and flame.

MARINERS

Men who have loved the ships they took to sea,
Loved the tall masts, the prows that creamed with foam,
Have learned, deep in their hearts, how it might be
That there is yet a dearer thing than home.
The decks they walk, the rigging in the stars,
The clean boards counted in the watch they keep,--
These, and the sunlight on the slippery spars,
Will haunt them ever, waking and asleep.

Ashore, these men are not as other men;
They walk as strangers through the crowded street,
Or, brooding by their fires, they hear again
The drone astern, where gurgling waters meet,
Or see again a wide and blue lagoon,
And a lone ship that rides there with the moon.

AN ABANDONED INN

Along this stillness steals their ghostly laughter:
The oaths they swore, the clamant song and jest,
Are haunting still each oaken beam and rafter,
That looked on many a gay, forgotten guest.
The clink of cups, the muffled clang of swords,
These, and the flapping cards, will not be stilled,
Though dust has spread the long-abandoned boards,
And hides at last the crimson wine they spilled.

And still, they say, on sullen nights of rain,
A passer-by may hear, beyond the door,
An old accounting for this ugly stain
That makes an evil pattern on the floor--
A sound of dice--an oath--a crashing chair ...
And sudden, grievous silence fallen there.

PRONE

Here where these grasses thrust between my fingers,
And where the earth against my palms is cool,
The hot day dies ... and only late light lingers
Above the shadowed valley's misty pool.
The trees have bent above me like tall lovers,
The stars return their slow, familiar way,
And a great, stirless quiet comes and covers
The traveller resting at the end of day.

I think this body, with its foolish fears,
May grow less foolish and less fearful so,
Learning that at the end of wandering years,
Waits but this house that it has come to know,
Familiar in its sleepy-hearted mirth,
The cool and kind and hospitable earth.

REVIVAL

This body, gathering slumber as it goes,
Will come too full of sleep for wandering,
And so lie down,--and yet it somehow knows
It never could be careless of the Spring;
But turning with the happy-minded earth,
When straying Aprils stir the sentient mould,
It still will know these festivals of mirth,
These subtle sorceries of green and gold.

And we may yet discover, after all,
How flesh is glory whitening on the hedge,
Or wine-red tulips burning at a wall;--
And we may learn, by some wild-flowered ledge,
How solemn dust at last turns gay again,
To light the Spring for later, wandering men.

IMPOSTOR

This Autumn of the yellow lanes
Is come a sorry vagabond,
Grown tearful now and over-fond
Of grey and melancholy rains.

He loves his griefs and broken sighs,
His sorrows of a thousand years,--
And thinks we do not know those tears
Are wood-smoke in his eyes.

If leaves go by us in a gust,
He needs must clutch his heart, and say:
"Alas" or else "Alack-a-day"--
And thinks we take it all on trust.

So sad and sad a rake he is!--
And yet so glad of being sad,
Knowing no fellow ever had
Such fine, becoming griefs as his.

SNOW DUSK

The iron twilight closes, and the steep
Gates of the day where late the light was hurled,
Swing to on silent hinges, and a sleep,
A still, white sleep is fallen on the world.
There is no stir these trackless miles around:
The Earth is turned a grey cathedral close,
Where is forgot all motion and all sound,
Beneath these smooth, obliterating snows.

One burning taper trembles ... and the sky
Curves like a dome where cloudy anthems are,
Above immaculate distances that lie
In thoughtful adoration of a star ...
Earth has her veil, and takes her silent vow:
Nothing save holiness is left her now.

MOOD

This grave, unlabouring beauty of the dusk,
Stars and still fields and swallows in the sky,
These cool, damp odours faint with earthen musk,
The fading sheep like ghosts of sheep gone by,--
Have held so long the thought of brooding men,
That something like a mood has gathered there,
Piled deep and high, again and yet again,
A moving, thoughtful presence on the air.

So when the last light passes from the hill,
Leaving these fields a glimmering grey and blue,
And the last bell has sounded and grown still,--
These blinking stars awake and tremble through,
Re-blossomed from those gathering moods of time,
Like brooding thoughts that flower into rhyme.

SHIPS IN HARBOUR

I have not known a quieter thing than ships,
Nor any dreamers steeped in dream as these,
For all that they have tracked disastrous seas,
And winds that left their sails in flagging strips;
Nothing disturbs them now, no stormy grips
That once had hurt their sides, no crash or swell,
Nor can the fretful harbour quite dispel
This quiet that they learned on lonely trips.

They have no part in all the noisy noons;
They are become as dreams of ships that go
Back to the secret waters that they know,
Each as she will to unforgot lagoons,
Where nothing moves except the ghostly spars
That mark the patient watches on the stars.

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Transcriber's note:

The following change was made to the text:

Page 13: "weight they bare" changed to "weight they bear".