Chapter III: The Snow Witch

When all the world is under snow,
And the wind, crying in the north,
Sends its wild choir of voices forth,
Now shrieking loud, now falling low,
The Snow Witch with her ice-crowned hair
Is hurling snowflakes everywhere.

Her garments are the Northern Lights
Beyond the bare arms of the trees;
And, from her height, she looks and sees
Earth’s towns and hamlets lit o’ nights;
And sighs, mayhap, far up above,
For one poor hearth alight with love.

❦

THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS

Northward upon the stream our boat is creeping,
The sky above is pearl, the river pearl,
And soon will coming night her shades unfurl
Like some great bird on stealthy pinions sweeping,
As the effulgence chills
And young stars stand above the Theban hills
Within whose fastnesses the kings are sleeping.

To them the roll of time is but a dreaming,
To them the lotus, mouldered on their breasts,
Still dripping from the Nile, in beauty rests,
As when the mourners broke those blossoms streaming
And shook the silver shower,
The pallid glory of the royal flower
Fit guerdon for a royal spirit deeming.

To-night it seems that peak and rugged boulder
Stand o’er their soundless dwellings for a sign;
Surely some cipher of a hand divine
Is graven yonder on the mountain’s shoulder,
Hidden in shadows vast
That melt to greyness as the boat slips past
With the slow current, and the sky grows colder.

Mayhap, the phantom of a past endeavour,
Born of that ancient striving to the light,
Has wrapt the secret sepulchres with might
And haunts the valley of the Nile for ever;
Breathing eternally
A note of immortality to be,
Resounding ceaselessly and dying never.

While, round the sleepers, sounds of feet have broken
The stillness that encompassed them so long,
And the loud voices of an idle throng
Within those halls of death have idly spoken;
While sacrilegious hands
Have loosed about them the funereal bands
To rob their bosoms of life’s symbolled token,

From one unchanging hope can none divide them,
Although its outward emblem be despoiled;
Though silence and the peace for which they toiled
A world whose ways they knew not has denied them,
That hope its wings has spread
Within the rifled strongholds of the dead
As the wings shadowed on the wall beside them.

Changeless, unaltered still the soul’s desire is,
Fixed as the hills whose heights we leave behind
To merge in fading colours undefined,
Purple and amethyst and rose and iris,
And, to the dripping oar,
The dusk is closing down along the shore,
The brooding dusk of Isis and Osiris.

❦

THE LOWLAND PLOUGHMAN

The team is stabled up, my lass,
The dew lies thick and grey;
Beyond the world, the long green light
Clings to the edge of day.

By farm and fold the work is still,
Their breath the beanflowers yield,
And, in the dusk, the gowans stand
Like moons along the field.

A little ghost alone, my dear,
The night moth flitters by;
Beside the hedge I’m lonely too,
Although no ghost am I.

Leave the gudeman to mind the hearth,
The wife to mend the fire,
Nor heed the lads whose voices come
In mirth from yard and byre.

The evening star is up, my dear,
And oh! the night is sweet,
Come through the heavy drops that bend
The grasses at your feet.

For I am young and I am strong
And well can work for two,
And ’tis a year, come Martinmas,
I’ve loved no lass but you.

And, in a year, come Martinmas,
Before the fields are sown,
I will not need to walk nor stray
Between the lights alone.

For then the cot beyond the farm
A happy man will hold,
A wife who wears a golden ring
To match her hair of gold.

❦

LATE FEBRUARY

Blue vistas of an avenue
Range, line on line, against the sky;
Away, beyond, the low hills lie
To frame this landscape in with blue.

And clear and far the light is spread
As though earth smiled to feel the stir,
The first faint thrill that moves in her
Who, all these months, has lain as dead.

Fresh year, fresh sky, fresh hope--and yet
A sigh is in the lengthening days;
Between the trunks the blackbird strays
Whose long-drawn note is called regret.

White snowdrops, close among the roots,
Scored at your drooping hearts with green,
What scents from springs that once have been
Cling, like old griefs, among your shoots?

Yes, like old griefs; and we, who view,
Year after year, life’s deathless round,
Feel their spent throb in every wound
And know that they are deathless too.

❦

FROM A TRAIN-WINDOW

Where, struck with sunset light, the shining rails
Converge upon our track,
The smoky canopy of London veils
The distant heaven with black.

Behind us, dropping further in our wake,
The lessening city lies,
And all the landscape has begun to take
A glamour from the skies.

Scarcely a cloud the sun’s effulgence shields
From evening’s stealthy hand;
But half the crimson disc beyond the fields
Stares on the level land.

Through the moist meadows, broad on either side,
Merged to one dusky plain,
There sounds, the breathing stillness to divide,
The clanking of the train.

And cooling silence, like a wave of balm,
After the city’s heat,
Is spread around us, odourous and calm,
With foam of meadowsweet.

In the damp ditches ranging from the line
Towards the lighted west
Tall spires of blossom, dimly white, define
A sweetness manifest.

And now the last red rim is vanishing,
Leaving the sky-line cold,
And mists, transfigured, to the grasses cling
Like gossamer of gold.

The dusk descends; between us and the town
The gliding miles increase;
And on our souls there settles softly down
An all-enfolding peace.

❦

POEMS OF INDIA