THE DARK AGES
AND OTHER POEMS
By “L.”
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1908
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
PAGE
I.
The Dark Ages
1
II.
The Bells of Venice
4
III.
An Ancient Church
5
IV.
To the English Gipsies
6
V.
Autumn Dying
9
VI.
The Departure for Cythera
10
VII.
The Village Church
13
VIII.
Lady Day near Bignor
14
IX.
A Cottage Inscription
16
X.
A Memory of Ireland
18
XI.
“Tír Nan Óg”
19
XII.
A Highland Day
21
XIII.
To the Firs
23
XIV.
Good-bye
24
XV.
The Fairy Glen Revisited
26
XVI.
Waiting
28
XVII.
Near Haarlem
30
XVIII.
The Tomb of Saint Augustine at Pavia
31
XIX.
Modern Florence
32
XX.
To Dante
33
XXI.
To Petrarch
34
XXII.
To a Lady of the Eighteenth Century
XXIII.
The “Liberal” Divine
37
XXIV.
The Quarrel
38
XXV.
The Old Fountain
40
XXVI.
Love and Death
41
XXVII.
Violets
43
XXVIII.
The Gardens of the Soul
44
XXIX.
A Man to Childish Things
46
XXX.
The Knight
47
XXXI.
Hopes
48
XXXII.
The Path
50
XXXIII.
The Call to Bethlehem
52
XXXIV.
A Christmas Lullaby
53
XXXV.
To the Holy Child
55
XXXVI.
Mater Amabilis
56
XXXVII.
Saint Stephen
57
XXXVIII.
Saint John at Ephesus
59
XXXIX.
The Little Children
61
XL.
The Circumcision
63
XLI.
The Return of the Magi
64
XLII.
Atonement
66
XLIII.
Calvary
67
XLIV.
“The Desert shall Blossom”
68
XLV.
Resurrection
69
XLVI.
The Ascension
XLVII.
A Hymn to the Holy Spirit
73
XLVIII.
“Adora et Tace”
76
XLIX.
The Refuge of the Wandering
77
L.
The Legend of St. Christopher
79
LI.
The Light Invisible
81
LII.
Onward
83
LIII.
The Faithful Departed
84
LIV.
Lethe
86
LV.
Ave Atque Vale
88
I
THE DARK AGES
Men call you “dark.” What factory then blurred the light
Of golden suns, when nothing blacker than the shades
Of coming rain climbed up the heather-mantled height?
While the air
Breathed all the scents of all untrodden flowers,
And brooks poured silver through the glimmering glades,
Then sweetly wound through virgin ground.
Must all that beauty pass?
And must our pleasure trains
Like foul eruptions belch upon the mountain head?
Must we perforce build vulgar villa lanes,
And on sweet fields of grass
The canting scutcheons of a cheating commerce spread?
Men call you “dark.” Did that faith see with cobwebbed eyes,
That built the airy octagon on Ely’s hill,
And Gloucester’s Eastern wall that woos the topaz skies,
Where the hymn
Angelic “Glory be to God on high,
And peace on earth to men who feel good will,”
Might softly sound God’s throne around?
Is that a perfect faith
Which pew-filled chapels rears,
Where Gothic fronts of stone mask backs of ill-baked bricks,
And where the frothy fighting preacher fears,
As peasants fear a wraith,
His deacon’s frown or some just change in politics?
Men call you “dark.” Was Chaucer’s speech a muddy stream,
The language born of Norman sun and Saxon snow?
Was Langland’s verse or Wyclif’s prose mere glow-worm’s gleam?
And the tales
Of Arthur’s sword and of the holy Grail,
And Avalon, the isle where no storms blow:
From such romance did no light glance?
Have we not heard a tongue,
Whose words the Saxon thralls
Would scorn to speak above their muck-rake and their fork,
The speech of barrack-rooms and music-halls,
Where every fool has flung
The rotten refuse of Calcutta and New York?
Men call you “dark.” But chivalry and honour stand
As words that you, not we, did fashion, when the need
Of food beyond the price of gold awoke our land.
For you taught
Inconstancy is like a standard lost;
And we who prove untrue in love or deed
Will doubly shame an ancient name.
Your robes were not all white,
Your soul was not a sea
Where all the crystal rivulets of God found room:
But we must often to your lessons flee,
Our truth with yours unite,
Before we meet the holy dayspring of the doom.
II
THE BELLS OF VENICE
Ring out again that faltering strain,
Cease not so soon,
Sweet peal that brought to me the thought
Of some deep shadowed English lane
Across the blue lagoon.
The water street where oarsmen meet
And shout ahead,
The glowing quay, all noise and glee,
Seemed hallowed as when angels’ feet
Touched Jacob’s stony bed.
On pearly dome and princely home
Day’s glory dies:
Once more the bells’ low murmur tells
That faith is not a line of foam
Nor life a bridge of sighs.
III
AN ANCIENT CHURCH
So little dost thou seem of common earth,
So much of spirit doth thy fabric show,
That we, who watch thee through the azure glow,
Might deem that with the stars thou cam’st to birth.
So sweet and true the voices from thy spire,
Which bless the day’s betrothal unto night,
That when they falter with
We well might think an angel touched his lyre.
If chiselled stone and molten bronze instil
Hopes deeper than the fountains of my tears,
And love that hungers for eternity,
God, I believe Thou hast some use for me;
Leave me no life of dumb and sluggard years,
But cut or melt me till I speak Thy will.
IV
TO THE ENGLISH GIPSIES [6]
Rough swarthy Gipsy folk,
Would that my voice could once forget to falter,
And sing a song as free as swallows’ wings
Of ancient Gipsies, and their “dukes” and “kings,”
The men who braved the branding-rod and halter,
Because like birds they nimbly came and went,
And loved the stars and road, and crouching tent
Beneath a grove of oak.
In ages long ago
The Brahman priests pursued you with their curses,
Because you found life sweeter at the core
Without the mumbling of their magic lore.
And you have lived to see their Sanskrit verses
Fall dead; and Brahmans, like mere Romany,
Now tempt their gods by trusting to the sea,
Though trembling while they go.
Then hardened against fear
You looted caravans of gold-shot dresses
And gems upon their way to bright Baghdad,
And drove the Moslem Khalif rampant mad,
When pearls culled from the ocean for the tresses
Of his Circassian, in your pouches fell,
As trifles to adorn the dusky shell
Of some black virgin’s ear.
Next Greece and Thessaly
Became the home of many a jocund roamer,
Who gaily danced, or begged with mien forlorn,
And patched his Indian speech where it was torn
With remnants from Demosthenes and Homer,
Until you struck your blackened tents again
And tattered pageants crossed the endless plain
Of fertile Hungary.
’Tis even said you planned
To trick the Pope with penitential moaning,
And gained his leave to wander seven years
Towards the melancholy North, with tears
The sin of feigned apostasy atoning:
Thus fortified against enquiring foes,
You, with the budding of the Tudor rose,
Alighted on our land.
Who says it was not good
To see your handkerchiefs of red and yellow,
And silver rings and basket-laden carts,
And hear the honey-lipped prophetic arts
Of wheedling witches, or a clean-limbed fellow
Who fiddled by the hedgerow in the smoke,
And roused the antique Gipsy song that woke
The silence of the wood?
Now that your blood must fail,
What artist soul revengefully remembers
You raided the domain of chanticleer,
Or deftly poisoned pigs to swell your cheer
Of hedgehogs cooked in clay amid the embers?
Who says you sometimes wedded art to force,
Or made the worse appear the better horse
Before a coming sale?
You soon will pass away;
Laid one by one below the village steeple
You face the East from which your fathers sprang,
Or sleep in moorland turf, beyond the clang
Of towns and fairs; your tribes have joined the people
Whom no true Romany will call by name,
The folk departed like the camp-fire flame
Of withered yesterday.
V
AUTUMN DYING
Autumn shakes in golden raiment,
Gashed with red;
None can ransom him by payment
From the dead.
They have shorn his strength with reaping,
Left him cold;
Now he wakes each morning weeping,
Weak and old.
And last night he sought my casement,
Came and fled;
Wailed for aid from roof to basement,
Touched my bed.
Though I cannot find his ransom,
Ere he dies;
I will pay all that I can—some
Hopes and sighs.
VI
THE DEPARTURE FOR CYTHERA
Ere they parted for Cythera
When the spring had reached its bloom,
Phyllis, Doris and Neaera
Peeped into their pictured room,
Wished to go, yet wished to linger,
Lifted each a taper finger,
Threw a kiss towards their portraits set in walls of rose brocade.
Where the beeches lift a curtain
Over shifting sunlit scenes,
They with footsteps light and certain
Used to dance like fairy queens;
Now they speed beneath the beeches
Till the path the water reaches
And the bay just softly ripples by a marble balustrade.
Purple were the sails that beckoned
And the deck was ivory,
Love stood smiling there and reckoned
His embarking company;
Every mast wore silver sheathing,
Music in the air was breathing,
In the rigging little laughing cupids upwards climbed and strayed.
On they sailed through fields of azure,
White was all their furrowed way,
Melting in a blue erasure,
Melting fast like yesterday;
Radiant Hope still steered them hoping,
Steered them past the woodlands sloping,
Where the doves descend and flutter on an ancient colonnade.
On they passed through golden hazes,
Watching distant peaks of snow,
On through shadowed island mazes,
Where the dreamy spices blow;
Till the moon herself was setting,
And the dew fell fast and wetting,
And the silver masts no image on the blackening waves displayed.
Frayed are now the rose-red panels
Filled with squares of rare brocade,
In the ceiling Time carves channels
Where the frescoes slowly fade;
Chipped are now the scrolls of plaster,
Which a skilled Italian master
Moulded all along the cornice, and with tips of gold o’erlaid.
But the shallow oval spaces
Underneath the white festoons,
Hold the tender pastel faces
Waiting endless afternoons;
For they never touched Cythera,
Phyllis, Doris, and Neaera,
And again they never landed by the marble balustrade.
VII
THE
Up at the church at the edge of the moor,
Flat on the pathway that leads to the door,
Worn by the tread of the mourning and poor,
There is a face that is fit for God’s floor.
How could a mason create in his brain
Just such a cherub to sob in the rain?
How could the pride of the dying but vain
Want such a cherub to blow a refrain?
This one had ankles with which he could run—
Is it a fact that a cherub has none?
This one had love-locks that flashed in the sun,
Yes, and his lips often pouted in fun.
Who was the angel that played on the street;
Whose was the face I can’t soil with my feet?
Nobody knows; but I hope I shall meet
One such a cherub in front of God’s seat.
VIII
LADY DAY NEAR BIGNOR
South-Eastward where the waving line of hills
Bears up the clouds that speed like passing boats,
On one sweet spot which distant sunlight fills
A sudden silver haze descends and floats.
The trees below like lace veil glistening streams,
The gorse puts on its tiny gloves of gold,
The cattle move as though they fed in dreams,
And timid lambs are bleating in the fold.
Though tangled bracken like an old man’s beard
Blends autumn’s ruddy brown with winter’s grey,
Soft blows the breeze that through the pines is heard,
Green moss and yellow primrose deck the way.
The Roman villa level on the grass,
With wrestling cupids on the floor within;
The church where first a Norman priest said mass,
The ivied chimneys of the Georgian inn:
These have their message. All things tell the change
Of seasons, races, and of man’s estate:
All bid us mark within how small a range
There moves a story tragically great.
The hills abide, and that mysterious Breath
Which brooded on the slowly shaping earth,
And came to-day like dew to Nazareth
To fashion our Redeemer’s Virgin-birth.
IX
A COTTAGE INSCRIPTION
“Time trieth troth.” Who carved the text
Above the narrow cottage door?
Two hundred years of storm have vexed
The words which front the western moor.
Was it a hind who loved the king
That held his court beyond the sea,
A hind who taught his child to sing
Of Stuart rose and Stuart tree?
Was it a swain whose soul adored
A maid who went to London town?
And did she choose some spangled lord
And coldly flout her country clown?
“Time trieth troth.” And was he true
Whose chisel carved that rugged line?
And was he loyal till the yew
O’erarched his heart’s now silent shrine?
Then, though bereft of king or love,
He found the poet’s secret gain,
The sympathy of suns above,
The friendship of the falling rain.
X
A MEMORY OF IRELAND
Where the saints of Holy Ireland sleep
No chancels pen them round,
But the waving trees their vigils keep
Above each verdant mound.
Here they climbed no lofty marble beds
To find a frigid rest,
But a canopy of golden threads
Hangs o’er them in the west.
When the larks have ceased their thankful hymn,
The ocean booms his bell,
And the lamps of heaven swing o’er the rim
Of every holy well.
May the Lord bring back that race of men
Whom charity enticed
To desert the world for some poor glen
And give the people Christ.
XI
“TÍR NAN ÓG” [19]
When thou didst die, they say a fairy’s pipe
Was heard outside the castle door,
And wee folk thick as August corn that’s ripe
Came trooping down the moor,
And bore thy soul with laughter and with light
O’er glen and heathered height.
Friends waked thee till the dawn thrice slanted by
To quench the tapers round thy bier,
And countless decades of the rosary
They numbered with a tear;
But yet they whispered, “She is now a queen,
And clad in rainbow green.”
They set thy form near blessed Finnan’s side,
And wailed the Gaelic death-lament;
But they believed thee happy as a bride
With long-dreamed joys content
Within the land they name with wistful tongue,
“The land where all are young.”
XII
A HIGHLAND DAY
WITHIN SIGHT OF CULLODEN
The snow-white borders of the grey-green sea
Peep through the mist that veils the strait with dew,
The sun grows bold and smites the landscape free,
The burn, the woods, the rocks of rose-red hue.
The world lies warm upon the heart of day,
The callants push their boat from off the shore,
The white gulls sail and flutter through the bay,
The jet-black daws are calling evermore.
The doves fly wheeling past their mountain wall,
The whispering pine trees weave a ceiling cool,
The rowans redden o’er the foaming fall,
The ferns keep guard around the fairies’ pool.
The distant moorland where the tribesmen bled
To win their wandering prince a royal home,
Now wraps a deeper purple on their bed,
While he sleeps cold below St. Peter’s dome.
The waves turn opal in the waning light,
The rocks exchange for grey their rose-red bloom,
The finite sinks into the infinite,
And sea and sky are wedded in the gloom.
XIII
TO THE FIRS
I LOVE the oak-grove where the Druid’s knife
Cut down the mistletoe in days of old;
I love the elms around the convent fold
Where souls escape the dust of highway life.
I love to watch the tiny milk-white spires
That on the chestnut branches lift their head;
I love to see the rowan growing red
With clusters bright as frosty winter fires.
But better still I love you, firs that crest
The lonely hill above the moaning firth,
Beside the path where bluebells gently nod.
To your grey arms, ere sunset leaves the West,
I can confide each
For you have known the waves and storms of God.
XIV
GOOD-BYE
Sing me one more villanelle,
Light as elfin foot that brushes
Through the ferns and foxgloves of the fairy dell.
Come where woodland spices smell,
Where the wild rose faintly flushes,
Sing me one more villanelle.
Rare as snowy heather bell,
Sweet as melody of thrushes
Through the ferns and foxgloves of the fairy dell.
When the shade creeps up the fell
Mid the parting sun’s last blushes,
Sing me one more villanelle.
Sing it to the curfew knell,
Where the streamlet plays with rushes
Through the ferns and foxgloves of the fairy dell.
Let it breathe no sad farewell,
Only mirth with silent hushes.
Sing me one more villanelle
Through the ferns and foxgloves of the fairy dell.
XV
THE FAIRY GLEN REVISITED
That pure and shy retreat
A Tartar would have spared,
But not that lawyer cur from Inverness,
Who thought its sylvan virgin loveliness
Would bring him gold if rudely bared
And hawked upon the street.
There children checked their race
And crept on tiptoed feet,
Lest they should break upon the rainbow rings
Of fairies glinting through transparent wings,
Or kindly wizard come to meet
A maid with lovelorn face.
No snow nor stinging sleet
Could chill the fairies’ bath;
So close the vaulting was with fir and larch
Which laid deep carpets underneath their arch,
That on the fairies’ silent path
No blast could ever beat.
Mid foam more white than fleece
The waterfall rang sweet,
It made each rocky cup a rippling well,
It coyly dived and peeped along the dell,
Then ran the rising sea to greet,
And greeting found its peace.
And now the cold and heat
Scourge all the glen with ire;
The broken boughs have choked the sobbing stream,
The silver birch is but a sodden beam,
The fairies’ path is sunk in mire,
The moss has left their seat.
Flash sorrow and disdain
For this most sordid feat,
You whom Burns taught to love a daisy’s face,
And Scott to love the mountains’ gloom and grace;
Or say they scattered chaff for wheat,
And sang their songs in vain.
XVI
WAITING
BASED ON THE GAELIC FEAR A’ BHÀTA
The year may change its time,
But still I climb
The cliff above the sea,
And look with eyes half dim with rain,
To know if God has brought again
My lover back to me.
When darkness downward glides
And slowly hides
The fading hills of blue,
I never bar the cottage door
Without one look across the moor,
A look of hope for you.
Sometimes when I am free
I seek the quay
Soon after break of day,
And find a newly harboured boat,
And ask if you are still afloat
Near home or far away.
I ask if you are well,
And they can tell
My heart is set on you:
And then they call me just a fool,
A baby in the world’s hard school
To give you love so true.
You promised me silk gowns
From Lowland towns,
And rings of twisted gold;
And, best of all, your picture bound
With stones to hem its beauty round
That I might kiss and hold.
My love is not the flower
Of one short hour;
You were my childhood’s pride;
Your image is my dream by night,
By day if ever put to flight
It comes back like the tide.
The swan upon the lake
When robbers take
Her young, is left to moan;
None tends her wounds or heeds her cry,
She wails her loss and waits to die:
Like her I cry alone.
XVII
NEAR HAARLEM
Triumphantly it soars, that full-domed sky,
Of lucent turquoise fading into pearl;
And here the happy birds their brown wings furl
By waters that lisp seaward dreamily.
Beyond these plains of silver and of green,
Amid the floating vapours of the town
The vast grey church uplifts its belfry crown,
A chiselled shrine through incense dimly seen.
The burdened barges trust the smiling flood,
Calm wraps the distance of reclining dunes,
The tower rings peace in soft alternate tones.
And who that hears the bells’ low luting tunes,
Now thinks of Haarlem’s siege and starving moans,
Or how these brooks once bubbled with brave blood?
XVIII
THE TOMB OF ST. AUGUSTINE AT PAVIA
Beneath the low barbaric Lombard apse
It rises like a ridge of Alpine snow,
And wry-wheeled ages with uneasy lapse
Creak past its majesty, and go.
Such music as leaves Milan’s marble spires
To mount towards a greater whiter throne,
Or tempts to earth again seraphic choirs,
Is at Augustine’s shrine unknown.
No wave of pilgrim footsteps surges here,
No sheaf of tapers lifts its votive gleam,
The half-taught critic comes not with his sneer,
When I draw nigh, dear saint, to dream.
Enough if far-off sounds of children’s glee
Bid me to “take and read” God’s open call,
Or some sad Monnica pray here to see
Her son, like thee, a second Paul.
XIX
MODERN FLORENCE
Hard by the home of Dante’s infant life
I saw a Yankee “Kake Walk” advertised;
Within San Miniato’s pillared aisle
A Japanese was peering unsurprised;
Where Michelangelo set “Dawn” and “Night,”
And her, most blest, whose softly sculptured smile
Glows with a maiden’s and a mother’s light,
A German Jew was nagging with his wife.
TO DANTE
The Church divided and the Empire fell,
Grave Dante, but thy verse in magic grows
And charms men upward to the snow-white Rose
Of heaven from the mire and grief of hell.
No lonely isle of dull forgetfulness
Hides Beatrice within its shadowed gloom,
For ’mid the petals of thy Rose’s bloom
Time’s hand has set that pearl of loveliness.
Though patched and powdered poets could not taste
Thy limpid sweetness, and exposed thy fame
To meet the leering Frenchman’s cynic air,
Thy love was fair without brocade or paste,
Thyself too great to need a gilded name;
Thy Comedy and God survive Voltaire.
XXI
TO PETRARCH
Yes, Petrarch, we most certainly believe
That you who wore your heart upon your sleeve,
Did love your love for Laura, and the eye
Of public fame, at which your sonnets fly,
Like skyward larks that court the genial sun;
And o’er the tears you treasured one by one
You downward bent with all a statue’s grace
To see reflections of your tearful face.
But none redeemed by love will e’er consent
To say you tasted of love’s sacrament.
XXII
TO A LADY OF
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
IN MEMORY OF METASTASIO
Nice, though your lips of coral
Now are dust;
And the schoolboy scans the moral
Graven on your broken bust
In the gilt barocco chapel
After Mass;
Where ten coats with broidered lappel
Bent when Nice used to pass.
Still perchance your spirit hovers
Where the lute
And the voices of your lovers
Chimed, but now are gone and mute.
Where the lonely arbour’s hollow
Shadier grows,
And the butterflies can follow
Fearlessly to kiss the rose.
And you smile because a poet
À la mode
Flouted you; and then, we know it,
Wrote an abject palinode.
For your hands, though light as feathers,
Held him tight:
Love was made to last all weathers,
Not to change with day and night.
XXIII
THE “LIBERAL” DIVINE
The “middle path” meets every need,
The Stagirite and Buddha say;
I won’t doubt more than half the creed
Nor wear a costume wholly lay.
XXIV
THE QUARREL
SUGGESTED BY A PICTURE OF FRAGONARD
On the elm tree she was swinging,
Just beyond the hedge of yew;
But she slowly ceased from singing,
From her breast a pink she drew.
Buttoning his coat of satin,
Off he strode towards the woods,
Tartly quoting Virgil’s Latin,
That a woman’s made of moods.
Long ago within God’s garden
Both were wrapped in long lone sleep,
Heeding not if hoar frosts harden,
Or the autumn leaves fall deep.
Laugh not at the statue calling
Phyllis with her marble muff,
Nor the marble cupids sprawling
On a cloud of powder puff.
Laugh not at his hermit fashions
Nor the book unwarmed by hope;
Say not that it shows the passions
Of a stony misanthrope.
For they loved while they were living,
Loved with love untold, unheard;
Though they parted unforgiving,
Each too proud to say a word.
XXV
THE OLD FOUNTAIN
One gay glint of rose and silver flounces
In a deep green dell,
Where a streamlet bubbles down and bounces
From a Triton’s mossy shell.
One more dance ere sunset on the mountain
Laughing says, “Too late”;
One sweet lute that tinkled with the fountain
Called two hearts to court their fate.
Some small raindrops, just to tease the Triton,
Mischievously fell;
Some one spoke a jest that quenched the light on
Eyes that he had long loved well.
That dark night he cursed the love he brought her,
Though it made his soul;
And she sobbed an echo to the water
Brimming in the fountain bowl.
XXVI
LOVE AND DEATH
Once toward a sunlit garden, laden
With the lime trees’ scented breath,
Came to watch a merry youth and maiden,
Love and Death.
At their bosoms Love threw fragrant posies,
Tossed them laughing low and blithe,
In the background Death amid the roses
Moved his scythe.
Ere the latest rose the path was strewing,
Her sweet maiden soul was fled;
He beside her grave his cheeks bedewing,
Bent his head.
Sobbing Love then thought to give him pleasure,
Bade his curse on Death attend;
But the youth begged Death who held his treasure
Be his friend.
Death as friend might give the old completeness
Time could give to him no more,
Death, not Love alone, the former sweetness
Might restore.
Love then saw the youth was worthier loving,
Dowered with a stronger grace;
And with downcast eyelids shyly moving,
Kissed Death’s face.
XXVII
VIOLETS
Where burning tapers hold
White suppliant hands from arms of gold
Around the Host; there no one sets
Sweet violets.
Fair roses droop and die
In halls of dance and minstrelsy;
But who within those walls has met
The violet?
Where faintly smiles the sun
Through chequered skies on beech groves dun,
There hides in vales sequestered yet
The violet.
Where I shall lie asleep,
Some friend, perhaps, a tear will weep,
And if our love knew no regrets,
Strew violets.
XXVIII
THE GARDENS OF THE SOUL
In a
Stands a stone enclosure tall,
Rich the finder is, and rich the giver
Of the key to pierce that wall.
Once within, you drink the clearest pleasures,
And your sorrow change for ease;
Ancient bards enchant you with their measures,
Sweetly sighs the Highland breeze.
Next amid the orange trees and cedars
Bearded Homer deigns to roam,
Musing tales of marching Argive leaders,
And Ulysses welcomed home.
Here where daffodils their crowns are bending
On a lawn of English green,
Milton gravely sits to tell the ending
Of angelic strifes unseen.
Here the almond bloom for ever blushes,
And Italian fountains rise;
While the wine of dawn their dewdrops flushes,
Dante speaks of Paradise.
But beyond where any poet paces,
Grows a gnarled grey olive grove,
Where the furthest stars have veiled their faces,
Weeping for eternal Love.