title="p. 50" id="pgepubid00089"/>And that hot-eyed, close-throated, blind regret
Of woman and man baulked and debarred the blue!—
No kiss—no kiss that day?
Nay, rather, though we seemed to wear the rue,
Sweet friend, how many, and how goodly—say!

XXXV

Sing to me, sing, and sing again,
   My glad, great-throated nightingale:
Sing, as the good sun through the rain—
   Sing, as the home-wind in the sail!

Sing to me life, and toil, and time,
   O bugle of dawn, O flute of rest!
Sing, and once more, as in the prime,
   There shall be naught but seems the best.

And sing me at the last of love:
   Sing that old magic of the May,
That makes the great world laugh and move
   As lightly as our dream to-day!

XXXVI

We sat late, late—talking of many things.
He told me of his grief, and, in the telling,
The gist of his tale showed to me, rhymed, like this.

It came, the news, like a fire in the night,
   That life and its best were done;
And there was never so dazed a wretch
   In the beat of the living sun.

I read the news, and the terms of the news
   Reeled random round my brain
Like the senseless, tedious buzzle and boom
   Of a bluefly in the pane.

So I went for the news to the house of the news,
   But the words were left unsaid,
For the face of the house was blank with blinds,
   And I knew that she was dead.

XXXVII

’Twas in a world of living leaves
That we two reaped and bound our sheaves:
They were of white roses and red,
And in the scything they were dead.

Now the high Autumn flames afield,
And what is all his golden yield
To that we took, and sheaved, and bound
In the green dusk that gladdened round?

Yet must the memory grieve and ache
Of that we did for dear love’s sake,
But may no more under the sun,
Being, like our summer, spent and done.

XXXVIII

Since those we love and those we hate,
With all things mean and all things great,
Pass in a desperate disarray
Over the hills and far away:

It must be, Dear, that, late or soon,
Out of the ken of the watching moon,
We shall abscond with Yesterday
Over the hills and far away.

What does it matter?  As I deem,
We shall but follow as brave a dream
As ever smiled a wanton May
Over the hills and far away.

We shall remember, and, in pride,
Fare forth, fulfilled and satisfied,
Into the land of Ever-and-Aye,
Over the hills and far away.

XXXIX

These were the woods of wonder
   We found so close and boon,
When the bride-month in her beauty
   Lay mouth to mouth with June.

November, the old, lean widow,
   Sniffs, and snivels, and shrills,
And the bowers are all dismantled,
   And the long grass wets and chills;

And I hate these dismal dawnings,
   These miserable even-ends,
These orts, and rags, and heeltaps—
   This dream of being merely friends.

XL

‘Dearest, when I am dead,
   Make one last song for me:
Sing what I would have said—
   Righting life’s wrong for me.

‘Tell them how, early and late,
   Glad ran the days with me,
Seeing how goodly and great,
   Love, were your ways with me.’

XLI

Dear hands, so many times so much
   When the spent year was green and prime,
Come, take your fill, and touch
   This one poor time.

Dear lips, that could not leave unsaid
   One sweet-souled syllable of delight,
Once more—and be as dead
   In the dead night.

Dear eyes, so fond to read in mine
   The message of our counted years,
Look your proud last, nor shine
   Through tears—through tears.

XLII

When, in what other life,
Where in what old, spent star,
Systems ago, dead vastitudes afar,
Were we two bird and bough, or man and wife?
Or wave and spar?
Or I the beating sea, and you the bar
On which it breaks?  I know not, I!
But this, O this, my Very Dear, I know:
Your voice awakes old echoes in my heart;
And things I say to you now are said once more;
And, Sweet, when we two part,
I feel I have seen you falter and linger so,
So hesitate, and turn, and cling—yet go,
As once in some immemorable Before,
Once on some fortunate yet thrice-blasted shore.
Was it for good?
O, these poor eyes are wet;
And yet, O, yet,
Now that we know, I would not, if I could,
Forget.

XLIII

The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain—
   They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart, they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
   And savage the helpless trees.

What does it profit a man to know
   These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
   And the rush of the wild sunrise?

Ever the rain—the rain and the wind!
   Come, hunch with me over the fire,
Dream of the dreams that leered and grinned,
Ere the blood of the Year got chilled and thinned,
   And the death came on desire!

XLIV

He made this gracious Earth a hell
With Love and Drink.  I cannot tell
Of which he died.  But Death was well.

Will I die of drink?
   Why not?
Won’t I pause and think?
   —What?
Why in seeming wise
   Waste your breath?
Everybody dies—
   And of death!

Youth—if you find it’s youth
   Too late?
Truth—and the back of truth?
   Straight,
Be it love or liquor,
   What’s the odds,
So it slide you quicker
   To the gods?

XLV

O, these long nights of days!
All the year’s baseness in the ways,
All the year’s wretchedness in the skies;
While on the blind, disheartened sea
A tramp-wind plies
Cringingly and dejectedly!
And rain and darkness, mist and mud,
They cling, they close, they sneak into the blood,
They crawl and crowd upon the brain:
Till in a dull, dense monotone of pain
The past is found a kind of maze,
At whose every coign and crook,
Broad angle and privy nook,
There waits a hooded Memory,
Sad, yet with strange, bright, unreproaching eyes.