class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="p. 62" id="pgepubid00113"/>XLVI

In Shoreham River, hurrying down
To the live sea,
By working, marrying, breeding Shoreham Town,
Breaking the sunset’s wistful and solemn dream,
An old, black rotter of a boat
Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote,
Lay stranded in mid-stream:
With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line,
That made me think of legs and a broken spine:
Soon, all-too soon,
Ungainly and forlorn to lie
Full in the eye
Of the cynical, discomfortable moon
That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky,
A clown’s face flour’d for work.  And by and by
The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned;
The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing;
The poor old hulk remained,

Stuck helpless in mid-ebb.  And I knew why—
Why, as I looked, my heart felt crying. [63]
For, as I looked, the good green earth seemed dying—
Dying or dead;
And, as I looked on the old boat, I said:—
‘Dear God, it’s I!’

XLVII

Come by my bed,
What time the gray ghost shrieks and flies;
Take in your hands my head,
And look, O look, into my failing eyes;
And, by God’s grace,
Even as He sunders body and breath,
The shadow of your face
Shall pass with me into the run
Of the Beyond, and I shall keep and save
Your beauty, as it used to be,
An absolute part of me,
Lying there, dead and done,
Far from the sovran bounty of the sun,
Down in the grisly colonies of the Grave.

XLVIII

Gray hills, gray skies, gray lights,
And still, gray sea—
O fond, O fair,
The Mays that were,
When the wild days and wilder nights
Made it like heaven to be!

Gray head, gray heart, gray dreams—
O, breath by breath,
Night-tide and day
Lapse gentle and gray,
As to a murmur of tired streams,
Into the haze of death.

XLIX

Silence, loneliness, darkness—
   These, and of these my fill,
While God in the rush of the Maytide
   Without is working His will.

Without are the wind and the wall-flowers,
   The leaves and the nests and the rain,
And in all of them God is making
   His beautiful purpose plain.

But I wait in a horror of strangeness—
   A tool on His workshop floor,
Worn to the butt, and banished
   His hand for evermore.

L

So let me hence as one
Whose part in the world has been dreamed out and done:
One that hath fairly earned and spent
In pride of heart and jubilance of blood
Such wages, be they counted bad or good,
As Time, the old taskmaster, was moved to pay;
And, having warred and suffered, and passed on
Those gifts the Arbiters preferred and gave,
Fare, grateful and content,
Down the dim way
Whereby races innumerable have gone,
Into the silent universe of the grave.

Grateful for what hath been—
For what my hand hath done, mine eyes have seen,
My heart been privileged to know;

With all my lips in love have brought
To lips that yearned in love to them, and wrought
In the way of wrath, and pity, and sport, and song:
Content, this miracle of being alive
Dwindling, that I, thrice weary of worst and best,
May shed my duds, and go
From right and wrong,
And, ceasing to regret, and long, and strive,
Accept the past, and be for ever at rest.

FINALE

Schizzando ma con sentimento

A sigh sent wrong,
A kiss that goes astray,
A sorrow the years endlong—
So they say.

So let it be—
Come the sorrow, the kiss, the sigh!
They are life, dear life, all three,
And we die.

Worthing, 1899-1901.

LONDON TYPES

(To S. S. P.)

I.  BUS-DRIVER

He’s called The General from the brazen craft
And dash with which he sneaks a bit of road
And all its fares; challenged, or chafed, or chaffed,
Back-answers of the newest he’ll explode;
He reins his horses with an air; he treats
With scoffing calm whatever powers there be;
He gets it straight, puts a bit on, and meets
His losses with both lip and £ s. d.;
He arrogates a special taste in short;
Is loftily grateful for a flagrant smoke;
At all the smarter housemaids winks his court,
And taps them for half-crowns; being stoney-broke,
   Lives lustily; is ever on the make;
   And hath, I fear, none other gods but Fake.

II.  LIFE-GUARDSMAN

Joy of the Milliner, Envy of the Line,
Star of the Parks, jack-booted, sworded, helmed,
He sits between his holsters, solid of spine;
Nor, as it seems, though Westminster were whelmed,
With the great globe, in earthquake and eclipse,
Would he and his charger cease from mounting guard,
This Private in the Blues, nor would his lips
Move, though his gorge with throttled oaths were charred!
He wears his inches weightily, as he wears
His old-world armours; and with his port and pride,
His sturdy graces and enormous airs,
He towers, in speech his Colonel countrified,
   A triumph, waxing statelier year by year,
   Of British blood, and bone, and beef, and beer.

III.  HAWKER

Far out of bounds he’s figured—in a race
Of West-End traffic pitching to his loss.
But if you’d see him in his proper place,
Making the browns for bub and grub and doss,
Go East among the merchants and their men,
And where the press is noisiest, and the tides
Of trade run highest and widest, there and then
You shall behold him, edging with equal strides
Along the kerb; hawking in either hand
Some artful nothing made of twine and tin,
Cardboard and foil and bits of rubber band:
Some penn’orth of wit-in-fact that, with a grin,
   The careful City marvels at, and buys
   For nurselings in the Suburbs to despise!

IV.  BEEF-EATER

His beat lies knee-high through a dust of story—
A dust of terror and torture, grief and crime;
Ghosts that are England’s wonder, and shame, and glory
Throng where he walks, an antic of old time;
A sense of long immedicable tears
Were ever with him, could his ears but heed;