go,
          my head
Is heavy, and my heart beats slowly, laboriously,
     My strength is shed.

THE END

IF I could have put you in my heart,
If but I could have wrapped you in myself,
How glad I should have been!
And now the chart
Of memory unrolls again to me
The course of our journey here, before we had to
    part.

And oh, that you had never, never been
Some of your selves, my love, that some
Of your several faces I had never seen!
And still they come before me, and they go,
And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene.

And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-night,
And have not any longer any hope
To heal the suffering, or make requite
For all your life of asking and despair,
I own that some of me is dead to-night.

THE BRIDE

MY love looks like a girl to-night,
      But she is old.
The plaits that lie along her pillow
      Are not gold,
But threaded with filigree,
      And uncanny cold.

She looks like a young maiden, since her brow
      Is smooth and fair,
Her cheeks are very smooth, her eyes are closed,
      She sleeps a rare
Still winsome sleep, so still, and so composed.

Nay, but she sleeps like a bride, and dreams her
           dreams
      Of perfect things.
She lies at last, the darling, in the shape of her dream,
      And her dead mouth sings
By its shape, like the thrushes in clear evenings.

THE VIRGIN MOTHER

MY little love, my darling,
You were a doorway to me;
You let me out of the confines
Into this strange countrie,
Where people are crowded like thistles,
Yet are shapely and comely to see.

My little love, my dearest
Twice have you issued me,
Once from your womb, sweet mother,
Once from myself, to be
Free of all hearts, my darling,
Of each heart's home-life free.

And so, my love, my mother,
I shall always be true to you;
Twice I am born, my dearest,
To life, and to death, in you;
And this is the life hereafter
Wherein I am true.

I kiss you good-bye, my darling,
Our ways are different now;
You are a seed in the night-time,
I am a man, to plough
The difficult glebe of the future
For God to endow.

I kiss you good-bye, my dearest,
It is finished between us here.
Oh, if I were calm as you are,
Sweet and still on your bier!
God, if I had not to leave you
Alone, my dear!

Let the last word be uttered,
Oh grant the farewell is said!
Spare me the strength to leave you
Now you are dead.
I must go, but my soul lies helpless
Beside your bed.

AT THE WINDOW

THE pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind
    as it mutters
Something which sets the black poplars ashake with
    hysterical laughter;
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern
    shutters.

Further down the valley the clustered tombstones
    recede,
Winding about their dimness the mist's grey
    cerements, after
The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly
    started to bleed.

The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as
    they pass
To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with
    two dark-filled eyes
That watch for ever earnestly from behind the window
    glass.

DRUNK

Too far away, oh love, I know,
To save me from this haunted road,
Whose lofty roses break and blow
On a night-sky bent with a load

Of lights: each solitary rose,
Each arc-lamp golden does expose
Ghost beyond ghost of a blossom, shows
Night blenched with a thousand snows.

Of hawthorn and of lilac trees,
White lilac; shows discoloured night
Dripping with all the golden lees
Laburnum gives back to light

And shows the red of hawthorn set
On high to the purple heaven of night,
Like flags in blenched blood newly wet,
Blood shed in the noiseless fight.

Of life for love and love for life,
Of hunger for a little food,
Of kissing, lost for want of a wife
Long ago, long ago wooed.
   . . . . . .
Too far away you are, my love,
To steady my brain in this phantom show
That passes the nightly road above
And returns again below.

The enormous cliff of horse-chestnut trees
  Has poised on each of its ledges
An erect small girl looking down at me;
White-night-gowned little chits I see,
  And they peep at me over the edges
Of the leaves as though they would leap, should
         I call
  Them down to my arms;
"But, child, you're too small for me, too small
  Your little charms."

White little sheaves of night-gowned maids,
  Some other will thresh you out!
And I see leaning from the shades
A lilac like a lady there, who braids
  Her white mantilla about
Her face, and forward leans to catch the sight
    Of a man's face,
Gracefully sighing through the white
    Flowery mantilla of lace.

And another lilac in purple veiled
  Discreetly, all recklessly calls
In a low, shocking perfume, to know who has hailed
Her forth from the night: my strength has failed
  In her voice, my weak heart falls:
Oh, and see the laburnum shimmering
    Her draperies down,
As if she would slip the gold, and glimmering
    White, stand naked of gown.

. . . . . .

The pageant of flowery trees above
  The street pale-passionate goes,
And back again down the pavement, Love
  In a lesser pageant flows.

Two and two are the folk that walk,
  They pass in a half embrace
Of linkèd bodies, and they talk
  With dark face leaning to face.

Come then, my love, come as you will
  Along this haunted road,
Be whom you will, my darling, I shall
  Keep with you the troth I trowed.

SORROW

WHY does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?

Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,

I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I let them float up the dark chimney.

DOLOR OF AUTUMN

THE acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn
And the snore of the night in my ear.

For suddenly, flush-fallen,
All my life, in a rush
Of shedding away, has left