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XII

Some starlit garden grey with dew,
Some chamber flushed with wine and fire,
What matters where, so I and you
   Are worthy our desire?

Behind, a past that scolds and jeers
For ungirt loin and lamp unlit;
In front the unmanageable years,
   The trap upon the pit;

Think on the shame of dreams for deeds,
The scandal of unnatural strife,
The slur upon immortal needs,
   The treason done to life:

Arise! no more a living lie
And with me quicken and control
A memory that shall magnify
   The universal Soul.

XIII
(To James McNeill Whistler)

Under a stagnant sky,
Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,
The River, jaded and forlorn,
Welters and wanders wearily—wretchedly—on;
Yet in and out among the ribs
Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles
Of some dead lake-built city, fall of skulls,
Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories,
Lingers to babble, to a broken tune
(Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!)
So melancholy a soliloquy
It sounds as it might tell
The secret of the unending grief-in-grain,

The terror of Time and Change and Death,
That wastes this floating, transitory world.

What of the incantation
That forced the huddled shapes on yonder short
To take and wear the night
Like a material majesty?
That touched the shafts of wavering fire
About this miserable welter and wash—
(River, O River of Journeys, River of Dreams!—)
Into long, shining signals from the panes
Of an enchanted pleasure-house
Where life and life might live life lost in life
For ever and evermore?

O Death!  O Change!  O Time!
Without you, O the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays!

XIV

Time and the Earth—
The old Father and Mother—
Their teeming accomplished,
Their purpose fulfilled,
Close with a smile
For a moment of kindness
Ere for the winter
They settle to sleep.

Failing yet gracious,
Slow pacing, soon homing,
A patriarch that strolls
Through the tents of his children,
The Sun, as he journeys
His round on the lower

Ascents of the blue,
Washes the roofs
And the hillsides with clarity;
Charms the dark pools
Till they break into pictures;
Scatters magnificent
Alms to the beggar trees;
Touches the mist-folk
That crowd to his escort
Into translucencies
Radiant and ravishing,
As with the visible
Spirit of Summer
Gloriously vaporised,
Visioned in gold.

Love, though the fallen leaf
Mark, and the fleeting light

And the loud, loitering
Footfall of darkness
Sign, to the heart
Of the passage of destiny,
Here is the ghost
Of a summer that lived for us,
Here is a promise
Of summers to be.

XV

You played and sang a snatch of song,
   A song that all-too well we knew;
But whither had flown the ancient wrong;
   And was it really I and you?
O since the end of life’s to live
   And pay in pence the common debt,
What should it cost us to forgive
   Whose daily task is to forget?

You babbled in the well-known voice—
   Not new, not new, the words you said.
You touched me off that famous poise,
   That old effect, of neck and head.

Dear, was it really you and I?
   In truth the riddle’s ill to read,
So many are the deaths we die
   Before we can be dead indeed.

XVI

One with the ruined sunset,
   The strange forsaken sands,
What is it waits and wanders
   And signs with desperate hands?

What is it calls in the twilight—
   Calls as its chance were vain?
The cry of a gull sent seaward
   Or the voice of an ancient pain?

The red ghost of the sunset,
   It walks them as its own,
These dreary and desolate reaches . . .
   But O that it walked alone!

XVII
CARMEN PATIBULARE
(To H. S.)

Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook
   And the rope of the Black Election,
’Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule
   Can never achieve perfection:
And ‘It’s O for the time of the New Sublime
   And the better than human way
When the Wolf (poor beast) shall come to his own
   And the Rat shall have his day!’

For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam
   And the power of provocation,

You have cockered the Brute with your dreadful fruit
   Till your thought is mere stupration:
And ‘It’s how should we rise to be pure and wise,
   And how can we choose but fall,
So long as the Hangman makes us dread
   And the Noose floats free for all?’

So Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Coign
   And the trick there’s no recalling,
They will haggle and hew till they hack you through
   And at last they lay you sprawling:
When ‘Hey! for the hour of the race in flower
   And the long good-bye to sin!’
And ‘Ho! for the fires of Hell gone out
   For the want of keeping in!’

But Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Bough
   And the ghastly Dreams that tend you,
Your growth began with the life of Man
   And only his death can end you:
They may tug in line at your hempen twine,
   They may flourish with axe and saw,
But your taproot drinks of the Sacred Springs
   In the living rock of Law.

And Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Fork,
   When the spent sun reels and blunders
Down a welkin lit with the flare of the Pit
   As it seethes in spate and thunders,
Stern on the glare of the tortured air
   Your lines august shall gloom,
And your master-beam be the last thing whelmed
   In the ruining roar of Doom.

XVIII
(To M. E. H.)

When you wake in your crib,
You, an inch of experience—
Vaulted about
With the wonder of darkness;
Wailing and striving
To reach from your feebleness
Something you feel
Will be good to and cherish you,
Something you know
And can rest upon blindly:
O then a hand
(Your mother’s, your mother’s!)
By the fall of its fingers

All knowledge, all power to you,
Out of