the dreary,
Discouraging strangenesses
Comes to and masters you,
Takes you, and lovingly
Woos you and soothes you
Back, as you cling to it,
Back to some comforting
Corner of sleep.

So you wake in your bed,
Having lived, having loved:
But the shadows are there,
And the world and its kingdoms
Incredibly faded;
And you grope in the Terror
Above you and under
For the light, for the warmth,

The assurance of life;
But the blasts are ice-born,
And your heart is nigh burst
With the weight of the gloom
And the stress of your strangled
And desperate endeavour:
Sudden a hand—
Mother, O Mother!—
God at His best to you,
Out of the roaring,
Impossible silences,
Falls on and urges you,
Mightily, tenderly,
Forth, as you clutch at it,
Forth to the infinite
Peace of the Grave.

XIX

O Time and Change, they range and range
   From sunshine round to thunder!—
They glance and go as the great winds blow,
   And the best of our dreams drive under:
For Time and Change estrange, estrange—
   And, now they have looked and seen us,
O we that were dear we are all-too near
   With the thick of the world between us.

O Death and Time, they chime and chime
   Like bells at sunset falling!—
They end the song, they right the wrong,
   They set the old echoes calling:

For Death and Time bring on the prime
   Of God’s own chosen weather,
And we lie in the peace of the Great Release
   As once in the grass together.

XX

The shadow of Dawn;
Stillness and stars and over-mastering dreams
Of Life and Death and Sleep;
Heard over gleaming flats the old unchanging sound
Of the old unchanging Sea.

My soul and yours—
O hand in hand let us fare forth, two ghosts,
Into the ghostliness,
The infinite and abounding solitudes,
Beyond—O beyond!—beyond . . .

Here in the porch
Upon the multitudinous silences
Of the kingdoms of the grave,
We twain are you and I—two ghosts Omnipotence
Can touch no more—no more!

XXI

When the wind storms by with a shout, and the stern sea-caves
Exult in the tramp and the roar of onsetting waves,
Then, then, it comes home to the heart that the top of life
Is the passion that burns the blood in the act of strife—
Till you pity the dead down there in their quiet graves.

But to drowse with the fen behind and the fog before,
When the rain-rot spreads and a tame sea mumbles the shore,

Not to adventure, none to fight, no right and no wrong,
Sons of the Sword heart-sick for a stave of your sire’s old song—
O you envy the blessèd dead that can live no more!

XXII

Trees and the menace of night;
Then a long, lonely, leaden mere
Backed by a desolate fell
As by a spectral battlement; and then,
Low-brooding, interpenetrating all,
A vast, grey, listless, inexpressive sky,
So beggared, so incredibly bereft
Of starlight and the song of racing worlds
It might have bellied down upon the Void
Where as in terror Light was beginning to be.

Hist!  In the trees fulfilled of night
(Night and the wretchedness of the sky)

Is it the hurry of the rain?
Or the noise of a drive of the Dead
Streaming before the irresistible Will
Through the strange dusk of this, the Debateable Land
Between their place and ours?

Like the forgetfulness
Of the work-a-day world made visible,
A mist falls from the melancholy sky:
A messenger from some lost and loving soul,
Hopeless, far wandered, dazed
Here in the provinces of life,
A great white moth fades miserably past.

Thro’ the trees in the strange dead night,
Under the vast dead sky,

Forgetting and forgot, a drift of Dead
Sets to the mystic mere, the phantom fell,
And the unimagined vastitudes beyond.

XXIII
(To P. A. G.)

Here they trysted, here they strayed,
   In the leafage dewy and boon,
Many a man and many a maid,
   And the morn was merry June:
‘Death is fleet, Life is sweet,’
   Sang the blackbird in the may;
And the hour with flying feet
   While they dreamed was yesterday.

Many a maid and many a man
   Found the leafage close and boon;
Many a destiny began—
   O the morn was merry June.

Dead and gone, dead and gone,
   (Hark the blackbird in the may!),
Life and Death went hurrying on,
   Cheek on cheek—and where were they?

Dust in dust engendering dust
   In the leafage fresh and boon,
Man and maid fulfil their trust—
   Still the morn turns merry June.
Mother Life, Father Death
   (O the blackbird in the may!),
Each the other’s breath for breath,
   Fleet the times of the world away.

XXIV
(To A. C.)

What should the Trees,
Midsummer-manifold, each one,
Voluminous, a labyrinth of life—
What should such things of bulk and multitude
Yield of their huge, unutterable selves,
To the random importunity of Day,
The blabbing journalist?
Alert to snatch and publish hour by hour
Their greenest hints, their leafiest privacies,
How can he other than endure
The ruminant irony that foists him off

With broad-blown falsehoods, or the obviousness
Of laughter flickering back from shine to shade,
And disappearances of homing birds,
And frolicsome freaks
Of little boughs that frisk with little boughs?

Now, at the word
Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night,
Night of the many secrets, whose effect—
Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread—
Themselves alone may fully apprehend,
They tremble and are changed:
In each, the uncouth individual soul
Looms forth and glooms
Essential, and, their bodily presences
Touched with inordinate significance,
Wearing the darkness like the livery

Of some mysterious and tremendous guild,
They brood—they menace—they appal:
Or the anguish of prophecy tears them, and they wring
Wild hands of warning in the face
Of some inevitable advance of doom:
Or, each to the other bending, beckoning, signing,
As in some monstrous market-place,
They pass the news, these Gossips