nature he inherited,
Neither sin's garrison to kill,
Yet at the last with constancy so great
As the world's vanities to abnegate,
Sternly to will the sacrifice of will
Upon the altars of the Uncreate,
So that he lived before he died
As one who hourly to himself denied
All joys save those that cannot pall,
Who having nothing yet had all.




FRIENDSHIP'S GARLAND


I

When I was a boy there was a friend of mine,
We thought ourselves warriors and grown folk swine,
Stupid old animals who never understood
And never had an impulse and said "you must be good."

We slank like stoats and fled like foxes,
We put cigarettes in the pillar-boxes,
Lighted cigarettes and letters all aflame—
O the surprise when the postman came!

We stole eggs and apples and made fine hay
In people's houses when people were away,
We broke street lamps and away we ran,
Then I was a boy but now I am a man.

Now I am a man and don't have any fun,
I hardly ever shout and I never never run,
And I don't care if he's dead that friend of mine,
For then I was a boy and now I am a swine.


II

We met again the other night
With people; you were quite polite,
Shook my hand and spoke awhile
Of common things with cautious smile;
Paid the usual debt men owe
To fellows whom they used to know.
But, when our eyes met full, yours dropped,
And sudden, resolute, you stopped,
Moving with hurried syllables
To make remarks to some one else.
I caught them not, to me they said:
"Let the dead past bury its dead,
Things were very different then,
Boys are fools and men are men."
Several times the other night
You did your best to be polite;
When in the conversation's round
You heard my tongue's familiar sound
You bent in eager pose my way
To hear what I had got to say;
Trying, you thought with some success,
To hide the chasm's nakedness.
But on your eyes hard films there lay;
No mock-interest, no pretence
Could veil your blank indifference;
And if thoughts came recalling things
Far-off, far-off, from those old springs
When underneath the moon and sun
Our separate pulses beat as one,
Vagrant tender thoughts that asked
Admittance found the portal masked;
You spurned them; when I'd said my say,
With laugh and nod you turned away
To toss your friends some easy jest
That smote my brow and stabbed my breast.
Foolish though it be and vain
I am not master of my pain,
And when I said good-night to you
I hoped we should not meet again,
And wondered how the soul I knew
Could change so much; have I changed too?


III

There was a man whom I knew well
Whose choice it was to live in hell;
Reason there was why that was so
But what it was I do not know.

He had a room high in a tower,
And sat there drinking hour by hour,
Drinking, drinking all alone
With candles and a wall of stone.

Now and then he sobered down,
And stayed a night with me in town.
If he found me with a crowd,
He shrank and did not speak aloud.

He sat in a corner silently,
And others of the company
Would note his curious face and eye,
His twitching face and timid eye.

When they saw the eye he had
They thought perhaps that he was mad.
I knew he was clear and sane
But had a horror in his brain.

He had much money and one friend
And drank quite grimly to the end.
Why he chose to die in hell
I did not ask, he did not tell.




LINES


When London was a little town
Lean by the river's marge,
The poet paced it with a frown,
He thought it very large.

He loved bright ship and pointing steeple
And bridge with houses loaded
And priests and many-coloured people ...
But ah, they were not woaded!

Not all the walls could shed the spell
Of meres and marshes green,
Nor any chaffering merchant tell
The beauty that had been:

The crying birds at fall of night,
The fisher in his coracle,
And grim on Ludgate's windy height,
An oak-tree and an oracle.

Sick for the past his hair he rent
And dropt a tear in season;
If he had cause for his lament
We have much better reason.

For now the fields and paths he knew
Are coffined all with bricks,
The lucid silver stream he knew
Runs slimy as the Styx;

North and south and east and west,
Far as the eye can travel,
Earth with a sombre web is drest
That nothing can unravel.

And we must wear as black a frown,
Wail with as keen a woe
That London was a little town
Five hundred years ago.

Yet even this place of steamy stir,
This pit of belch and swallow,
With chrism of gold and gossamer
The elements can hallow.

I have a room in Chancery Lane,
High in a world of wires,
Whence fall the roofs a ragged plain
Wooded with many spires.

There in the dawns of summer days
I stand in adoration,
While London's robed in rainbow haze
And gold illumination.

The wizard breezes waft the rays
Shot by the waking sun,
A myriad chimneys softly blaze,
A myriad shadows run.

Round the wide rim in radiant mist
The gentle suburbs quiver,
And nearer lies the shining twist
Of Thames, a holy river

Left and right my vision drifts,
By yonder towers I linger,
Where Westminster's cathedral lifts
Its belled Byzantine finger,

And here against my perchèd home
Where hold wise converse daily
The loftier and the lesser dome,
St. Paul's and the Old Bailey.




ECHOES


There is a far unfading city
Where bright immortal people are;
Remote from hollow shame and pity,
Their portals frame no guiding star
But blightless pleasure's moteless rays
That follow their footsteps as they dance
Long lutanied measures through a maze
Of flower-like song and dalliance.

There always glows the vernal sun,
There happy birds for ever sing,
There faint perfumèd breezes run
Through branches of eternal spring;
There faces browned and fruit and milk
And blue-winged words and rose-bloomed kisses
In galleys gowned with gold and silk
Shake on a lake of dainty blisses.

Coyness is not, nor bear they thought
Save of a shining gracious flow,
All natural joys are temperate sought,
For calm desire there they know,
A fire promiscuous, languorous, kind;
They scorn all fiercer lusts and quarrels,
Nor blow about on anger's wind,
Nor burn with love, nor rust with morals.

Folk in the far unfading city,
Burning with lusts my senses are,
I am torn with love and shame and pity,
Be to my heart a guiding star
Wise youths and maidens in the sun,
With eyes that charm and lips that sing,
And gentle arms that rippling run,
Shed on my heart your endless spring!




THE FUGITIVE


Flying his hair and his eyes averse,
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
How could we clear his charms rehearse?
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.

High on a down we found him last,
Shy as a hare, he fled as fast;
How could we clasp him or ever he passed?
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.

How could we cling to his limbs that shone,
Ravish his cheeks' red gonfalon,
Or the wild-skin cloak that he had on?
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.

For the wind of his feet still straightly shaping,
He loosed at our breasts from his eyes escaping
One crooked swift glance like a javelin leaping.
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.

And his feet passed over the sunset land
From the place forlorn where a forlorn band
Watching him flying we still did stand.
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.

Vanishing now who would not stay
To the blue hills on the verge of day.
O soft! soft! Music play,
Fading away,
(Fleet are his feet
And his heart apart)
Fading away.




IN AN ORCHARD


Airy and quick and wise
In the shed light of the sun,
You clasp with friendly eyes
The thoughts from mine that run.

But something breaks the link;
I solitary stand
By a giant gully's brink
In some vast gloomy land.

Sole central watcher, I
With steadfast sadness now
In that waste place descry
'Neath the awful heavens how

Your life doth dizzy drop
A little foam of flame
From a peak without a top
To a pit without a name.




IN A CHAIR


He room is full of the peace of night,
The small flames murmur and flicker and sway,
Within me is neither shadow, nor light,
Nor night, nor twilight, nor dawn, nor day.

For the brain strives not to the goal of thought,
And the limbs lie wearied, and all desire
Sleeps for a while, and I am naught
But a pair of eyes that gaze at a fire.




A DAY


I. MORNING

The village fades away
Where I last night came
Where they housed me and fed me
And never asked my name.

The sun shines bright, my step is light,
I, who have no abode,
Jeer at the stuck, monotonous
Black posts along the road.


II. MIDDAY

The wood is still,
As here I sit
My heart drinks in
The peace of it.

A something stirs
I know not where
Some quiet spirit
In the air.

O tall straight stems!
O cool deep green!
O hand unfelt!
O face unseen!


III. EVENING

The evening closes in,
As down this last long lane
I plod; there patter round
First heavy drops of rain.

Feet ache, legs ache, but now
Step quickens as I think
Of mounds of bread and cheese
And something hot to drink.


IV. NIGHT

Ah! sleep is sweet, but yet
I will not sleep awhile
Nor for a space forget
The toil of that last mile;

But lie awake and feel
The cool sheets' tremulous kisses
O'er all my body steal ...
Is sleep as sweet as this is?




THE MIND OF MAN


I

Beneath my skull-bone and my hair,
Covered like a poisonous well,
There is a land: if you looked there
What you saw you'd quail to tell.
You that sit there smiling, you
Know that what I say is true.

My head is very small to touch,
I feel it all from front to back,
An eared round that weighs not much,
Eyes, nose-holes, and a pulpy crack:
Oh, how small, how small it is!
How could countries be in this?

Yet, when I watch with eyelids shut,
It glimmers forth, now dark, now clear,
The city of Cis-Occiput,
The marshes and the writhing mere,
The land that every man I see
Knows in himself but not in me.


II

Upon the borders of the weald
(I walk there first when I step in)
Set in green wood and smiling field,
The city stands, unstained of sin;
White thoughts and wishes pure
Walk the streets with steps demure.

In its clean groves and spacious halls
The quiet-eyed inhabitants
Hold innocent sunny festivals
And mingle in decorous dance;
Things that destroy, distort, deface,
Come never to that lovely place.

Never could evil enter thither,
It could not live in that sweet air,
The shadow of an ill deed must wither
And fall away to nothing there.
You would say as there you stand
That all was beauty in the land.

But go you out beyond the gateway,
Cleave you the woods and pass the plain,
Cross you the frontier down, and straightway
The trees will end, the grass will wane,
And you will come to a wilderness
Of sticks and parchèd barrenness.

The middle of the land is this,
A tawny desert midmost set,
Barren of living things it is,
Saving at night some vampires flit
That nest them in the farther marish
Where all save vilest things must perish.

Here in this reedy marsh of green
And oily pools, swarm insects fat
And birds of prey and beasts obscene,
Things that the traveller shudders at,
All cunning things that creep and fly
To suck men's blood until they die.

Rarely from hence does aught escape
Into the