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.

A CHANT

Gently the petals fall as the tree gently sways
    That has known many springs and many petals fall
Year after year to strew the green deserted ways
    And the statue and the pond and the low, broken wall.

Faded is the memory of old things done,
    Peace floats on the ruins of ancient festival;
They lie and forget in the warmth of the sun,
    And a sky silver-blue arches over all.

O softly, O tenderly, the heart now stirs
    With desires faint and formless; and, seeking not, I find
Quiet thoughts that flash like azure kingfishers
    Across the luminous, tranquil mirror of the mind.

THE THREE HILLS

There were three hills that stood alone
    With woods about their feet.
They dreamed quiet when the sun shone
    And whispered when the rain beat.

They wore all three their coronals
    Till men with houses came
And scored their heads with pits and walls
    And thought the hills were tame.

Red and white when day shines bright
    They hide the green for miles,
Where are the old hills gone? At night
    The moon looks down and smiles.

She sees the captors small and weak,
    She knows the prisoners strong,
She hears the patient hills that speak:
    "Brothers, it is not long;

"Brothers, we stood when they were not
    Ten thousand summers past.
Brothers, when they are clean forgot
    We shall outlive the last;

"One shall die and one shall flee
    With terror in his train,
And earth shall eat the stones, and we
    Shall be alone again."

AT NIGHT

Dark fir-tops foot the moony sky,
    Blue moonlight bars the drive;
Here at the open window I
    Sit smoking and alive.

Wind in the branches swells and breaks
    Like ocean on a beach;
Deep in the sky and my heart there wakes
    A thought I cannot reach.

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, and there behold
A city veiled in rainbow haze
    And spangled all with gold.

The breezes waft abroad 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.

FLORIAN'S SONG

My soul, it shall not take us,
    O we will escape
This world that strives to break us
    And cast us to its shape;
Its chisel shall not enter,
    Its fire shall not touch,
Hard from rim to centre,
    We will not crack or smutch.

'Gainst words sweet and flowered
    We have an amulet,
We will not play the coward
    For any black threat;
If we but give endurance
    To what is now within—
The single assurance
    That it is good to win.

Slaves think it better
    To be weak than strong,
Whose hate