hewing, digging tunnels, roads;
Building ships, temples, multiform abodes.
How, for his body's appetites, his toils
Have conquered all earth's products, all her soils;
And in what thousand thousand shapes of art
He has tried to find a language for his heart!

Never at rest, never content or tired:
Insatiate wanderer, marvellously fired,
Most grandly piling and piling into the air
Stones that will topple or arch he knows not where.
And yet did I, this spring, think it more strange,
More grand, more full of awe, than all that change,
And lovely and sweet and touching unto tears,
That through man's chronicled and unchronicled years,
And even into that unguessable beyond
The water-hen has nested by a pond,
Weaving dry flags into a beaten floor,
The one sure product of her only lore.
Low on a ledge above the shadowed water
Then, when she heard no men, as nature taught her,
Flashing around with busy scarlet bill
She built that nest, her nest, and builds it still.

O let your strong imagination turn
The great wheel backward, until Troy unburn,
And then unbuild, and seven Troys below
Rise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow,
Till all have passed, and none has yet been there:
Back, ever back. Our birds still crossed the air;
Beyond our myriad changing generations
Still built, unchanged, their known inhabitations.
A million years before Atlantis was
Our lark sprang from some hollow in the grass,
Some old soft hoof-print in a tussock's shade;
And the wood-pigeon's smooth snow-white eggs were laid,
High amid green pines' sunset-coloured shafts,
And rooks their villages of twiggy rafts
Set on the tops of elms, where elms grew then,
And still the thumbling tit and perky wren
Popped through the tiny doors of cosy balls
And the blackbird lined with moss his high-built walls;
A round mud cottage held the thrush's young,
And straws from the untidy sparrow's hung.
And, skimming forktailed in the evening air,
When man first was were not the martins there?
Did not those birds some human shelter crave,
And stow beneath the cornice of his cave
Their dry tight cups of clay? And from each door
Peeped on a morning wiseheads three or four.

Yes, daw and owl, curlew and crested hern,
Kingfisher, mallard, water-rail and tern,
Chaffinch and greenfinch, wagtail, stonechat, ruff,
Whitethroat and robin, fly-catcher and chough,
Missel-thrush, magpie, sparrow-hawk and jay,
Built, those far ages gone, in this year's way.
And the first man who walked the cliffs of Rame,
As I this year, looked down and saw the same
Blotches of rusty red on ledge and cleft
With grey-green spots on them, while right and left
A dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying,
Wheeling and crossing and darting, crying and crying,
Circling and crying, over and over and over,
Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover.
And below on a rock against the grey sea fretted,
Pipe-necked and stationary and silhouetted,
Cormorants stood in a wise, black, equal row
Above the nests and long blue eggs we know.

O delicate chain over all the ages stretched,
O dumb tradition from what far darkness fetched:
Each little architect with its one design
Perpetual, fixed and right in stuff and line,
Each little ministrant who knows one thing,
One learnèd rite to celebrate the spring.
Whatever alters else on sea or shore,
These are unchanging: man must still explore.

A DOG'S DEATH

The loose earth falls in the grave like a peaceful regular breathing;
Too like, for I was deceived a moment by the sound:
It has covered the heap of bracken that the gardener laid above him;
Quiet the spade swings: there we have now his mound.

A patch of fresh earth on the floor of the wood's renewing chamber:
All around is grass and moss and the hyacinth's dark green sprouts:
And oaks are above that were old when his fiftieth sire was a puppy:
And far away in the garden I hear the children's shouts.

Their joy is remote as a dream. It is strange how we buy our sorrow
For the touch of perishing things, idly, with open eyes;
How we give our hearts to brutes that will die in a few seasons,
Nor trouble what we do when we do it; nor would have it otherwise.

A POET TO HIS MUSE

Muse, you have opened like a flower.

*****

Long ago I knew that brown integument,
Like a dead husk, had dormant life within it,
And waited till a first white point appeared
Which shot into a naked stiff pale spike
That grew.
I knew this was not all;
Nothing I said as greener you grew and taller,
But dreamed alone of the day when your bud would unsheathe,
And silently swell, and at last your crown would break
Filling the air with clouds of colour and fragrance,
Radiant waves, odours of immortality.

*****

In a pot of earth I watered and tended you,
Breaking the clods and soaking the earth with water
That fed your roots and eased your way to the light.
I gave you the sun and the rain
But saved you from scorching and drowning:
You are mine, and only I know you,
And the ways of your growth, and the days.

*****

But you are not from me.
I am but a pen for a hand,
A bed for a river,
A window for light.
And I bow in awe to that Power
That made you a flower.

PROCESSES OF THOUGHT

I

I find my mind as it were a deep water.

Sometimes I play with a thought and hammer and bend it,
Till tired and displeased with that I toss it away,
Or absently let it slip to the yawning water:
And down it sinks, forgotten for many a day.

But a time comes when tide or tempest washes it
High on the beach, and I find that shape of mine,
Or I haul it out from the depths on some casual rope,
Or, passing over that spot in quiet shine,

I see, where my boat's shadow makes deep the water,
A patch of colour, far down, from the bottom apart,
A wavering sign like the gleam from an ancient anchor,
Brown fixing and fleeting flakes; and I feel my heart

Wake to a strange excitement; so that I stop,
Put up my paddles and dredge with a careful net:
And I catch it, and see it stir, and feel its weight,
And pull till it nears and breaks from the water wet.

And my eyes dwell on that old abandoned thing
Recovered by chance. For the shape I had found so dull
Has crusted and changed in secrecy and silence,
And its surface shines like a pearl, most beautiful.

II

In bed I lie, and my thoughts come filing by,
All forms and faces, cheerful, serene and sad:
Some clear, some mistily showing and fragmentary,
Some altered in size or shape since last they were seen.

But O last, you group of merry ones!
Lord knows when I saw you before, but I met you once,
The whole collection of you, impudent-eyed;
And now, rosy and grinning, with linked arms
You go swingingly by, turning