class="line">That, if I listen very quietly,

III.

Your eyes rejoiced in colour's ecstasy

Fulfilling even their uttermost desire,

When, over a great sunlit field afire

With windy poppies, streaming like a sea

Of scarlet flame that flaunted riotously

Among green orchards of that western shire,

You gazed as though your heart could never tire

Of life's red flood in summer revelry.

 

And as I watched you little thought had I

How soon beneath the dim low-drifting sky

Your soul should wander down the darkling way,

With eyes that peer a little wistfully,

Half-glad, half-sad, remembering, as they see

Lethean poppies, shrivelling ashen grey.

IV.

October chestnuts showered their perishing gold

Over us as beside the stream we lay

In the Old Vicarage garden that blue day,

Talking of verse and all the manifold

Delights a little net of words may hold,

While in the sunlight water-voles at play

Dived under a trailing crimson bramble-spray,

And walnuts thudded ripe on soft black mould.

 

Your soul goes down unto a darker stream

Alone, O friend, yet even in death's deep night

Your eyes may grow accustomed to the dark,

And Styx for you may have the ripple and gleam

Of your familiar river, and Charon's bark

Tarry by that old garden of your delight.

WILLIAM DENIS BROWNE

(GALLIPOLI, 1915)

Night after night we two together heard

The music of the Ring,

The inmost silence of our being stirred

By voice and string.

 

Though I to-night in silence sit, and you

In stranger silence sleep,

Eternal music stirs and thrills anew

The severing deep.

TENANTS

Suddenly, out of dark and leafy ways,

We came upon the little house asleep

In cold blind stillness, shadowless and deep,

In the white magic of the full moon-blaze.

Strangers without the gate, we stood agaze,

Fearful to break that quiet, and to creep

Into the home that had been ours to keep

Through a long year of happy nights and days

 

So unfamiliar in the white moon-gleam,

So old and ghostly like a house of dream

It seemed, that over us there stole the dread

That even as we watched it, side by side,

The ghosts of lovers, who had lived and died

Within its walls, were sleeping in our bed.

SEA-CHANGE

Wind-flicked and ruddy her young body glowed

In sunny shallows, splashing them to spray;

But when on rippled, silver sand she lay,

And over her the little green waves flowed,

Coldly translucent and moon-coloured showed

Her frail young beauty, as if rapt away

From all the light and laughter of the day

To some twilit, forlorn sea-god's abode.

 

Again into the sun with happy cry

She leapt alive and sparkling from the sea,

Sprinkling white spray against the hot blue sky,

A laughing girl ... and yet, I see her lie

Under a deeper tide eternally

In cold moon-coloured immortality.

GOLD

All day the mallet thudded, far below

My garret, in an old ramshackle shed

Where ceaselessly, with stiffly nodding head

And rigid motions ever to and fro

A figure like a puppet in a show

Before the window moved till day was dead,

Beating out gold to earn his daily bread,

Beating out thin fine gold-leaf blow on blow.

 

And I within my garret all day long

Unto that ceaseless thudding tuned my song,

Beating out golden words in tune and time

To that dull thudding, rhyme on golden rhyme.

But in my dreams all night in that dark shed

With aching arms I beat fine gold for bread.