| Of that long cloud-bar in the West, Whose nether edge, erelong, you see The silvery chrism in turn anoint, And then the tiniest rosy point Touched doubtfully and timidly Into the dark blue's chilly strip, As some mute, wondering thing below, Awakened by the thrilling glow, Might, looking up, see Dian dip One lucent foot's delaying tip In Latmian fountains long ago.
Here is no startle of dreaming bird That sings in his sleep, or strives to sing;
what silence was before?
Nor noise of any living thing, Here is no sough of branches stirred, Such as one hears by night on shore; Only, now and then, a sigh, With fickle intervals between, Such as Andromeda might have heard, Sometimes far, and sometimes nigh, And fancied the huge sea-beast unseen Turning in sleep; it is the sea That welters and wavers uneasily Round the lonely reefs of Appledore.
AFTER THE BURIAL.
YES, faith is a goodly anchor; When skies are sweet as a psalm, At the bows it lolls so stalwart, In its bluff, broad-shouldered calm. And when over breakers to leeward The tattered surges are hurled, It may keep our head to the tempest, With its grip on the base of the world.
But, after the shipwreck, tell me What help in its iron thews, Still true to the broken hawser, Deep down among sea-weed and ooze?
In the breaking gulfs of sorrow, When the helpless feet stretch out And find in the deeps of darkness No footing so solid as doubt,
Then better one spar of Memory, One broken plank of the Past, That our human heart may cling to, Though hopeless of shore at last!
To the spirit its splendid conjectures, To the flesh its sweet despair, Its tears o'er the thin-worn locket With its anguish of deathless hair!
Immortal? I feel it and know it, Who doubts it of such as she? But that is the pang's very secret, – Immortal away from me.
There's a narrow ridge in the graveyard
Would scarce stay a child in his race, But to me and my thought it is wider Than the star-sown vague of Space.
Your logic, my friend, is perfect, Your moral most drearily true; But, since the earth clashed on her coffin,
I keep hearing that, and not you.
Console if you will, I can bear it; "T is a well-meant alms of breath; But not all the preaching since Adam Has made Death other than Death.
It is pagan; but wait till you feel it, That jar of our earth, that dull shock When the ploughshare of deeper pas-
Tears down to our primitive rock.
Unaltered! Alas for the sameness That makes the change but more! "Tis a dead man I see in the mirrors, 'Tis his tread that chills the floor!
To learn such a simple lesson,
Need I go to Paris and Rome, That the many make the household, But only one the home?
'T was just a womanly presence, An influence unexprest,
But a rose she had worn, on my gravesod
Were more than long life with the rest!
"T was a smile, 't was a garment's rustle, "T was nothing that I can phrase, But the whole dumb dwelling grew conscious,
And put on her looks and ways.
Were it mine I would close the shutters, Like lids when the life is fled, And the funeral fire should wind it, This corpse of a home that is dead.
For it died that autumn morning When she, its soul, was borne To lie all dark on the hillside
That looks over woodland and corn.
Thou only aspirest the more, Unregretful the old leaves shedding That ringed thee with music before, And deeper thy roots embedding In the grace and the beauty of yore; Thou sigh'st not, "Alas, I am older, The green of last summer is sear!" But loftier, hopefuller, bolder, Winnest broader horizons each year.
To me 't is not cheer thou art singing: There's a sound of the sea, O mournful tree,
In thy boughs forever clinging, And the far-off roar
Of waves on the shore A shattered vessel flinging.
As thou musest still of the ocean On which thou must float at last, And seem'st to foreknow
And the sailor wrenched from the broken The shipwreck's woe mast,
Do I, in this vague emotion, This sadness that will not pass, Though the air throb with wings, And the field laughs and sings, Do I forebode, alas!
The ship-building longer and wearier, The voyage's struggle and strife, And then the darker and drearier Wreck of a broken life?•
I Go to the ridge in the forest I haunted in days gone by, But thou, O Memory, pourest No magical drop in mine eye, Nor the gleam of the secret restorest That hath faded from earth and sky: A Presence autumnal and sober Invests every rock and tree, And the aureole of October Lights the maples, but darkens me.
Pine in the distance, Patient through sun or rain, Meeting with graceful persistence, With yielding but rooted resistance, The northwind's wrench and strain, No memory of past existence Brings thee pain;
Right for the zenith heading, Friendly with heat or cold,
Thine arms to the influence spreading Of the heavens, just from of old,
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