|
IN a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, | |
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee, | |
Walled round with rocks as an inland island, | |
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. | |
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses | 5 |
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed | |
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses | |
Now lie dead. | |
|
The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken, | |
To the low last edge of the long lone land. | 10 |
If a step should sound or a word be spoken, | |
Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand? | |
So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless, | |
Through branches and briars if a man make way, | |
He shall find no life but the sea-wind’s, restless | 15 |
Night and day. | |
|
The dense hard passage is blind and stifled | |
That crawls by a track none turn to climb | |
To the strait waste place that the years have rifled | |
Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time. | 20 |
The thorns he spares when the rose is taken; | |
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain; | |
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken, | |
These remain. | |
|
Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not; | 25 |
As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry; | |
From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not, | |
Could she call, there were never a rose to reply. | |
Over the meadows that blossom and wither, | |
Rings but the note of a sea-bird’s song. | 30 |
Only the sun and the rain come hither | |
All year long. | |
|
The sun burns sear, and the rain dishevels | |
One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath. | |
Only the wind here hovers and revels | 35 |
In a round where life seems barren as death. | |
Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, | |
Haply, of lovers none ever will know, | |
Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping | |
Years ago. | 40 |
|
Heart handfast in heart as they stood, “Look thither,” | |
Did he whisper? “Look forth from the flowers to the sea; | |
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither, | |
And men that love lightly may die—But we?” | |
And the same wind sang, and the same waves whitened, | 45 |
And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed, | |
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened, | |
Love was dead. | |
|
Or they loved their life through, and then went whither? | |
And were one to the end—but what end who knows? | 50 |
Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, | |
As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. | |
Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? | |
What love was ever as deep as a grave? | |
They are loveless now as the grass above them | 55 |
Or the wave. | |
|
All are at one now, roses and lovers, | |
Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea. | |
Not a breath of the time that has been hovers | |
In the air now soft with a summer to be. | 60 |
Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter | |
Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep, | |
When, as they that are free now of weeping and laughter, | |
We shall sleep. | |
|
Here death may deal not again forever; | 65 |
Here change may come not till all change end. | |
From the graves they have made they shall rise up never; | |
Who have left naught living to ravage and rend. | |
Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing, | |
When the sun and the rain live, these shall be; | 70 |
Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing | |
Roll the sea. | |
|
Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, | |
Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink | |
Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble | 75 |
The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, | |
Here now in his triumph where all things falter, | |
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, | |
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, | |
Death lies dead. | 80 |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment