I wonder if with you, as it is with me, If under your slipping words, that easily flow About you as a garment, easily, Your violent heart beats to and fro!
Ah, stern, cold man, How can you lie so relentless hard While I wash you with weeping water! Do you set your face against the daughter Of life? Can you never discard Your curt pride's ban?...
The trees in trouble because of autumn, And scarlet berries falling from the bush, And all the myriad houseless seeds Loosing hold in the wind's insistent push
It is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to the pane, The thin sycamores in the playground are swinging with flattened leaves; The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow gloom that stains...
Outside the house an ash-tree hung its terrible whips, And at night when the wind arose, the lash of the tree Shrieked and slashed the wind, as a ship's Weird rigging in a storm shrieks hideously. ...
Many years have I still to burn, detained Like a candle flame on this body; but I enshrine A darkness within me, a presence which sleeps contained In my flame of living, her soul enfolded in mine. ...
The acrid scents of autumn, Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn And the snore of the night in my ear.
My world is a painted fresco, where coloured shapes Of old, ineffectual lives linger blurred and warm; An endless tapestry the past has woven drapes The halls of my life, compelling my soul to conform. ...
I have opened the window to warm my hands on the sill Where the sunlight soaks in the stone: the afternoon Is full of dreams, my love, the boys are all still In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone. ...
Along the avenue of cypresses All in their scarlet cloaks, and surplices Of linen go the chanting choristers, The priests in gold and black, the villagers. . . .
When she rises in the morning I linger to watch her; She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window And the sunbeams catch her Glistening white on the shoulders, While down her sides the mellow...
Between the avenues of cypresses, All in their scarlet cloaks, and surplices Of linen, go the chaunting choristers, The priests in gold and black, the villagers.
She bade me follow to her garden, where The mellow sunlight stood as in a cup Between the old grey walls; I did not dare To raise my face, I did not dare look up,...
O Stiffly shapen houses that change not, What conjuror's cloth was thrown across you, and raised To show you thus transfigured, changed, Your stuff all gone, your menace almost rased? ...