Works

Down the stone stairs
Girls with their large eyes wide with tragedy
Lift looks of shocked and momentous emotion up at me.
And I smile.

Ladies
Stepping like birds with their bright and pointed feet...

No, now I wish the sunshine would stop, and the white shining houses, and the gay red flowers on the balconies and the bluish mountains beyond, would be crushed out between two valves of darkness; the darkness falling, the dark...

OH the green glimmer of apples in the orchard,
Lamps in a wash of rain!
Oh the wet walk of my brown hen through the stack-yard,
Oh tears on the window pane!
...

FIRST PART

Upon her plodding palfrey
With a heavy child at her breast
And Joseph holding the bridle
They mount to the last hill-crest.

Dissatisfied and weary...

I

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?...

And because you love me
think you you do not hate me?
Ha, since you love me to ecstasy
it follows you hate me to ecstasy.

Because when you hear me
go down the road outside the house...

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.

For suddenly, flush-fallen,...

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.
...

The red range heaves and compulsory sways, ah see! in the flush of a march
Softly-impulsive advancing as water towards a weir from the arch
Of shadow emerging as blood emerges from inward shades of our night...

The clouds are pushing in grey reluctance slowly northward to you,
While north of them all, at the farthest ends, stands one bright-bosomed, aglance...

This is the last of all, this is the last!
I must hold my hands, and turn my face to the fire,
I must watch my dead days fusing together in dross,
Shape after shape, and scene after scene from my past...

Surely you've trodden straight
To the very door!
Surely you took your fate
Faultlessly. Now it's too late
To say more.

It is evident you were right,
That man has a course to go...

I don't care whether I am beautiful to you
You other women.
Nothing of me that you see is my own;
A man balances, bone unto bone
Balances, everything thrown
In the scale, you other women.
...

On that day
I shall put roses on roses, and cover your grave
With multitude of white roses: and since you were brave
One bright red ray.

So people, passing under...

In front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost ribbon of rainbow;
And between us and it, the thunder;
And down below in the green wheat, the labourers
Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat.
...

WE are out on the open road.
Through the low west window a cold light flows
On the floor where never my numb feet trode
Before; onward the strange road goes.

Soon the spaces of the western sky...

Darkness comes out of the earth
And swallows dip into the pallor of the west;
From the hay comes the clamour of children's mirth;
Wanes the old palimpsest.

The night-stock oozes scent,...

The hours have tumbled their leaden, monotonous sands
And piled them up in a dull grey heap in the West.
I carry my patience sullenly through the waste lands;...

I am here myself; as though this heave of effort
At starting other life, fulfilled my own:
Rose-leaves that whirl in colour round a core
Of seed-specks kindled lately and softly blown
...