Works

All the trees and bushes of the garden
Display their bright new green.

But above them all, still bare,
The great old acacia stands,
His solitary bent black branches stark...

Muse, you have opened like a flower.

* * * * *

Long ago I knew that brown integument,
Like a dead husk, had dormant life within it,
And waited till a first white point appeared...

My heart was like a bird and took to flight,
Around the rigging circling joyously;
The ship rolled on beneath a cloudless sky
Like a great angel drunken with the light.
...

The wind of evening cried along the darkening trees,
Along the darkening trees, heavy with ancient pain,
Heavy with ancient pain from faded centuries,
From faded centuries.... O foolish thought and vain!
...

This dense hard ground I tread.
These iron bars that ripple past,
Will they unshaken stand when I am dead
And my deep thoughts outlast?

Is it my spirit slips,
Falls, like this leaf I kick aside;...

Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache,
Plunged in this squalid city's filthy sea,
For another ocean where the splendours break
Blue, clear, and deep as is virginity....

Oft Music, as it were some moving mighty sea,
Bears me towards my pale
Star: in clear space, or 'neath a vaporous canopy
On-floating, I set sail.
...

I

I find my mind as it were a deep water.

Sometimes I play with a thought and hammer and bend it,
Till tired and displeased with that I toss it away,
Or absently let it slip to the yawning water:...

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon's line is hid
By a black day sadder than any night;

When the changed earth is but a dungeon dank...

One, Nature! burns and makes thee bright,
One gives thee weeds to mourn withal;
And what to one is burial
Is to the other life and light.

The unknown Hermes who assists...

(To Edmund Gosse)

Within mankind's duration, so they say,
Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday.
Asia had no name till man was old
And long had learned the use of iron and gold;...

The lover and the stern philosopher
Both love, in their ripe time, the confident
Soft cats, the house's chiefest ornament,
Who like themselves are cold and seldom stir.
...

'Tis bitter-sweet, when winter nights are long,
To watch, beside the flames which smoke and twist,
The distant memories which slowly throng,
Brought by the chime soft-singing through the mist.
...

Flying his hair and his eyes averse,
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.
How could our song his charms rehearse?
Fleet are his feet and his heart apart.

High on a down we found him last,...

I have loved to-night; from love's last bordering steep
I have fallen at last with joy and forgotten the shore;
I have known my love to-night as never before,...

BOOK I

Mother of Rome, delight of gods and men,
Beloved Venus, who under the fleeting stars
Fillest the freighted sea and earth's ripe fields,
O since through thee alone all forms of life...

I am a lake, altered by every wind.
The mild South breathes upon me, and I spread
A dance of merry ripples in the sun.
The West comes stormily and I am troubled,...

The lily of Malud is born in secret mud.
It is breathed like a word in a little dark ravine
Where no bird was ever heard and no beast was ever seen,
And the leaves are never stirred by the panther's velvet sheen....

I heard a voice that cried, "Make way for those who died!"
And all the coloured crowd like ghosts at morning fled;
And down the waiting road, rank after rank there strode,...

I

Beneath my skull-bone and my hair,
Covered like a poisonous well,
There is a land: if you looked there
What you saw you'd quail to tell.
You that sit there smiling, you...