English

It is the little brown hour of twilight.
I pause between two dark houses,
For there is a song in my heart.
If I could sing at this moment what I wish to sing,
The nations would crown me,
If I were dumb ever afterwards.
For I am sure it would be the greatest song in the world,
And the song every one has been trying to sing
Just now!
But it will not come out.

Earth is a prey of the hours
Life is dividing of days
Sorrow and happiness fly
Vanish dishonour and praise
Yet, toil we on toward something that lieth before our way,

Yearnings are shattered and healed
Battles are lost and are won
All the old visions are dead
All the old faces are gone
Only remains on the Earth the voice that is crying “on!”

Vanish the echoes of feet
That once in my chamber have trod
Die in the darkness without
With the silence of death they are shod

Shall we turn from the mysterious dark with the pagan prayer and spell,
As wholly a hideous dream from the gloom of the gateway of Hell?
Shall we say of the wild-eyed savage who crouches with gibber and moan,
Where the dead stone god sits glaring, that the worship is dead as the stone?
Not so; for the worshipper lives, and with him the worship grew,
And the fear of his heart is deep and the prayer of his lips is true;
The worshipper lives and prays, and with him the worship began,
Though the fetish that towers be a fetish, the man that kneels is a man;

I know not how it is—it seems
Fantastic and surprising
That after all these dreams and dreams,
Here in the sun's first level beams,
The sun is still just rising!

When first he showed his sovereign face,
And bade the night-folk scuttle
Back to their holes, I took my place
Here on the hill, and God His grace
Sent slumber soft and subtle.

Among the poppies red and white,
I've lain and drowsed, for all it
Appears a sluggardly delight.
I must have had a wakeful night,
Though, faith, I don't recall it.

As one, at midnight wakened by the call
Of golden plovers in their seaward flight,
Who lies and listens as the clear notes fall
Through tingling quiet of the frosty night,
Who lies and listens as the wild notes fail,
And then, in fancy following the flock,
Fares over slumbering hill and dreaming dale,
Until he hears the surf on reef and rock
Break thundering, and all sense of self is drowned
Within the mightier music of the deep,
And he no more recalls the piping sound
That startled him from dull undreaming sleep—

Because the little gentleman made nautical instruments
And lived in a street which ran down to the sea,
The neighbours called him “Salt Charlie.”
I wonder what they would have said if they had known
That he stole out every evening to a sweet-shop
And bought sticks of red-and-white sugar candy.
It was a pleasant thing to see him,
Standing meekly before the custom-house,
Sucking a sugar-stick,
And gazing at the dead funnels of anchored steamers
Against a star-sprung sky.

I thought of him in an oval gilt frame

Ladies, I do not know you, and I think
I do not want to. And a strange beginning
I make with that. Admitted; there's the odds.
You live between the covers of a book,
At least for me, but then I've known a crowd
Of other people who do that. My mind
Is stuffed with phantoms out of poets' brains.
But you are out of nothing but the air,
Or were, rather, for one of you is dead.
Dead or alive, it is the same to me,
Since all our contact lies in printer's ink.

But even this, peculiar as it is,
Is but a thread of singularity.

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season,
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent

I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.

A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew dabbled, the lily and rose;
Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,
Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew:

Willows weave spring sorrow,
brow knit in sorrow, I lean from painted tower.
Red sorrow, green sadness—on each branch wither flowers;
the old sorrow not yet gone,
new sorrow comes as well.
How many sunsets have I passsed in sorrow?
The hook of sorrow hangs above:
let me ask the moon about this sorrow.
In sorrow I watch the southern clouds withdraw.