I dreamt I was in love again
With the One Before the Last,
And smiled to greet the pleasant pain
Of that innocent young past.

But I jumped to feel how sharp had been
The pain when it did live,
How the faded dreams of Nineteen-ten
Were Hell in Nineteen-five.

The boy’s woe was as keen and clear,
The boy’s love just as true,
And the One Before the Last, my dear,
Hurt quite as much as you.

Sickly I pondered how the lover
Wrongs the unanswering tomb,
And sentimentalizes over
What earned a better doom.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

He went up under the gray leaves
All gray and lost in the olive lands
And laid his forehead, gray with dust,
Deep in the dustiness of his hot hands.
After everything this. And this was the end.
-- Now I must go, as I am going blind.
And why is it Thy will that I must say
Thou art, when I myself no more can find Thee.
I find Thee no more. Not in me, no.
Not in others. Not in this stone,
I find Thee no more. I am alone.
I am alone with all men's sorrow --
All that, through Thee, I thought to lighten,

Good-bye to the cradle, the dear wooden cradle
The rude hand of Progress has thrust it aside.
No more to its motion o’er sleep’s fairy ocean,
Our play-weary wayfarers peacefully glide.

No more by the rhythm of slow-moving rocker,
Their sweet dreamy fancies are fostered and fed;
No more to low singing the cradle goes swinging –
The child of this era is put into bed.

Good-bye to the cradle, the dear wooden cradle,
It lent to the twilight a strange, subtle charm;
When bees left the clover, when play-time was over,

They pass upon their old, tremulous feet,
Creeping with little satchels down the street,
And they remember, many years ago,
Passing that way in silks. They wander, slow
And solitary, through the city ways,
And they alone remember those old days
Men have forgotten. In their shaking heads
A dancer of old carnivals yet treads
The measure of past waltzes, and they see
The candles lit again, the patchouli
Sweeten the air, and the warm cloud of musk
Enchant the passing of the passionate dusk.
Then you will see a light begin to creep

He's an old grey horse, with his head bowed sadly,
   And with dim old eyes and a queer roll aft,
With the off-fore sprung and the hind screwed badly,
   And he bears all over the brands of graft;
And he lifts his head from the grass to wonder
   Why by night and day the whim is still,
Why the silence is, and the stampers' thunder
   Sounds forth no more from the shattered mill.

In that whim he worked when the night winds bellowed

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
-- Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,

Riches I hold in light esteem;
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn:

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, 'Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!'

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
'Tis all that I implore;
In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

A livid sky on London
And like the iron steeds that rear
A shock of engines halted
And I knew the end was near:
And something said that far away, over the hills and far away
There came a crawling thunder and the end of all things here.
For London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down,
As digging lets the daylight on the suken streets of yore,
The lightning looked on London town, the broken bridge of London
town.
The ending of a broken road where men shall go no more.

I saw the kings of London town,

The old Jimmy Woodser comes into the bar
Unwelcomed, unnoticed, unknown,
Too old and too odd to be drunk with, by far;
So he glides to the end where the lunch baskets are
And they say that he tipples alone.

His frockcoat is green and the nap is no more,
And his hat is not quite at its best;
He wears the peaked collar our grandfathers wore,
The black-ribbon tie that was legal of yore,
And the coat buttoned over his breast.


When first he came in, for a moment I thought
That my vision or wits were astray;

In through the porch and up the silent stair;
Little is changed, I know so well the ways;--
Here, the dead came to meet me; it was there
The dream was dreamed in unforgotten days.

But who is this that hurries on before,
A flitting shade the brooding shades among?--
She turned,--I saw her face,--O God, it wore
The face I used to wear when I was young!

I thought my spirit and my heart were tamed
To deadness; dead the pangs that agonise.
The old grief springs to choke me,--I am shamed
Before that little ghost with eager eyes.