Ships in Harbour Part 4

I have imagined ... but I do not know.

ENCORE

This old slow music will have never done With dancers who were graceful long ago; A sigh returns them, one by ghostly one, To tunes and measures that they knew--and know.

These lifted faces, floating on a stream, Are one with other faces that were fair,-- That once were light, and summertime and dream, And drifted laughter over hall and stair.

The viols end, and two by two they pa.s.s Out of this blaze into the leafy dark, Too ghostly and too dim across the gra.s.s, Too soon obscured and blotted, all,--till Hark!

This old, slow music that is like a sigh For silver feet gone, ah, how lightly by.

REDEMPTION

The old G.o.ds wait where secret beauty stirs, By green, untempled altars of the Spring, If haply, still, there be some wors.h.i.+ppers Whose hearts are moved with long remembering.

The cloven feet of Pan are on the hill, His reedy musics sadder than all rains, Since none will seek--pipe ever as he will-- Those unanointed and neglected fanes.

Beauty and joy--the bread and wine and all-- We have foresworn; our noisy hearts forget; We stray and on strange altars cry and call ...

Ah, patient G.o.ds, be patient with us yet, And Pan, pipe on, pipe on, till we shall rise, And follow, and be happy, and be wise.

THE HUNTED

There is no rest for them, even in Death: As life had harried them from lair to lair, Still with unquiet eyes and furtive breath, They haunt the secret by-ways of the air.

They know Earth's outer regions like a street, And on pale s.h.i.+ps that make no port of call, They pa.s.s in silence when they chance to meet, Saying no names, telling no tales at all.

Yet, on November nights of wind and storm, s.h.i.+vered and driven from their ghostly sh.o.r.es, They peer in lighted windows glowing warm, And thrill again at dear, remembered doors-- But they are wary listeners in the night: Speak but a name, and they are off in flight.

THE SCHOOL BOY READS HIS ILIAD

The sounding battles leave him nodding still: The din of javelins at the distant wall Is far too faint to wake that weary will That all but sleeps for cities where they fall.

He cares not if this Helen's face were fair, Nor if the thousand s.h.i.+ps shall go or stay; In vain the rumbling chariots throng the air With sounds the centuries shall not hush away.

Beyond the window where the Spring is new, Are marbles in a square, and tops again, And floating voices tell him what they do, Luring his thought from these long-warring men,---- And though the camp be visited with G.o.ds, He dreams of marbles and of tops, and nods.

MOMENTS

Earth has been splendid in her changing moods, Whose scattered glories mark the moment spent; Reliques of mirth or thoughtful solitudes Betoken what a Christ or Dante meant.

What smiling dream, what happy, happy hour Yielded an Athens for the bride of Time!

What darker reverie wrought the Roman flower Whose crimson petals stained the gra.s.s with crime!

Mood after mood, its subtle secret hid, Plies in the earth and has its moody way, Patient or swift--to build a pyramid, Or strike a Phidias from the quickened clay ...

A reverie, that is cities on a hill, Or laughter trembling in a daffodil.

CLEAR MORNING

The air is full of thin and blowing bells Whose delicate, faint music breaks and swells

For every lightest wind, and dies unheard,-- Unless it be by some leaf-hidden bird,

Or some shy faun who listens in the reeds, If haply there be tunes to suit his needs.

RENAISSANCE

This glittering sense of bright and bladed gra.s.s, Of hedges topped with blossom, white like foam, And moons that know a purple way to pa.s.s,-- This beauty that the mind has taken home-- Goes never wholly from us at the last, But stays beyond each summer's slow decay, Storing our thought with summers that are past: Hedges and moons, white in their ancient way.

So, in some subtle instant, for their sake, The winter world turns summer earth and sky: Blossom and bird and musics in their wake ...

And one bright moment, ere it hurries by, Throngs all the mind with colour, light and mirth, Like summertimes returning through the earth.

AN OLD LOVER

Whenever he would talk to us of s.h.i.+ps, Old schooners lost, or tall s.h.i.+ps under weigh, The G.o.d of speech was neighbour to his lips, A lover's grace on words he loved to say.

He called them by their names, and you could see Spars in the sun, keels, and their curling foam; And all his mind was like a morning quay Of s.h.i.+ps gone out, and s.h.i.+ps come gladly home.

He filled the bay with sails we had not seen: The _Marguerita L._, "a maid for shape,"

The slender _Kay_, the worthy _Island Queen_,-- That was his own, he lost her off the Cape, "She was a s.h.i.+p"--and then he looked away, And talked to us no more of s.h.i.+ps that day.

ONE DAY IN SUMMER