Ships in Harbour Part 7

MOONFLOWERS

These frail, white blooms have lit the Summer night Like ghosts of beauty that had gone too soon,-- With something less than any glimmering light That sways and faints and trembles in the moon.

I think the Earth, grown half-regretful, now, Of faces that were lovely of old time, Lifts here again dim hands and hair and brow, In loveliness more fragile than a rhyme.

So that the listening night has somehow learned A way of prescient waiting through the dark, For half-forgotten loveliness returned,-- Too frail and dim for eyes like ours to mark More than a ghostly glimmer on the air, That once was lighted brows and hands and hair.

CHALLENGE

The Spring has crowned the startled gra.s.s with light, And lit each apple-tree with blooms of May, Her footprints flowering through the silent night, Show where she went her hurried, careless way ...

A magic that awakens and goes by, Too care-free to be bound, too fickle-fleet, Leaves helpless legions staring at the sky, Confronted with a later, sure defeat.

A bird, half-hid among the apple boughs, Sings and sings on above the blossoming earth, A high, clear music of eternal vows To transient joy ... and joy's eternal worth ...

Above the certain wreck, this dauntless thing, Caught up and hurled from ruined Spring to Spring.

BEFORE SPRING

Who knows what endless practices are held, Before bright pencils mark the April earth---- Where gra.s.ses learn how gaiety is spelled, And jonquils trace the golden writs of mirth; Some slow, imperfect patterns must be wrought Some, cast aside in dark, abandoned crypts, Before the swift, impulsive hands are taught To shape the Spring's illuminated scripts.

What gifted fingers are so quick to mould And form aright the thin Aprilian line, The frail, fair lettering in green and gold!-- What art has taught that intricate design, From which those later scriveners compose Such final, crowning rubrics as the rose!

MOONS KNOW NO TIME

Moonlight is memory ... though the sun forget, And moonlight lingers by a crumbling wall, And gra.s.s-grown walks where flagging-stones are set For feet that pa.s.s that way no more at all.

Summers gone by, and laughter that is still, And hair whose gold is hidden from the sun,-- Moonlight remembering on a lonesome hill Might half return them, one by ghostly one.

Suns mark the days ... but moonlight knows no time, Finding old springs in every lighted face, Old musics in a whisper hushed like rhyme: And Summers that have gone and left no trace, Are one with each new Summer come to flower, Moving in moonlight through a haunted hour.

MY NEIGHBOUR

He never could grow old, for gay Romance Walks with him daily through our crowded ways, Illumining each common circ.u.mstance, And rearing splendid dreams about his days.

Whether he walks or rides, it is the same, He is the grey-haired knight, his cane for lance, On some adventure for a lady's name, With fancied kings and queens for confidants.

Folk that he meets--woman or man or boy-- All play a role in some forgotten place: His carriage is a chariot at Troy, And somewhere, at the end, is Helen's face ...

I like to wonder, when he looks at me, What glorious thing, that instant, I may be.

AT THE NEXT TABLE

O, Lady like a tea-cup, A flower, or a fan, What dear, archaic fancy Devised you as it ran Through gone Arcadian summers Of sweet and gentle airs, Of roses at the cas.e.m.e.nt, And slippers on the stairs?

O, Lady like a poem Out of the olden time, Be now the fading pattern Of this archaic rhyme.

SALVAGE

Since we have learned how beauty comes and goes: A phantom fading from the hills like light, Summer and slow disaster in the rose, An April face that wanders toward the night,-- It is not strange that we who linger here, Are haunted by the colours of the sky, The ghost of beauty in the stricken year, The thought of beauty gone too swiftly by.

So that men strive with chisel, pen and brush, To save the lifted brow, the transient spring, Happy if they may fix the fading blush, Or make the mood a memorable thing, And snare one glowing hour from fleeting time, A golden bird, caged in a golden rhyme.

IN A GIRLS' SCHOOL

These walls will not forget, through later days, How they had bloomed with lifted, tossing heads Of swaying girls who thronged these ordered ways Like windy tulips blowing in their beds.

Stones may remember laughter down a hall, And eyes more bright than blossoms in the gra.s.s,-- A dream to haunt them--after all and all-- When they are dust with dusty things that pa.s.s.

So that some wind of beauty, waking then, Whose breath shall be new summertimes for earth, Will stir these scattered stones to dreams, again, Of blowing shapes, of brightening eyes and mirth, And corridors, like windy tulip beds, Of swaying girls and beautiful, bright heads.

AT ELSINORE

... And still, they say, when nights are nearly spent, And watchmen take their doze, before relief, He comes to walk upon the battlement, And all his brow is clouded with a grief.

From end to end, from end to end he goes, Muttering his maledictions--and a name Of one who drowned, it seems--though no one knows, For there's a madness in his words, they claim.

TO WILLIAM GRIFFITH

(_He that is Pierrot_)