Part 18 (1/2)

EPITAPH IN OLD MODE

The leaves fall gently on the gra.s.s, And all the willow trees and poplar trees and elder trees That bend above her where she sleeps, O all the willow trees, the willow trees Breathe sighs above her tomb.

O pause and pity as you pa.s.s.

She loved so tenderly, so quietly, so hopelessly; And sometimes comes one here and weeps-- She loved so tenderly, so tenderly, And never told them whom.

SONNET

There was an Indian, who had known no change, Who strayed content along a sunlit beach Gathering sh.e.l.ls. He heard a sudden strange Commingled noise: looked up; and gasped for speech.

For in the bay, where nothing was before, Moved on the sea, by magic, huge canoes, With bellying cloths on poles, and not one oar, And fluttering coloured signs and clambering crews.

And he, in fear, this naked man alone, His fallen hands forgetting all their sh.e.l.ls, His lips gone pale, knelt low behind a stone, And stared, and saw, and did not understand, Columbus's doom-burdened caravels Slant to the sh.o.r.e, and all their seamen land.

THE BIRDS

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; And aeons had pa.s.sed, when the first corn was planted, Since first the use of syllables was granted.

Men were on earth while climates slowly swung, Fanning wide zones to heat and cold, and long Subsidence turned great continents to sea, And seas dried up, dried up interminably, Age after age; enormous seas were dried Amid wastes of land. And the last monsters died.

Earth wore another face. O since that prime Man with how many works has sprinkled time!

Hammering, hewing, digging tunnels, roads; Building s.h.i.+ps, temples, multiform abodes.

How, for his body's appet.i.tes, his toils Have conquered all earth's products, all her soils; And in what thousand thousand shapes of art He has tried to find a language for his heart!

Never at rest, never content or tired: Insatiate wanderer, marvellously fired, Most grandly piling and piling into the air Stones that will topple or arch he knows not where.

And yet did I, this spring, think it more strange, More grand, more full of awe, than all that change, And lovely and sweet and touching unto tears, That through man's chronicled and unchronicled years, And even into that unguessable beyond The water-hen has nested by a pond, Weaving dry flags, into a beaten floor, The one sure product of her only lore.

Low on a ledge above the shadowed water Then, when she heard no men, as nature taught her, Plas.h.i.+ng around with busy scarlet bill She built that nest, her nest, and builds it still.

O let your strong imagination turn The great wheel backward, until Troy unburn, And then unbuild, and seven Troys below Rise out of death, and dwindle, and outflow, Till all have pa.s.sed, and none has yet been there: Back, ever back. Our birds still crossed the air; Beyond our myriad changing generations Still built, unchanged, their known inhabitations.

A million years before Atlantis was Our lark sprang from some hollow in the gra.s.s, Some old soft hoof-print in a tussock's shade; And the wood-pigeon's smooth snow-white eggs were laid, High, amid green pines' sunset-coloured shafts, And rooks their villages of twiggy rafts Set on the tops of elms, where elms grew then, And still the thumbling t.i.t and perky wren Popped through the tiny doors of cosy b.a.l.l.s And the blackbird lined with moss his high-built walls; A round mud cottage held the thrush's young, And straws from the untidy sparrow's hung.

And, skimming forktailed in the evening air, When man first was were not the martens there?

Did not those birds some human shelter crave, And stow beneath the cornice of his cave Their dry tight cups of clay? And from each door Peeped on a morning wiseheads three or four.

Yes, daw and owl, curlew and crested hern, Kingfisher, mallard, water-rail and tern, Chaffinch and greenfinch, warbler, stonechat, ruff, Pied wagtail, robin, fly-catcher and chough, Missel-thrush, magpie, sparrow-hawk, and jay, Built, those far ages gone, in this year's way.

And the first man who walked the cliffs of Rame, As I this year, looked down and saw the same Blotches of rusty red on ledge and cleft With grey-green spots on them, while right and left A dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying, Wheeling and crossing and darting, crying and crying, Circling and crying, over and over and over, Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover.