Hawthorn and Lavender Part 5

XL

'Dearest, when I am dead, Make one last song for me: Sing what I would have said-- Righting life's wrong for me.

'Tell them how, early and late, Glad ran the days with me, Seeing how goodly and great, Love, were your ways with me.'

XLI

Dear hands, so many times so much When the spent year was green and prime, Come, take your fill, and touch This one poor time.

Dear lips, that could not leave unsaid One sweet-souled syllable of delight, Once more--and be as dead In the dead night.

Dear eyes, so fond to read in mine The message of our counted years, Look your proud last, nor shine Through tears--through tears.

XLII

When, in what other life, Where in what old, spent star, Systems ago, dead vast.i.tudes afar, Were we two bird and bough, or man and wife?

Or wave and spar?

Or I the beating sea, and you the bar On which it breaks? I know not, I!

But this, O this, my Very Dear, I know: Your voice awakes old echoes in my heart; And things I say to you now are said once more; And, Sweet, when we two part, I feel I have seen you falter and linger so, So hesitate, and turn, and cling--yet go, As once in some immemorable Before, Once on some fortunate yet thrice-blasted sh.o.r.e.

Was it for good?

O, these poor eyes are wet; And yet, O, yet, Now that we know, I would not, if I could, Forget.

XLIII

The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain-- They are with us like a disease: They worry the heart, they work the brain, As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane, And savage the helpless trees.

What does it profit a man to know These tattered and tumbling skies A million stately stars will show, And the ruining grace of the after-glow And the rush of the wild sunrise?

Ever the rain--the rain and the wind!

Come, hunch with me over the fire, Dream of the dreams that leered and grinned, Ere the blood of the Year got chilled and thinned, And the death came on desire!

XLIV

_He made this gracious Earth a h.e.l.l_ _With Love and Drink_. _I cannot tell_ _Of which he died_. _But Death was well_.

Will I die of drink?

Why not?

Won't I pause and think?

--What?

Why in seeming wise Waste your breath?

Everybody dies-- And of death!

Youth--if you find it's youth Too late?

Truth--and the back of truth?

Straight, Be it love or liquor, What's the odds, So it slide you quicker To the G.o.ds?

XLV

O, these long nights of days!

All the year's baseness in the ways, All the year's wretchedness in the skies; While on the blind, disheartened sea A tramp-wind plies Cringingly and dejectedly!

And rain and darkness, mist and mud, They cling, they close, they sneak into the blood, They crawl and crowd upon the brain: Till in a dull, dense monotone of pain The past is found a kind of maze, At whose every coign and crook, Broad angle and privy nook, There waits a hooded Memory, Sad, yet with strange, bright, unreproaching eyes.

XLVI

In Sh.o.r.eham River, hurrying down To the live sea, By working, marrying, breeding Sh.o.r.eham Town, Breaking the sunset's wistful and solemn dream, An old, black rotter of a boat Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote, Lay stranded in mid-stream: With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line, That made me think of legs and a broken spine: Soon, all-too soon, Ungainly and forlorn to lie Full in the eye Of the cynical, discomfortable moon That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky, A clown's face flour'd for work. And by and by The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned; The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing; The poor old hulk remained, Stuck helpless in mid-ebb. And I knew why-- Why, as I looked, my heart felt crying. {63} For, as I looked, the good green earth seemed dying-- Dying or dead; And, as I looked on the old boat, I said:-- '_Dear G.o.d_, _it's I_!'

XLVII

Come by my bed, What time the gray ghost shrieks and flies; Take in your hands my head, And look, O look, into my failing eyes; And, by G.o.d's grace, Even as He sunders body and breath, The shadow of your face Shall pa.s.s with me into the run Of the Beyond, and I shall keep and save Your beauty, as it used to be, An absolute part of me, Lying there, dead and done, Far from the sovran bounty of the sun, Down in the grisly colonies of the Grave.

XLVIII

Gray hills, gray skies, gray lights, And still, gray sea-- O fond, O fair, The Mays that were, When the wild days and wilder nights Made it like heaven to be!

Gray head, gray heart, gray dreams-- O, breath by breath, Night-tide and day Lapse gentle and gray, As to a murmur of tired streams, Into the haze of death.

XLIX