Ships in Harbour Part 9

RENDEZVOUS

... So she came back to you and me, She who had been the lovely third ...

A little, blue ghost in time for tea;

Smiling and grave and with no word Of how things fare with such as she, But suddenly lonely when she heard,

In that still place, the fragile clink Of tea cups, and her own dear name, 'Twas like her to be touched, I think,

With smiling pity for you and me;-- So, in a breathless haste, she came, A little, blue ghost in time for tea.

SONNETS FROM A HOSPITAL

I

SPRING

Remembering sunlight on the steepled square, Remembering April's way with little streets, And pouter pigeons coasting down the air, Spilling a beauty, like white-crested fleets,-- I have imagined, in these pain-racked days, The look of gra.s.ses thrusting through the earth, Of tender shoots along green-bordered ways, Of hedges, and their first, frail blossoming mirth.

I have imagined, too, in some such wise Death may allow, within her darkened room, Some subtle intimation of wide skies, Of startled gra.s.ses, and the hedge in bloom,-- And we may know when some far spring comes down, Wearing her magic slippers through the town.

II

FEVER

The cool, sweet earth is cool and sweet indeed, To flesh that fever makes a cinder of,-- An angel with cool hands to cup his need, In ministrations, kinder yet than love.

There, a cool cheek to lay against his own, And rest for that hot blood's too restless will, His hands to curve on root or clod or stone;-- And deep-dug earth is very, very still.

Yet some, remembering happiness he had Of living things, of leaf and sun and air, Could pity him his prison, and be sad,-- Not knowing how he is companioned there, Nor how, for such as he and his great need, The cool, sweet earth is cool and sweet indeed.

III

RUINS

The spring comes in to me like spring in Rome,-- As year by year those ruins, dead to mirth, Sense a strange quickening in the sweetened loam, Where new, returning Aprils take the earth; Something they lost, so many centuries gone, Something too swift and subtle for a word, Is half-remembered--in a shattered faun, A stained and broken bird-bath, and its bird.

But otherwise, all alien comes the Spring, Touching but not transforming what they are: Flowers in the cranny but a foolish thing, Gra.s.s in the pavements, foreign as a star ...

Each reminiscent, half-insensate stone Mocked with new life it cannot call its own.

IV

VISITATION

All through my fevered nights, their grey ghosts came, The great, cool sailing ships blown softly by, More fair than any beauty that we name, Girdled of water, chrismed of the sky.

I cannot tell what hidden bales of prize, What mystic spell may haunt the wraiths of ships, But these were secret healing on my eyes, And these were cooling water at my lips.

It may be, when the final fever ends, And flesh burns out, at last, and pulses fail, They will not know, my grieved and stricken friends, How in that instant I had given hail To one white ship come ghostwise in from sea, And how at last that it is well with me.

THIS LANE IN MAY

A fragrance lingers, though the rains be done; And apple-trees have shaken from their hair The thin and shining blossoms, one by one, Starring the roadway like a silver stair.

And something softer than the rain comes by, Older and dearer than these bright, new days: An odour ... or a trick of lights that lie Familiar on these gra.s.s-grown, rutted ways.

This lane in May is such a haunted thing, For all the newness of the rain-wet trees: An old, old May, remembered of the Spring, Returning ghostwise on such days as these, Moves in the blowing odours where they pa.s.s, Trailing these scattered blossoms in the gra.s.s.

FUGITIVE

Behind these falling curtains of the rain, Beauty goes by, a phantom on the hill, A timid fugitive beyond the lane, In rainy silver,--and so shy and still That only peering eyes of some hid bird, Or furry ears that listened by a stone, Could guess at Something neither seen nor heard, Finding escape, and faring by, alone.

For eyes like ours, too faint a thing and fleet, Too lightly running for such ears to hear The stealthy going of those weightless feet; No thrilling sight or sound of her comes near, Only the shining gra.s.ses where they lie, Give hint of silver slippers hasting by.

AN OLD GARDENER

He has always a wise and knowing air: For him there is no mystery in the mould, Where seeds put on the shimmering things they wear, And come to birth in yellow, green, and gold.

His quizzical, grey eyes can somehow mark The silver shaft of sunlight where it goes, Still radiant and undarkened in the dark, To find the seed room of the hidden rose.

For him the secret alchemies are plain; He tells most surely how these things befall, In words grown intimate with roots and rain; And yet, he is so tender of it all, So wise and kind in ways of leaf and sod, Sometimes I think him very like to G.o.d.

THE VEIL

Here where the snow comes whitely down, All worldiness is done; The saintly, silent little Town Is like a nun;

Most holy in her street and spire, Most perfectly at rest,-- Ah, G.o.d, who knows what hid desire Is in her breast,

Where peony or daffodil Or wayward rose begins, Burning her drifted bosom, still, Like secret sins.