DEMETER AND OTHER POEMS The volume with this title was published in December, 1889, when Tennyson was eighty years old, and included the poems that follow, as far as 'In Memoriam: W. G. Ward,' and also Crossing the Bar,' which the poet afterwards requested to have printed at the end of all collected editions of his works. Twenty thousand copies of the book were sold during the week after it appeared. FAINT as a climate-changing bird that flies All night across the darkness, and at dawn Falls on the threshold of her native land, And can no more, thou camest, O my child, Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams, Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumb With passing thro' at once from state to state, Until I brought thee hither, that the day, When here thy hands let fall the gather'd flower, Might break thro' clouded memories once again On thy lost self. A sudden nightingale 10 'We know not, and we know not why we wail.' I climb'd on all the cliffs of all the seas, And ask'd the waves that moan about the world, 'Where? do ye make your moaning for my child?' And round from all the world the voices came, 'We know not, and we know not why we moan.' 'Where?' and I stared from every eaglepeak, I thridded the black heart of all the woods, I peer'd thro' tomb and cave, and in the Drew from thyself the likeness of thyself Without thy knowledge, and thy shadow past Before me, crying, 'The Bright one in the highest Is brother of the Dark one in the lowest, And Bright and Dark have sworn that I, the child Of thee, the great Earth-Mother, thee, the Power That lifts her buried life from gloom to bloom, Should be for ever and for evermore |