Your greenness,

Your cleanness,

Some of your shade, some of your sky,

Some of your calm as I go by;

Your flowers to trim

The pavements grim;

Your space for room in the jostled street,

And grass for carpet to my feet;

Your fountains take and sweet bird calls

To sing me from my office walls.

All that I can see

I carry off with me.

But you never miss my theft,
So much treasure you have left.
As I find you, fresh at morning,
So I find you, home returning-
Nothing lacking from your grace.
All your riches wait in place
For me to borrow

On the morrow.

Do you hear this praise of you,

Little park that I pass through?

THE NEW-BORN

I have heard them in the night

The cry of their fear,

Because there is no light,

Because they do not hear

Familiar sounds and feel the familiar arm,

And they awake alone.

Yet they have never known

Danger or harm.

What is their dread?

This dark about their bed?

But they are so lately come

Out of the dark womb

Where they were safely kept.
That blackness was good;

And the silence of that solitude

Wherein they slept

Was kind.

Where did they find

Knowledge of death?

Caution of darkness and cold?

These of the little, new breath-
Have they a prudence so old?

RAIN AT NIGHT

Are you awake? Do you hear the rain?
How rushingly it strikes upon the ground,
And on the roof, and the wet window-pane!
Sometimes I think it is a comfortable sound,
Making us feel how safe and snug we are:

Closing us off in this dark, away from the dark outside.

The rest of the world seems dim tonight, mysterious and far.

Oh, there is no world left! Only darkness, darkness stretching wide, And full of the blind rain's immeasurable fall!

How nothing must we seem unto this ancient thing!
How nothing unto the earth-and we so small!

Oh, wake, wake! do you not feel my hands cling?

One day it will be raining as it rains tonight; the same wind blowRaining and blowing on this house wherein we lie: but you and I— We shall not hear, we shall not ever know.

O love, I had forgot that we must die.

THE LOVER SINGS OF A GARDEN

Oh, beautiful are the flowers of your garden,

The flowers of your garden are fair:

Blue flowers of your eyes

And dusk flower of your hair;

Dew flower of your mouth

And peony-budded breasts,

And the flower of the curve of your hand

Where my hand rests.

SINCE I HAVE FELT THE SENSE OF DEATH

Since I have felt the sense of death,
Since I have borne its dread, its fear-
Oh, how my life has grown more dear
Since I have felt the sense of death!
Sorrows are good, and cares are small,
Since I have known the loss of all.

Since I have felt the sense of death,
And death forever at my side
Oh, how the world has opened wide
Since I have felt the sense of death!
My hours are jewels that I spend,
For I have seen the hours end.

Since I have felt the sense of death,

Since I have looked on that black night—

My inmost brain is fierce with light
Since I have felt the sense of death.
O dark, that made my eyes to see!
O death, that gave my life to me

HAPPINESS BETRAYS ME

Happiness betrays me

Happiness slays me!

Sorrow was kind and loneliness was my sweet companion,

Denial gave me good gifts.

Now freedom is a bondage upon me.

And smoothness slackens my feet.

I will find my way back to the thorns;

I will find my way back again to the good thorns and steepness.

Happiness betrays me

Happiness slays me.

MEMORY

I can remember our sorrow, I can remember our laughter;
I know that surely we kissed and cried and ate together;

I remember our places and games, and plans we had—
The little house and how all came to naught-
Remember well:

But I cannot remember our love,

I cannot remember our love.

ARCHES

Under the high-arching bridge

The shadow arch

Bends itself,

Curved

Down into the water;

And lies in the water

As motionless

As the arch above it is motionless:

Masonry of the dusk.

THE STONE-AGE SEA

Never has ship sailed on that sea

Nor ray of tower shone on it;

Motionless, without desire or memory,

Like a great languorous sea of stone it lies.

And as these ledges of rock on which they sit-
So stony, so unseeing-are the eyes

fference

Of this strange folk who from the naked shore
Look ever beyond them to the aged face
Of the waters. One with the hoar

Mighty boulders they seem, one with the deep:
These the first beings of the first rude race
Of time. Their hearts are still locked asleep,
So lately from the gray marble were they torn:
And all the multitudes of the world are yet unborn.

Ford Madox Hueffer

ANTWERP

I

Gloom!

An October like November;

August a hundred thousand hours,
And all September;

A hundred thousand dragging sunlit days,

And half October like a thousand years . .
And doom!

That then was Antwerp

How could they do it?

Those souls that usually dived

Into the dirty caverns of mines;

Who usually hived

In the name of God,

In whitened hovels; under ragged poplars;

Who dragged muddy shovels over the grassy mud,

Lumbering to work over the greasy sods . . .

Those men there, with the appearance of clods,

Were the bravest men that a usually listless priest of God

Ever shrived. . .

And it is not for us to make them an anthem.

If we found words there would come no wind that would fan them

To a tune that the trumpets might blow it,

Shrill through the heaven that's ours or yet Allah's,

Or the wide halls of any Valhallas.