On the hot stone he perched contented so, 10
As if never a cart would pass again
That way; as if I were the last of men
And he the first of insects to have earth
And sun together and to know their worth.
I was divided between him and the gleam, 15
The motion, and the voices, of the stream,
The waters running frizzled over gravel,
That never vanish and for ever travel.
A grey flycatcher silent on a fence
And I sat as if we had been there since 20
The horseman and the horse lying beneath
The fir-tree-covered barrow on the heath,
The horseman and the horse with silver shoes,
Galloped the downs last. All that I could lose
I lost. And then the child’s voice raised the dead. 25
‘No one’s been here before’ was what she said
And what I felt, yet never should have found
A word for, while I gathered sight and sound.
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ASPENS
All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,
The aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.
Out of the blacksmith’s cavern comes the ringing 5
Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing –
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.
The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
And over lightless pane and footless road, 10
Empty as sky, with every other sound
Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,
A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
In tempest or the night of nightingales, 15
To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.
And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes. 20
Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.
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THE MILL-WATER
Only the sound remains
Of the old mill;
Gone is the wheel;
On the prone roof and walls the nettle reigns.
Water that toils no more 5
Dangles white locks
And, falling, mocks
The music of the mill-wheel’s busy roar.
Pretty to see, by day
Its sound is naught 10
Compared with thought
And talk and noise of labour and of play.
Night makes the difference.
In calm moonlight,
Gloom infinite, 15
The sound comes surging in upon the sense:
Solitude, company, –
When it is night, –
Grief or delight
By it must haunted or concluded be. 20
Often the silentness
Has but this one
Companion;
Wherever one creeps in the other is:
Sometimes a thought is drowned 25
By it, sometimes
Out of it climbs;
All thoughts begin or end upon this sound,
Only the idle foam
Of water falling 30
Changelessly calling,
Where once men had a work-place and a home.
The original manuscript
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FOR THESE
An acre of land between the shore and the hills,
Upon a ledge that shows my kingdoms three,
The lovely visible earth and sky and sea,
Where what the curlew needs not, the farmer tills:
A house that shall love me as I love it, 5
Well-hedged, and honoured by a few ash-trees
That linnets, greenfinches, and goldfinches
Shall often visit and make love in and flit:
A garden I need never go beyond,
Broken but neat, whose sunflowers every one 10
Are fit to be the sign of the Rising Sun:
A spring, a brook’s bend, or at least a pond:
For these I ask not, but, neither too late
Nor yet too early, for what men call content,
And also that something may be sent 15
To be contented with, I ask of fate.
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DIGGING
What matter makes my spade for tears or mirth,
Letting down two clay pipes into the earth?
The one I smoked, the other a soldier
Of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet
Perhaps. The dead man’s immortality 5
Lies represented lightly with my own,
A yard or two nearer the living air
Than bones of ancients who, amazed to see
Almighty God erect the mastodon,
Once laughed, or wept, in this same light of day. 10
The original manuscript
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TWO HOUSES
Between a sunny bank and the sun
The farmhouse smiles
On the riverside plat:
No other one
So pleasant to look at 5
And remember, for many miles,
So velvet-hushed and cool under the warm tiles.
Not far from the road it lies, yet caught
Far out of reach
Of the road’s dust 10
And the dusty thought
Of passers-by, though each
Stops, and turns, and must
Look down at it like a wasp at the muslined peach.
But another house stood there long before: 15
And as if above graves
Still the turf heaves
Above its stones:
Dark hangs the sycamore,
Shadowing kennel and bones 20
And the black dog that shakes his chain and moans.
And when he barks, over the river
Flashing fast,
Dark echoes reply,
And the hollow past 25
Half yields the dead that never
More than half hidden lie:
And out they creep and back again for ever.
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COCK-CROW
Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, –
Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow:
And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand, 5
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,
Each facing each as in a coat of arms:
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.
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OCTOBER
The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, –
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
That blackberry and gorse
, in dew and sun, 5
Bow down to; and the wind travels too light
To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;
The gossamers wander at their own will.
At heavier steps than birds’ the squirrels scold.
The rich scene has grown fresh again and new 10
As Spring and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
In alternation of violet and rose, 15
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
But if this be not happiness, – who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy 20
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.
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THERE’S NOTHING LIKE THE SUN
There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountain side or street of town. 5
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning’s storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what 10
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March’s sun,
Like April’s, or July’s, or June’s, or May’s,
Or January’s, or February’s, great days:
And August, September, October, and December 15
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said –
Or, if I could live long enough, should say –
‘There’s nothing like the sun that shines today.’
There’s nothing like the sun till we are dead. 20
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THE THRUSH
When Winter’s ahead,
What can you read in November
That you read in April
When Winter’s dead?
I hear the thrush, and I see 5
Him alone at the end of the lane
Near the bare poplar’s tip,
Singing continuously.
Is it more that you know
Than that, even as in April, 10
So in November,
Winter is gone that must go?
Or is all your lore
Not to call November November,
And April April, 15
And Winter Winter – no more?
But I know the months all,
And their sweet names, April,
May and June and October,
As you call and call 20
I must remember
What died in April
And consider what will be born
Of a fair November;
And April I love for what 25
It was born of, and November
For what it will die in,
What they are and what they are not,
While you love what is kind,
What you can sing in 30
And love and forget in
All that’s ahead and behind.
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LIBERTY
The last light has gone out of the world, except
This moonlight lying on the grass like frost
Beyond the brink of the tall elm’s shadow.
It is as if everything else had slept
Many an age, unforgotten and lost 5
The men that were, the things done, long ago,
All I have thought; and but the moon and I
Live yet and here stand idle over the grave
Where all is buried. Both have liberty
To dream what we could do if we were free 10
To do some thing we had desired long,
The moon and I. There’s none less free than who
Does nothing and has nothing else to do,
Being free only for what is not to his mind,
And nothing is to his mind. If every hour 15
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
And I could take and carry them away 20
I should be rich; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.
And yet I still am half in love with pain,
With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth, 25
With things that have an end, with life and earth,
And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.
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THIS IS NO CASE OF PETTY RIGHT OR WRONG
This is no case of petty right or wrong
That politicians or philosophers
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
Beside my hate for one fat patriot 5
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true: –
A kind of god he is, banging a gong.
But I have not to choose between the two,
Or between justice and injustice. Dinned
With war and argument I read no more 10
Than in the storm smoking along the wind
Athwart the wood. Two witches’ cauldrons roar.
From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;
Out of the other an England beautiful
And like her mother that died yesterday. 15
Little I know or care if, being dull,
I shall miss something that historians
Can rake out of the ashes when perchance
The phoenix broods serene above their ken.
But with the best and meanest Englishmen 20
I am one in crying, God save England, lest
We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed.
The ages made her that made us from the dust:
She is all we know and live by, and we trust
She is good and must endure, loving her so: 25
And as we love ourselves we hate her foe.
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RAIN
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been 5
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain, 10
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain 15
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
The original manuscript of the poem
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THE CLOUDS THAT ARE SO LIGHT
The clouds that are so light,
Beautiful, swift and bright,
Cast shadows on field and park
Of the earth that is so dark,
And even so now, light one! 5
Beautiful, swift and bright one!
You let fall on a heart that was dark,
Unillumined, a deeper mark.
But clouds would have, without earth
To shadow, far less worth: 10
Away from your shadow on me
Your beauty less would be,
And if it still be treasured
An age hence, it shall be measured
By this small dark spot 15
Without which it were not.
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ROADS
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.
Roads go on 5
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
On this earth ‘tis sure
We men have not made 10
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:
The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream 15
If we trod it not again.
They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only. 20
From dawn’s twilight