All round me, but far away, the night’s twin consciousness roars
With sounds that endlessly swell and sink like the storm of thought in the brain,
Lifting and falling like slow breaths taken, pulsing like oars
Immense that beat the blood of the night down its vein.
The night is immense and awful, Helen, and I am insect small
In the fur of this hill, clung on to the fur of shaggy, black heather.
A palpitant speck in the fur of the night, and afraid of all,
Seeing the world and the sky like creatures hostile together.
And I in the fur of the world, and you a pale fleck from the sky,
How we hate each other to-night, hate, you and I,
As the world of activity hates the dream that goes on on high,
As a man hates the dreaming woman he loves, but who will not reply.
Dream-confused
Is that the moon
At the window so big and red?
No one in the room,
No one near the bed——?
Listen, her shoon
Palpitating down the stair?
—Or a beat of wings at the window there?
A moment ago
She kissed me warm on the mouth,
The very moon in the south
Is warm with a bloody glow,
The moon from far abysses
Signalling those two kisses.
And now the moon
Goes slowly out of the west,
And slowly back in my breast
My kisses are sinking, soon
To leave me at rest.
Corot
The trees rise tall and taller, lifted
On a subtle rush of cool grey flame
That issuing out of the dawn has sifted
The spirit from each leaf’s frame.
For the trailing, leisurely rapture of life
Drifts dimly forward, easily hidden
By bright leaves uttered aloud, and strife
Of shapes in the grey mist chidden.
The grey, phosphorescent, pellucid advance
Of the luminous purpose of God, shines out
Where the lofty trees athwart stream chance
To shake flakes of its shadow about.
The subtle, steady rush of the whole
Grey foam-mist of advancing God,
As He silently sweeps to His somewhere, his goal,
Is heard in the grass of the sod.
Is heard in the windless whisper of leaves
In the silent labours of men in the fields,
In the downward dropping of flimsy sheaves
Of cloud the rain skies yield.
In the tapping haste of a fallen leaf,
In the flapping of red-roof smoke, and the small
Foot-stepping tap of men beneath
These trees so huge and tall.
For what can all sharp-rimmed substance but catch
In a backward ripple, God’s purpose, reveal
For a moment His mighty direction, snatch
A spark beneath His wheel.
Since God sweeps onward dim and vast,
Creating the channelled vein of Man
And Leaf for His passage, His shadow is cast
On all for us to scan.
Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely:
Imitate the magnificent trees
That speak no word of their rapture, but only
Breathe largely the luminous breeze.
Morning Work
A gang of labourers on the piled wet timber
That shines blood-red beside the railway siding
Seem to be making out of the blue of the morning
Something faery and fine, the shuttles sliding,
The red-gold spools of their hands and faces shuttling
Hither and thither across the morn’s crystalline frame
Of blue: trolls at the cave of ringing cerulean mining,
And laughing with work, living their work like a game.
Transformations
I
The Town
Oh you stiff shapes, swift transformation seethes
About you: only last night you were
A Sodom smouldering in the dense, soiled air;
To-day a thicket of sunshine with blue smoke-wreaths.
To-morrow swimming in evening’s vague, dim vapour
Like a weeded city in shadow under the sea,
Beneath an ocean of shimmering light you will be:
Then a group of toadstools waiting the moon’s white taper.
And when I awake in the morning, after rain,
To find the new houses a cluster of lilies glittering
In scarlet, alive with the birds’ bright twittering,
I’ll say your bond of ugliness is vain.
II
The Earth
Oh Earth, you spinning clod of earth,
And then you lamp, you lemon-coloured beauty;
Oh Earth, you rotten apple rolling downward,
Then brilliant Earth, from the burr of night in beauty
As a jewel-brown horse-chestnut newly issued:—
You are all these, and strange, it is my duty
To take you all, sordid or radiant tissued.
III
Men
Oh labourers, oh shuttles across the blue