Whose song is tired at last For no mate heard. The loving voice is silent, The useless word; One by one flitting Sick with hope deferred. Driving and driving, The ship drives amain: While swift from mast to mast Shapes flit again, Flit silent as the silence Where men lie slain; Their shadow cast upon the sails Is like a stain. No voice to call the sleepers, No hand to raise : They sleep to death in dreaming, Of length of days. FROM HOUSE TO HOME. THE first was like a dream through summer heat, While the half-frozen pulses lagged to beat Beneath a winter moon. "But," says my friend, "what was this thing and where?" It was a pleasure-place within my soul; An earthly paradise supremely fair That lured me from the goal. The first part was a tissue of hugged lies; The second was its ruin fraught with pain: Why raise the fair delusion to the skies But to be dashed again? My castle stood of white transparent glass Glittering and frail with many a fretted spire, But when the summer sunset came to pass It kindled into fire. My pleasaunce was an undulating green, Stately with trees whose shadows slept below, With glimpses of smooth garden-beds between Swift squirrels on the pastures took their ease, Fulfilled their careless life. Woodpigeons cooed there, stock doves nestled there; My trees were full of songs and flowers and fruit, Their branches spread a city to the air And mice lodged in their root. My heath lay farther off, where lizards lived In strange metallic mail, just spied and gone; Like darted lightnings here and there perceived But no where dwelt upon. Frogs and fat toads were there to hop or plod And spill the morning dew. All caterpillars throve beneath my rule, With snails and slugs in corners out of sight; I never marred the curious sudden stool That perfects in a night. Safe in his excavated gallery The burrowing mole groped on from year to year; No harmless hedgehog curled because of me His prickly back for fear. |