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William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. (1878–1962). Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920.

The Islands

I

WHAT are the Islands to me,

what is Greece,

what is Rhodes, Samos, Chios,

what is Paros facing west,

what is Crete?

What is Samothrace,

rising like a ship,

what is Imbros redning the storm-waves

with its breast?

What is Naxos, Paros, Milos,

what the circle about Lycia,

what, the Cyclades’

white necklace?

What is Greece—

Sparta, rising like a rock,

Thebes, Athens,

what is Corinth?

What is Euboia

with its island violets,

what is Euboia, spread with grass,

set with swift shoals,

what is Crete?

What are the islands to me,

what is Greece?

II

What can love of land give to me

that you have not—

what do the tall Spartans know,

and gentler Attic folk?

What has Sparta and her women

more than this?

What are the islands to me

if you are lost—

What is Naxos, Tinos, Andros,

and Delos, the clasp

of the white necklace?

III

What can love of land give to me

that you have not,

what can love of strife break in me

that you have not?

Though Sparta enter Athens,

salt, rising to wreak terror

Thebes wrack Sparta,

each changes as water,

and fall back.

IV

“What has love of land given to you

that I have not?”

I have questioned Tyrians

where they sat

on the black ships,

weighted with rich stuffs,

I have asked the Greeks

from the white ships,

and Greeks from ships whose hulks

lay on the wet sand, scarlet

with great beaks.

I have asked bright Tyrians

and tall Greeks—

“what has love of land given you?”

And they answered—“peace.”

V

But beauty is set apart,

beauty is cast by the sea,

a barren rock,

beauty is set about

with wrecks of ships,

upon our coasts, death keeps

the shallows—death waits

clutching toward us

from the deeps.

Beauty is set apart;

the winds that slash its beach,

swirl the coarse sand

upward toward the rocks.

Beauty is set apart

from the islands

and from Greece.

VI

In my garden,

the winds have beaten

the ripe lilies;

in my garden, the salt

has wilted the first flakes

of young narcissus,

and the lesser hyacinth

and the salt has crept

under the leaves of the white hyacinth.

In my garden

even the wind-flowers lie fiat,

broken by the wind at last.

VII

What are the islands to me

if you are lost,

what is Paros to me

if your eyes draw back,

what is Milos

if you take fright of beauty,

terrible, torturous, isolated,

a barren rack?

What is Rhodes, Crete,

what is Paros facing west,

what, white Imbros?

What are the islands to me

if you hesitate,

what is Greece if you draw back

from the terror

and cold splendor of song

and its bleak sacrifice?

The North American Review