| |
| HIGH on the mountain where the storm-heads are, | |
| Lying where all may see, there is a place | |
| As hideous and shocking as a scar | |
| That mars the beauty of a well-loved face. | |
| Infinitely drear, and raw, and nude, | 5 |
| It waits and listens in the solitude. | |
| |
| There is no friendly tree in all that square | |
| Of scattered stones and arid, troubled clay. | |
| Bleak as the creed of those who journey there, | |
| Hard as the code by which they lived their day, | 10 |
| It gives them all they ask of it—its best; | |
| No beauty and no softness—only rest. | |
| |
| But oh, the pity of it all is this: | |
| They lived with beauty and their eyes were blind. | |
| Dreaming of far strong joys, they came to miss | 15 |
| Those that were near. So at the last we find | |
| No tenderness of blossom, but instead | |
| Mute emblems of the longings of the dead. | |
| |
| These rain-bleached sea-shells in an ordered row | |
| Tell of an ocean that they never knew | 20 |
| Except in dreams which, through the ebb and flow | |
| Of years, set seaward as the torrents do. | |
| Always they planned to follow, knowing deep | |
| Within their hearts that dreams are but for sleep. | |
| |
| And see these tawdry bits of broken glass | 25 |
| Which speak the foreign glories of the town— | |
| The crowds, the lights; these too are dreams that pass | |
| Here where the hemming walls of rock look down, | |
| And clasp their children fast within their keep | |
| Until they cradle them at last to sleep. | 30 |
| |
| Yet all the while if they could only know | |
| The beauty that is theirs to breathe and touch— | |
| The whisper of the dawn across the snow, | |
| The vast low-drifting clouds that love them much— | |
| Oh, they could call their dreams home down the sky, | 35 |
| And carry beauty with them when they die. | |
| |
