| |
| IN a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, | |
| At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee, | |
| Walled round with rocks as an inland island, | |
| The ghost of a garden fronts the sea. | |
| A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses | 5 |
| The steep square slope of the blossomless bed | |
| Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses | |
| Now lie dead. | |
| |
| The fields fall southward, abrupt and broken, | |
| To the low last edge of the long lone land. | 10 |
| If a step should sound or a word be spoken, | |
| Would a ghost not rise at the strange guest’s hand? | |
| So long have the gray bare walks lain guestless, | |
| Through branches and briars if a man make way, | |
| He shall find no life but the sea-wind’s, restless | 15 |
| Night and day. | |
| |
| The dense hard passage is blind and stifled | |
| That crawls by a track none turn to climb | |
| To the strait waste place that the years have rifled | |
| Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time. | 20 |
| The thorns he spares when the rose is taken; | |
| The rocks are left when he wastes the plain; | |
| The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken, | |
| These remain. | |
| |
| Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not; | 25 |
| As the heart of a dead man the seed-plots are dry; | |
| From the thicket of thorns whence the nightingale calls not, | |
| Could she call, there were never a rose to reply. | |
| Over the meadows that blossom and wither, | |
| Rings but the note of a sea-bird’s song. | 30 |
| Only the sun and the rain come hither | |
| All year long. | |
| |
| The sun burns sear, and the rain dishevels | |
| One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath. | |
| Only the wind here hovers and revels | 35 |
| In a round where life seems barren as death. | |
| Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, | |
| Haply, of lovers none ever will know, | |
| Whose eyes went seaward a hundred sleeping | |
| Years ago. | 40 |
| |
| Heart handfast in heart as they stood, “Look thither,” | |
| Did he whisper? “Look forth from the flowers to the sea; | |
| For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither, | |
| And men that love lightly may die—But we?” | |
| And the same wind sang, and the same waves whitened, | 45 |
| And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed, | |
| In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened, | |
| Love was dead. | |
| |
| Or they loved their life through, and then went whither? | |
| And were one to the end—but what end who knows? | 50 |
| Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, | |
| As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. | |
| Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? | |
| What love was ever as deep as a grave? | |
| They are loveless now as the grass above them | 55 |
| Or the wave. | |
| |
| All are at one now, roses and lovers, | |
| Not known of the cliffs and the fields and the sea. | |
| Not a breath of the time that has been hovers | |
| In the air now soft with a summer to be. | 60 |
| Not a breath shall there sweeten the seasons hereafter | |
| Of the flowers or the lovers that laugh now or weep, | |
| When, as they that are free now of weeping and laughter, | |
| We shall sleep. | |
| |
| Here death may deal not again forever; | 65 |
| Here change may come not till all change end. | |
| From the graves they have made they shall rise up never; | |
| Who have left naught living to ravage and rend. | |
| Earth, stones, and thorns of the wild ground growing, | |
| When the sun and the rain live, these shall be; | 70 |
| Till a last wind’s breath upon all these blowing | |
| Roll the sea. | |
| |
| Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, | |
| Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink | |
| Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble | 75 |
| The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, | |
| Here now in his triumph where all things falter, | |
| Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, | |
| As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, | |
| Death lies dead. | 80 |
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