| XXVIII When we are old and those rejoicing veins Are frosty channels to a muted stream, And out of all our burning there remains No feeblest spark to fire us, even in a dream, This be our solace: that it was not said When we were young and warm and in our prime, Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, Sleeping away the unreturning time. O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love, When morning strikes her spear upon the land, And we must rise and arm us and reprove The insolent daylight with a steady hand, Be not discountenanced if the knowing know We rose from rapture but an hour ago. XXIX Heart, have no pity on this house of bone: Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy. No man holds mortgage on it; it is your own; To give, to sell at auction, to destroy. When you are blind to moonlight on the bed, When you are deaf to gravel on the pane, Shall quavering caution from this house instead Cluck forth at summer mischief in the lane? All that delightful youth forbears to spend Molestful age inherits, and the ground Will have us; therefore, while we're young, my friend — The Latin's vulgar, but the advice is sound. Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here For age to invest in compromise and fear. XXX Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution's power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It may well be. I do not think I would. XXXI When we that wore the myrtle wear the dust, And years of darkness cover up our eyes, And all our arrogant laughter and sweet lust Keep counsel with the scruples of the wise; When boys and girls that now are in the loins Of croaking lads, dip oar into the sea, — And who are these that dive for copper coins? No longer we, my love, no longer we — Then let the fortunate breathers of the air, When we lie speechless in the muffling mould, Tease not our ghosts with slander, pause not there To say that love is false and soon grows cold, But pass in silence the mute grave of two Who lived and died believing love was true. XXXII Time, that is pleased to lengthen out the day For grieving lovers parted or denied, And pleased to hurry the sweet hours away From such as lie enchanted side by side, Is not my kinsman; nay, my feudal foe Is he that in my childhood was the thief Of all my mother's beauty, and in woe My father bowed, and brought our house to grief. Thus, though he think to touch with hateful frost Your treasured curls, and your clear forehead line, And so persuade me from you, he has lost; Never shall he inherit what was mine. When time and all his tricks have done their worst, Still will I hold you dear, and him accurst. XXXIII Sorrowful dreams remembered after waking Shadow with dolour all the candid day; Even as I read, the silly tears out-breaking Splash on my hands and shut the page away . . . Grief at the root, a dark and secret dolour, Harder to bear than wind-and-weather grief, Clutching the rose, draining its cheek of colour, Drying the bud, curling the opened leaf. Deep is the pond — although the edge be shallow, Frank in the sun, revealing fish and stone, Climbing ashore to turtle-head and mallow — Black at the centre beats a heart unknown. Desolate dreams pursue me out of sleep; Weeping I wake; waking, I weep, I weep. XXXIV Most wicked words! forbear to speak them out. Utter them not again; blaspheme no more Against our love with maxims learned from Doubt: Lest Death should get his foot inside the door. We are surrounded by a hundred foes; And he that at your bidding joins our feast, I stake my heart upon it, is one of those, Not in their councils does he sit the least. Hark not his whisper: he is Time's ally, Kinsman to death, and leman of Despair: Believe that I shall love you till I die; Believe, and thrust him forth; and arm the stair; And top the walls with spikes and splintered glass That he pass gutted should again he pass. XXXV Clearly my ruined garden as it stood Before the frost came on it I recall — Stiff marigolds, and what a trunk of wood The zinnia had, that was the first to fall; These pale and oozy stalks, these hanging leaves Nerveless and darkened, dripping in the sun, Cannot gainsay me, though the spirit grieves And wrings its hands at what the frost has done. If in widening silence you should guess I read the moment with recording eyes, Taking your love and all your loveliness Into a listening body hushed of sighs . . . Though summer's rife and the warm rose in season, Rebuke me not: I have a winter reason. XXXVI Hearing your words, and not a word among them Tuned to my liking, on a salty day When inland woods were pushed by winds that flung them Hissing to leeward like a ton of spray, I though how off the Matinicus the tide Came pounding in, came running through the Gut, While from the Rock the warning whistle cried, And children whimpered, and the doors blew shut; There in the autumn when the men go forth, With slapping skirts and the island women stand In gardens stripped and scattered, peering north, With dahlia tubers dripping from the hand: The wind of their endurance, driving south, Flattened you words against your speaking mouth. |
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