Long long years has he lain In thy garth, O sad Saint Cleather: What tears there, bared to weather, Will cleanse that stain!
Love is long-suffering, brave, Sweet, prompt, precious as a jewel; But O, too, Love is cruel, Cruel as the grave.
I PLAY my sweet old airs— The airs he knew When our love was true— But he does not balk His determined walk, And passes up the stairs.
I sing my songs once more, And presently hear His footstep near As if it would stay; But he goes his way, And shuts a distant door.
So I wait for another morn And another night In this soul-sick blight; And I wonder much As I sit, why such A woman as I was born!
MY spirit will not haunt the mound Above my breast, But travel, memory-possessed, To where my tremulous being found Life largest, best.
My phantom-footed shape will go When nightfall grays Hither and thither along the ways I and another used to know In backward days.
And there you’ll find me, if a jot You still should care For me, and for my curious air; If otherwise, then I shall not, For you, be there.
THERE are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand, Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly, I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.
In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man’s friend— Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend: Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I, But mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbour is the sky.
In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways— Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days: They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things— Men with a frigid sneer, and women with tart disparagings.
Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was, And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this, Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.
I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the moon, Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune; I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.