Sorrow keeps a stone house Builded grim and gray; Pleasure hath a straw thatch Hung with lanterns gay. On her petty savings Niggard Prudence thrives, Passion, ere the moonset, Bleeds a thousand lives.
Virtue hath a warm hearth-- Folly’s dead and drowned; Friendship hath her own when Love is underground. Ah! for me the madness Of the spendthrift flower, Burning myriad sunsets In a single hour.
_For this is the joy of the rose: That it blows, And goes._
Through halls of vanished pleasure, And hold of vanished power, And crypt of faith forgotten, I came to Ludlow tower.
A-top of arch and stairway, Of crypt, and donjon cell, Of council hall, and chamber, Of wall, and ditch, and well,
High over grated turrets Where clinging ivies run, A thousand scarlet poppies Enticed the rising sun,
Upon the topmost turret, With death and damp below,-- Three hundred years of spoilage,-- The crimson poppies grow.
This hall it was that bred him, These hills that knew him brave, The gentlest English singer That fills an English grave.
How have they heart to blossom So cruel gay and red, When beauty so hath perished And valour so hath sped?
When knights so fair are rotten, And captains true asleep, And singing lips are dust-stopped Six English earth-feet deep?
When ages old remind me How much hath gone for naught, What wretched ghost remaineth Of all that flesh hath wrought;
Of love and song and warring, Of adventure and play, Of art and comely building, Of faith and form and fray--
I’ll mind the flowers of pleasure, Of short-lived youth and sleep, That drank the sunny weather A-top of Ludlow keep.
A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars; A pungent odor from the dusty sage; A sudden stirring of the huddled herds; A breaking of the distant table-lands Through purple mists ascending, and the flare Of water-ditches silver in the light; A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world; A sudden sickness for the hills of home.
Canst thou conjure a vanished morn of spring, Or bid the ashes of the sunset glow Again to redness? Are we strong to wring From trodden grapes the juice drunk long ago? Can leafy longings stir in autumn’s blood, Or can I wear a pearl dissolved in wine, Or go a-Maying in a winter wood, Or paint with youth thy wasted cheek, or mine? What bloom, then, shall abide, since ours hath sped? Thou art more lost to me than they who dwell In Egypt’s sepulchres, long ages fled; And would I touch--Ah me! I might as well Covet the gold of Helen’s vanished head, Or kiss back Cleopatra from the dead!