Classic Poem

Across the darkling hills of Dandenong
Stalks Twilight like a ghost, and from the bay
There comes a deep, sonorous, sea born sound,
With flying spears of rain, and in the west
Fierce remnants of a stormy sunset glare
On heights that look like heaps of sullen gold
Against the leaden shadows of the slopes.

When day is dying off the windy wold,
And sleet is beating through the whistling woods;
What time the weeping maiden, April, sits
Amongst the faded relics of the leaves;
Then Memory often turns to old old days,
And wanders, like a wraith, into the Past;
And if a man has loved and suffered much
The phantom of his youth is apt to come,
And flit before him as he sits alone,
And float about him like a fitful dream,
A sweet sad light amidst the gathering gloom.

Ah! when the hair is thin and shot with grey,
And he who wears it has a mournful sense
That he is growing old before his time,
How trying then to such a one must be
The apparition of his former self
Arrayed with strength and love, and joy, and hope,
And radiant with those aspirations young
That flood with light the face, what time our blood
Is full of spring's abundant light and fire,
And lusty as the green September sap!

While sitting near the dream of what he was
And musing on the fact of what he is ,
The soft dead days before him, one by one,
Float, dim as Banquo's issue in the play;
And these with thin sad voices seem to say —
" We too were part of thee: we each are waifs —
Pale perished waifs of thee, and Love, and Youth. "
Nor come the days alone. Old spots — old scenes,
Sweet-coloured places in another land
Untrodden by his feet for many years,
As in a dream-scape, grow upon his sight,
Like alienated beauty. Then it is
He makes a darkness with his hollowed hands
About his faded face; and then it is
He fain would find some Lethe which would bring
That state of rest and great forgetfulness
In which the Past with all its lights and shade
Is wholly drowned and nothing comes to vex
The soul with hints of sorrow born of death,
Or broken hopes, or disappointed loves.

At nightfall, darling, after days austere,
Before the moody fragments of my fire,
I often sit alone and think of you;
And though I know that now these thoughts are sin,
And though the shadow of another stands
Between us twain, and though I keenly feel
How much you wronged me in deceptive days,
I have no power to kill a lawless love,
And cannot choose but call you darling still.
Ah, Maud! there is no passion like the first:
I feel it when I breathe your slow sweet name,
I know it when I hear the songs you loved,
It burns me when I pass you in the street;
In all my dreams your shadow floats about,
In all my walks your presence fills the time,
In all my verse there is a trace of you;
And, since our alienation, I have felt
That sense of loss which never leaves a man,
But kills his pleasure in the glad green earth,
And spills his love for God's most perfect days,
And makes him tired and sick of all that is.