Classic Poem

When the hamlet and the dogs are sleeping
The green caverns of the mountain quake;
Rows of old men come at midnight, weeping,
Weeping for the legendary lake.
To and fro they interlace the moonlight,
To and fro with stately rhythm glide,
All together to a mournful measure
Piling old runes in a massy treasure
Round the oak roots of the mountain-side.
Then before the morning's eyes
View that trancèd sacrifice
They have vanished to the caverns where the water courses rise.

Swift the chattering and bright
Little hamlet shakes the night
From its heels when larks awake,—
Not a peasant in it caring
As he whistles on his faring
If, beyond a granddam's knowing,
Where sunburnt feet and scythes are going
The transparent waves were flowing
Of a legendary lake;
If leaning palaces and trees
With grey moss clinging at their knees
Gazed in those blue deeps, forsooth,
At dawn, remembering their youth,
Or kings in robes like chrysolite
Shining through the summer night
Their blameless covenant did write.
Jacques, a-bowing neath his rake
That combs the brown leaf from the grass
Beside the road folk take from mass
Shakes his scraggling beard in ruth
At the legendary lake,
And the Evil One's deceiving
For a pomp that never was.
Is it matter for believing
That, where the Father's dwelling be
And every night the Father pours his tea
Shining monsters, fixed of eye,
Swam passing one another by?
And the iridescent glass
Boys dug rumbling out of the ground,—
Bowls and baubles to a rumbling sound,—
Were the Evil One's deceiving
For a pomp that never was.
Not a coney skin he'd stake,
Not a yellow straw, in truth,
On the ruined forest hoary
Or the cross-unhallowed glory
Of the legendary lake.