English

Here is the long-bided hour: the labor of years is accomplished.
Why should this sadness unplumbed secretly weigh on my heart?
Is it, my work being done, I stand like a laborer, useless,
One who has taken his pay, a stranger to tasks that are new?
Is it the work I regret, the silent companion of midnight,
Friend of the golden-haired Dawn, friend of the gods of the hearth?

Here is the crab tree,
Firm and erect,
In spite of the thin soil,
In spite of neglect.
The twisted root grapples
For sap with the rock,
And draws the hard juice
To the succulent top:
Here are wild apples,
Here's a tart crop!

No outlandish grafting
That ever grew soft
In a sweet air of Persia,
Or safe Roman croft;
Unsheltered by steading,
Rock-rooted and grown,
A great tree of Erin,
It stands up alone,
A forest tree spreading
Where forests are gone.

Here is no peace, although the air has fainted,
— And footfalls die and are buried in deep grass,
And reverential trees are softly painted
— Like saints upon an oriel of glass.

The pattern of the atmosphere is spherical,
— A bubble in the silence of the sun,
Blown thinner by the very breath of miracle
— Around a core of loud confusion.

Here is no virtue; here is nothing blessed
— Save this foredoomed suspension of the end;
Faith is the blossom, but the fruit is cursed;
— Go hence, for it is useless to pretend.

Here is Kit Logan with her love-child come
To Lady Helen's gate:
Then down sweeps Helen from the Italian room,
She with her child of hate.

Kit's boy was born of violent hot desire,
Helen's of hate and dread:
Poor girl, betrayed to union with the Squire,
Loathing her marriage bed.

Kit Logan, who is father to your boy?
But Helen knows, too well:
Listen what biting taunts they both employ,
Watch their red anger swell.

Yet each would give her undying soul to be
Changed to the other's place.

" HERE is Honor, the dying knight,
And here is Truth, the snuffed-out light,
And here is Faith, the broken staff,
And here is Knowledge, the throttled laugh.
And there are Fame, the lost surprise,
Virtue, the uncontested prize,
And Sacrifice, the suicide,
And here the wilted flower, Pride.
Under the crust of things that die,
Living, unfathomed, here am I. "

Here is a rarity
Brings no premium:
A Neo-Stoic
Agro-Bohemian.

One-third insomnia
One-third art
One-third The Man
With the Cardiac Heart.

When I itch
It's not from fleas,
But from a bad case
Of Burke's Disease.

What then in sum
Bedevils me?
I'm flunking my Required Course
In Advanced Burkology.

Here , in this sequestered close
Bloom the hyacinth and rose;
Here beside the modest stock
Flaunts the flaring hollyhock;
Here, without a pang, one sees
Ranks, conditions, and degrees.

All the seasons run their race
In this quiet resting-place;
Peach, and apricot, and fig
Here will ripen, and grow big;
Here is store and overplus, —
More had not Alcinoüs!

Here, in alleys cool and green,
Far ahead the thrush is seen;
Here along the southern wall
Keeps the bee his festival;

Here in this inland garden
Unrumorous of surf,
Here where the willows warden
Only the sunny turf,

Here in the windy weather,
Here where the lake wind lulls,
Slowly on silver feather
Drift overhead the gulls.

O heart estranged of grieving
What is a sea-bird's wing?
What beauty past believing
Are you remembering?

Here in the pine shade is the nest of night,
Lined deep with shadows, odorous and dim,
And here he stays his sweeping flight,
Here where the strongest wind is lulled for him,
He lingers brooding until dawn,
While all the trembling stars move on and on.

Under the cliff there drops a lonely fall,
Deep and half heard its thunder lifts and booms;
Afar the loons with eerie call
Haunt all the bays, and breaking through the glooms
Upfloats that cry of light despair,
As if a demon laughed upon the air.

Here in the dark what ghostly figures press! —
No phantom of the Past, or grim or sad;
No wailing spirit of woe; no spectre, clad
In white and wandering cloud, whose dumb distress
Is that its crime it never may confess;
No shape from the strewn sea; nor they that add
The link of Life and Death, — the tearless mad,
That live nor die in dreary nothingness:
But blessed spirits waiting to be born —
Thoughts to unlock the fettering chains of Things;
The Better Time; the Universal Good.
Their smile is like the joyous break of morn;