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The Visit

There is a bed-time sadness in this place
That seemed ahead so promising and sweet,
Almost like music calling us from home;

But now the staircase does not need our feet,
The drawer is ignorant of my brush and comb,
The mirror quite indifferent to your face.

Coursegoules

Beside the road to Coursegoules
Are shepherdess and sheep.
The sun is hot. The shade is cool
Beside the road to Coursegoules,
And every man's a fool, a fool
Who does not fall asleep
Beside the road to Coursegoules
And shepherdess and sheep.

Ancestors

I have forgotten the country in the North, where my people lived before me.
The stone walls curving over green hills; the air as pure as spirits could breathe in heaven, but much more cold.
The cry of the curlews, like a voice given to the sky; the dark bogs and the stones.
The brown streams, always talking to the lonely sheep.
My people before me had brown eyes like the streams, and bodies built to endure the battering wind like walls. And their forgotten faces, I think, were shy, resolved, and fresh.
They lived in stone houses, under the black-shadowing sycamores.

At the End

The day my great-aunt Sarah died, how I remember well,
She lay alone with daffodils and never rang her bell.
She lay as quiet as her chair and books upon her shelf.
She gave no trouble to her nurse, no trouble to herself.
She was more quiet than the bare, ploughed fields that lay outside.
The knowledge in her listening face as certain was, and wide.
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