Words fiery-hearted yet, dreams and desires
With living looks intolerable, regrets

Whose voice comes as the voice of an only child
Heard from the grave: shapes of a Might-Have-

Been

Beautiful, miserable, distraught—

The Law no man may baffle denied and slew.

The spell-bound ships stand as at gaze

To let the marvel by. The grey road glooms. . . .

What grace, what glamour, what wild will,

Transfigure the shadows? Whose,

Heart of my heart, Soul of my soul, but yours?

Ghosts-ghosts-the sapphirine air

Teems with them even to the gleaming ends
Of the wild day-spring! Ghosts,

Everywhere everywhere-till I and you

At last-dear love, at last!—

Are in the dreaming, even as Life and Death,
Twin-ministers of the unoriginal Will.

ΧΙ

GULLS in an aëry morrice
Gleam and vanish and gleam.
The full sea, sleepily basking,
Dreams under skies of dream.

Gulls in an aëry morrice

Circle and swoop and close

Fuller and ever fuller

The rose of the morning blows.

Gulls, in an aëry morrice

Frolicking, float and fade . . . O, the way of a bird in the sunshine, The way of a man with a maid!

XII

SOME starlit garden grey with dew,
Some chamber flushed with wine and fire,
What matters where, so I and you
Are worthy our desire?

Behind, a past that scolds and jeers
For ungirt loins and lamps unlit ;
In front, the unmanageable years,
The trap upon the Pit ;

Think on the shame of dreams for deeds,

The scandal of unnatural strife,

The slur upon immortal needs,
The treason done to life:

Arise! no more a living lie,
And with me quicken and control
Some memory that shall magnify
The universal Soul.

XIII

To James McNeill Whistler

UNDER a stagnant sky,

Gloom out of gloom uncoiling into gloom,

The River, jaded and forlorn,

Welters and wanders wearily-wretchedly—on ;

Yet in and out among the ribs

Of the old skeleton bridge, as in the piles
Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls,
Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories,
Lingers to babble to a broken tune

(Once, O, the unvoiced music of my heart!)
So melancholy a soliloquy

It sounds as it might tell

The secret of the unending grief-in-grain,
The terror of Time and Change and Death,
That wastes this floating, transitory world.

What of the incantation

That forced the huddled shapes on yonder shore

To take and wear the night

Like a material majesty?

That touched the shafts of wavering fire

About this miserable welter and wash

(River, O River of Journeys, River of Dreams !)— Into long, shining signals from the panes

Of an enchanted pleasure-house,

Where life and life might live life lost in life
For ever and evermore?

O Death! O Change! O Time!
Without you, O, the insufferable eyes
Of these poor Might-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays!