“IT is sad that so many of worth,
Still in the flesh,” soughed the yew,
“Misjudge their lot whom kindly earth
Secludes from view.
“They ride their diurnal round
Each day-span’s sum of hours
In peerless ease, without jolt or bound
Or ache like ours.
“If the living could but hear
What is heard by my roots as they creep
Round the restful flock, and the things said there,
No one would weep.”
“‘Now set among the wise,’
They say: ‘Enlarged in scope,
That no God trumpet us to rise
We truly hope.’”
I listened to his strange tale
In the mood that stillness brings,
And I grew to accept as the day wore pale
That show of things.
“FOR LIFE I HAD NEVER CARED GREATLY”
FOR Life I had never cared greatly,
As worth a man’s while;
Peradventures unsought,
Peradventures that finished in nought,
Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately
Unwon by its style.
In earliest years—why I know not—
I viewed it askance;
Conditions of doubt,
Conditions that leaked slowly out,
May haply have bent me to stand and to show not
Much zest for its dance.
With symphonies soft and sweet colour
It courted me then,
Till evasions seemed wrong,
Till evasions gave in to its song,
And I warmed, until living aloofly loomed duller
Than life among men.
Anew I found nought to set eyes on,
When, lifting its hand,
It uncloaked a star,
Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar,
And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon
As bright as a brand.
And so, the rough highway forgetting,
I pace hill and dale
Regarding the sky,
Regarding the vision on high,
And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting
My pilgrimage fail.