The First: Youth.
Youth is a vale afire with hollyhocks,
Robbed by those greedy publicans the bees,
Where cuckoos call like fairy story clocks
And blue-jays holla in the apple trees.
No thunderheads come up with black despair
To dim its arching orchard's leafy sheen,
But clouds like ivory towers pile in air
And gothic woods stand, cloistered, cool and green.
It is a glade where earliest flowers grow,
Along the melting snowbanks in the spring,
The waxen-stemmed anemones first show,
And Madame Woodthrush preens her dainty wing.
White hyacinths like masts with flower spars
Stand in the woods and dot each bosky lawn,
Like distant sails or clusters of pale stars
Against an emerald sky at early dawn.
Cleft in life's hills, Youth is a sheltered swale
Where for a while we lie in indolence
And watch time's waterfall thin as a veil
That falls and hangs and smokes in long suspense,
And there a fountain spouts of purest joy
That feeds the fall, birds whistle on its brim,
Often I lay beside it when a boy
And saw the future mirrored vague and dim--
Heaven was there a strangely clouded page,
Two rivers on the plains met like a "Y,"
And blue as ghosts the mountains of old age
Rolled down the western sky.
The Second: High Tide o' Life.
High Tide o' Life's a city by the sea,
By tide rips where the flood comes shouting in,
On straits that bring up ships with spicèd freights
And sails as scarlet as a woman's sin.
A mart where merchants chaffer on the docks
For pearls and feather work and jewel'd shoon,
And hurry off to feast when all the clocks
Strike anvil-tongued a thousand-noted noon.
High Tide o' Life's a city proudly vain,
With minarets from whence men can descry,
Like domes of giants' houses, chain on chain,
Death's arid mountains arabesque the sky.
And hoary uplands wave with tasseled corn,
And long sun pencils strike the hills, afar,
The walled towns smolder in the fire of morn
Like embers of a sullen, fallen star.
High Tide o' Life's an upland where no breath
Of frost has ever crept across the grass,
But days as idle as a shibboleth
Like golden coins are quickly spent. They pass
In hidden valleys fit for secret lust,
Where strange winged-sins like griffin-hippogryphs
Bask with their glittering scales in white-hot dust
Along a sunstruck face of basalt cliffs.
It is an isle in red, witch-haunted seas
Where lovers' nights, the jade-faced moon stands still,
Pouring an amber twilight through the trees,
Across the copper ocean and the hill.
High Tide o' Life's a plain laid easterly
In realms ruled over by some fabled _Djinn_
Where rivers blue as _lapis-lazuli_
Rush down to meet the flood tides roaring in.
The Third: Old Age.
Old age is like a bleak plateau,
About--around--the dead leaves blow
In shouting, keening winter wind,
Below life's plains lie cloud bedimmed
Below.
In long gray lines the dead leaves go,
The stone blue shadows limn the snow,
The thwacking branches creak and mutter
In scarecrow desolation utter.
In scarecrow
Clothes the last leaves flutter
And in dry hollows rasp and putter
About the starved, old, carven faces,
Around the ancient burial places
About, around, below.
That land is very old and lonely
Beneath--among--the cliffs its only
Hope is kindling firelight
Before the coming of the night,
Before
There are no travelers there
Left any more to come and share
The shelter from the ghost wolves' patter,
The helter-skelter, bony clatter
The helter-skelter
And the scatter
Of riven, driven souls that chatter
Beneath the cliffs, while in and out
Among them raves the death wolves' rout,
Beneath, among, before.
And ever from each waning fire
Away--away--against desire
The death wolves snatch their struggling toll,
And snarl and harry down a soul,
And snarl
And harry down one other,
And then another and another,
To where Death sits, an idiot,
That stirs all things into a pot,
That stirs
Till everything is nought
Except the stirrer and the pot;
Beside eternities midriff,
Where time is bordered by a cliff,
With creaking bones and dismal whoop
He makes God's bitter charnel soup--
"Away," he cries, "or we shall quarrel,
Away, my wolves, for more and snarl
Away! Away! and snarl."