The wonder this. For some there are no trees;
Or in the trees no beauty and no mirth:--
Those dullest millions, pent
In life-long banishment
From all the gifts and creatures of the earth,
Shut in the inner darkness of the town;
Those blighted things you see,
But the Sun sees not, at its going down:--
Warped outcasts of some human forestry;
Blind victims of the blind,
Wreckt ones and dark of mind,
With the poor fruit, after their piteous kind.
And if you take some Old One to the fields,
To see what Nature yields
With fullest hands to men already free,
It well may be,
As on some indecipherable book
The Guest will look,
With eyes too old,--too old, too dim to see;
Too old, too old to learn;
Or to discern--
Before it slips away,
The joy of such a late half-holiday!
Proffer those starved eyes your belated cup:
They look not up.
Too late, too late for any sky to do
Brief kindness with its blue.
And what behold they, then?
In the shamed moment, when
Old eyes bow down again?
_Down in the night and blackness of the heart,
The drowned things start.
And he recks nothing of the meadow air,
Because of what is There.
Lost things of hope and sorrow without tongue:
The human lilies, sprung
Out of the ooze, and trodden,
Even as they breathed and clung!
Lost lilies, bruised and sodden;
Lost faces, gleaming there,
Where misery blasphemes the sacred young!
Mute outcry, most, of those
Small suffering hands defrauded of their rose;
Faces the daylight shuns;
Ruinous faces of the little ones,--
Pale witness, unaware.
Starved lips, and withering blood--
O broken in the bud!--
Blank eyes, and blighted hair._
(_O golden, golden tree!
Bear yet awhile with me._)
So is it, haply, when
Dull eyes look up, and then
Dull eyes look down again.
Waste no vain holiday on such as these;
For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
V
For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
And with what eye-shut ease
We leave them, at the last, for company,
The Tree,
Whose two stark boughs no springtime yet unfurled,
Ever, since time began;
Nor bloom so strange to see!--
Behold, the Man,
With His two arms outstretched to fold the world.
_O, do you remember?--How it came to be?
Far, golden windows gazing from the shore;
Golden ebb of daylight; heart could hold no more:
Belovèd and Belovèd, and the sea._
_Westward the sun,--low, slow and golden;
Eastward the moon climbed, honey-pale.
O do you remember? while our eyes were holden,
Close, close upon us,--the Golden Sail?
Wind-swift she came,--thing of living flame,
Sea-breathing Glory, to make the heart afraid!
The ripples, fold on fold
Of coiling gold,
Trailing a thousand ways
Her golden maze,
Rocked in a golden tumult, every one,
The gondolas, the ships ..
Westward she made .....
A portent from the sky,--gone by, gone by,
To golden, far eclipse; ...
Into the Sun._
_Behold, a mystery
That shook to golden throbbing all the sea.
Oh, and what needed one more wonder be
For thee and me, Belovèd? thee and me?_