Fearless riders of the gale,
In your bleak eyes is the memory
Of sinking ships:
Desire, unsatisfied,
Droops from your wings.

You lie at dusk
In the sea's ebbing cradles,
Unresponsive to its mother mood;
Or hover and swoop,
Snatching your food and rising again,
Greedy,
Unthanking.

You veer and steer your callous course,
Unloved of other birds;
And in your soulless cry
Is the mocking echo
Of woman's weeping in the night.

The Saddle—where that August noon we basked
Above the gorse in the quivering golden glow—
Was a smother of white mist and driving snow
That, stinging, blinding and bewildering, tasked
My utmost powers as in the wan twilight
I crossed the ridge this afternoon alone,
Plunging thigh-deep through drifts of whirling white
In a wind that seemed to strip me to the bone.

Yet as I struggled through the drifts I knew
No sharp regret for golden days gone by;
For in my heart was the blaze and scent and bloom
Of unforgotten summers, as I thought of you

A negro in a dandy livery
Of blue and silver, dangling from one hand
A rose-emblazoned bandbox jauntily,
With conscious smile of gold and ivory
He ambles down the side-walk. …
And I see
Him naked in a steamy forest-land
Of dense green swamp beneath a dripping tree,
Crouched for the spring and grinning greedily.

He cleaned out middens for his daily bread:
War took him overseas and in a bed
Of lilies-of-the-valley dropt him dead.

Night into the universe
Frees us from the walls of day,
And Death, into the starry All,
When ourselves have passed away.

Easter Day breaks!
Christ rises! Mercy every way is infinite—
Earth breaks up; time drops away;
In flows heaven with its new day
Of endless life—
What is left for us save in growth
Of soul to rise up, …
From the gift looking to the giver,
And from the cistern to the river,
And from the finite to infinity,
And from man's dust to God's divinity.

They do not live who choose the middle way,
Whom ecstasy and anguish have not known,
Who scale no trembling heights, nor plumb the lone
Depths of an aching darkness in bright day.
They miss the passion with the pain, the gay
High tides that sweep the spirit to its own,
The lifting surge of music, the dear tone
Of a loved voice in pleading or in play.
They miss the hurts and stumblings; surely fear
Is never theirs, nor groping in the night;
In their serene cool weather come no dread
Torrents or tempests to corrupt their sight,

When the last day is ended,
And the nights are through;
When the last sun is buried
In its grave of blue;

When the stars are snuffed like candles,
And the seas no longer fret;
When the winds unlearn their cunning,
And the storms forget;

When the last lip is palsied,
And the last prayer said;
Love shall reign immortal
While the worlds lie dead!

Not endless life, but endless love, I crave,
The gladness and the calm of holier springs,
The hope that makes men resolute and brave,
The joyful life in the great Life of Things.

Tapping the rails as he went by
And driving the slack wedges tight,
He walked towards the morning sky
Between two golden lines of light
That dwindled slowly into one
Sheer golden rail that ran right on
Over the fells into the sun.

And dazzling in his eyes it shone,
That golden track, as left and right
He swung his clinking hammer—ay,
'Twas dazzling after that long night
In Hindfell tunnel, working by
A smoky flare and making good
The track the rains had torn. …
Clink, clink,
On the sound metal—on the wood