‘Where have you been? You look queer,
You look black.’ ‘O my dear,
All alone to Hell and back,
By my known, my desert track;
Though once I might, like you, have gone
By candlelight to Babylon.’

‘What have you seen?’ ‘No flame or fires,
But such a stream of terrors and desires.
O my child, nothing's there
Like your fingers, like your hair,
Nor this table, nor this chair;
Nothing certain but despair.’

Timothy, where are you walking to-day,
Slouching along with your hands in your pockets,
Your eyes dreamy blue, as old painters portray
Your girl-mother's eyes in your grandmother's lockets?

Timothy, why are you trudging the street
With that delicate, far-away look on your face,
Heedless of jostling folk that you meet;—
Are you walking this town, or some more remote place?

Have you returned to Lyonesse realm,
To shadow-spun towers, to tourneys and feasts,
Where a brighter sun gleams on your damascened helm,

I am fire and dew and sunshine,
I am mist on the foamy wave,
I'm the rippling note from the field-lark's throat,
I'm the jewel hid in the cave.

I'm the lightning flash on the mountain,
And the cold rose-red of the dawn,
I'm the odor of pine and purple vine,
And the willowy leap of the fawn.

I'm the sigh of the south wind of autumn,
I'm the scent of the earth at first rain,
I'm the wild honker call of the earliest fall,
I'm the yellow of ripening grain.

I'm the music no singer has dreamed of,

I have forgotten the country in the North, where my people lived before me.
The stone walls curving over green hills; the air as pure as spirits could breathe in heaven, but much more cold.
The cry of the curlews, like a voice given to the sky; the dark bogs and the stones.
The brown streams, always talking to the lonely sheep.
My people before me had brown eyes like the streams, and bodies built to endure the battering wind like walls. And their forgotten faces, I think, were shy, resolved, and fresh.
They lived in stone houses, under the black-shadowing sycamores.

The day my great-aunt Sarah died, how I remember well,
She lay alone with daffodils and never rang her bell.
She lay as quiet as her chair and books upon her shelf.
She gave no trouble to her nurse, no trouble to herself.
She was more quiet than the bare, ploughed fields that lay outside.
The knowledge in her listening face as certain was, and wide.

When the Comforters of Job
Had filled up each weary lobe
With suggestions, there appeared—
Goatee foot and goatee beard—
Most appropriately from mist,
Satan, the Psychiatrist.

He said, “I've seen and overheard
How you look, and every word
You have uttered makes me guess
I can help you in distress.
First, let not your mind be bumptious:
Jonah, gulphed by his Subconscious,
Stands for fact. The parable
Is, of course, the whopping Whale.
Your Subconscious is your trouble
Which your Reason can but double.

O strong Republic of the nobler years
Whose white feet shine beside time's fairer flood
That shall flow on the clearer for our blood
Now shed, and the less brackish for our tears;
When time and truth have put out hopes and fears
With certitude, and love has burst the bud,
If these whose powers then down the wind shall scud
Still live to feel thee smite their eyes and ears,
When thy foot's tread hath crushed their crowns and creeds,
Care thou not then to crush the beast that bleeds,
The snake whose belly cleaveth to the sod,

A summer mist
Enveloping those dark leaves
Perfumes the air
In my youth I saw
And did not see.

What shall meadow hold to please me,
Spreading wide its scented waving,
How shall quiet mosses ease me,
Or the night-wind cool my craving?
Hill and hedgerow, cloud-sweet sky,
Echo our good-by.

Bud unplucked and leaf a-quiver,
Bird that lifts a tuneless trilling,
Restless dream of brook and river,
All June's cup a wasted spilling—
You and I so thirsty-hearted!—
Summer knows us parted.

Oh Landor, in your quiet grave
What room is there for wrath or pride?
The peace your heart did break and crave
Is yours—and what beside?

Do you, with all that ghostly throng
You met in dreams, now such as they,
Wander in earnest talk along
Acheron's waters grey?

And does your now immortal maid
For whom you wrote and lived and sighed,
Move there, a pale and lovely shade
For ever by your side?

In that dim world of falling leaves
Which spoke for you no word of fear,
I pray that now your soul receives