Classic Poem

I T'S growing evening in my soul,
It darkens in.
At the gray window now and then
I hear them toll
The hour-and-day-long chimes of St. Etienne.

Indeed I'd not have lived elsewhere
Nor otherwise,
Nor as the dreary saying is
Been happier,
To wear the love of life within my eyes.

My heart's desolate meadow ways,
All wet and green,
Opened for her to wander in
A little space.
I'd have it even so as it has been.

I've lived the days that fly away,
I have a tale
To tell when age has made me pale
And hair of gray
Excuse the fancy shaking out her sail.

No one shall know what I intend.
Even as I feel
The aching voices make appeal
And swell and blend,
It seems to me I might stoop down to kneel

In memory of that day in June
When, all the land
Lying out in lazy summer fanned
Now and anon
By dying breezes from the Channel strand,

With nothing in our lives behind,
Nothing before,
In sunlight rich as melting ore
And wide as wind
We clomb the donjon tower of old Gisors

Thro' the portcullis botched in wood
And up, in fear,
A laddered darkness of a stair,
Up to the good
Sun-stricken prospect and the dazzling air.—

Even now I shade my breaking eyes.—
And by her side
Surely she saw my heart divide
Like paradise
For her to walk abroad in at noon-tide.

It swims about my memory.
I feel around
The country steeped in summer swound;
I feel the sigh
That all these years within her breast was bound.

Her fingers in my hand are laid.
I seem to gaze
Into the colours of her face,
And there is made
A quiver in my knees like meadow-grass’.

That time I lived the life I have:
A certain flower
Blooms in a hundred years one hour,
And what it gave
Is richer, no, nor more, but all its power.

The chimes have ended for to-day.
After midnight
Solitude blows her candle out;
Dreams go away,
And memory falls from the mast of thought.