Voices of girls with scarves around their heads.

XVII

To write one song, I said

To write one song, I said,

As sad as the sad wind

That walks around my bed,

Having one simple fall

As a candle-flame swells, and is thinned,

As a curtain stirs by the wall

—For this I must visit the dead,

Headstone and wet cross,

Paths where the mourners tread,

A solitary bird,

These call up the shade of loss,

Shape word to word.

That stones would shine like gold

Above each sodden grave,

This, I had not foretold,

Nor the birds’ clamour, nor

The image morning gave

Of more and ever more,

As some vast seven-piled wave,

Mane-flinging, manifold,

Streams at an endless shore.

XVIII

If grief could burn out

If grief could burn out

Like a sunken coal,

The heart would rest quiet,

The unrent soul

Be still as a veil;

But I have watched all night

The fire grow silent,

The grey ash soft:

And I stir the stubborn flint

The flames have left,

And grief stirs, and the deft

Heart lies impotent.

XIX

Ugly Sister

I will climb thirty steps to my room,

Lie on my bed;

Let the music, the violin, cornet and drum

Drowse from my head.

Since I was not bewitched in adolescence

And brought to love,

I will attend to the trees and their gracious silence,

To winds that move.

XX

I see a girl dragged by the wrists

I see a girl dragged by the wrists

Across a dazzling field of snow,

And there is nothing in me that resists.

Once it would not be so;

Once I should choke with powerless jealousies;

But now I seem devoid of subtlety,

As simple as the things I see,

Being no more, no less, than two weak eyes.

There is snow everywhere,

Snow in one blinding light.

Even snow smudged in her hair

As she laughs and struggles, and pretends to fight;

And still I have no regret;

Nothing so wild, nothing so glad as she

Rears up in me,

And would not, though I watched an hour yet.

So I walk on. Perhaps what I desired

—That long and sickly hope, someday to be

As she is—gave a flicker and expired;

For the first time I’m content to see

What poor mortar and bricks

I have to build with, knowing that I can

Never in seventy years be more a man

Than now—a sack of meal upon two sticks.

So I walk on. And yet the first brick’s laid.

Else how should two old ragged men

Clearing the drifts with shovels and a spade

Bring up my mind to fever-pitch again?

How should they sweep the girl clean from my heart,

With no more done

Than to stand coughing in the sun,

Then stoop and shovel snow onto a cart?

The beauty dries my throat.

Now they express,

All that’s content to wear a worn-out coat,

All actions done in patient hopelessness,

All that ignores the silences of death,