Lie still, for the wind on the warm seas dozes,

And the wind is unquieter yet than thou art.

Does a thought in thee still as a thorn's wound smart?

Does the fang still fret thee of hope deferred?

What bids the lips of thy sleep dispart? Only the song of a secret bird.

The green land's name that a charm encloses,

It never was writ in the traveller's chart,

And sweet on its trees as the fruit that grows is,

It never was sold in the merchant's mart.

The swallows of dreams through its

dim fields dart,

Alas, the joy, the sorrow, and the scorn, That clothed thy life with hopes and sins and fears,

And gave thee stones for bread and tares for corn

And plume-plucked gaol-birds for thy starveling peers,

Till death clipt close their flight with shameful shears;

Till shifts came short and loves were hard to hire,

When lilt of song nor twitch of twangling wire

Could buy thee bread or kisses; when light fame

Spurned like a ball and haled through brake and briar,

Villon, our sad bad glad mad brother's name!

Hardly, to speak for summer one sweet word

Of summer's self scarce heard.

But higher the steep green sterile fields, thickset

With flowerless hawthorn even to the upward verge

Whence the woods gathering watch new cliffs emerge,

Higher than their highest of crowns that sea-winds fret,

Holds fast, for all that night or wind can say,

Some pale pure color yet,

Too dim for green and luminous for gray. Between the climbing inland cliffs above And these beneath that breast and break the bay,

A barren peace too soft for hate or love Broods on an hour too dim for night or day.

O wind, O wingless wind that walk'st the sea,

Weak wind, wing-broken, wearier wind than we,

Who are yet not spirit-broken, maimed like thee,

Who wail not in our inward night as thou

In the outer darkness now,

What word has the old sea given thee for mine ear

From thy faint lips to hear?

For some word would she send me, knowing not how.

Nay, what far other word

Than ever of her was spoken, or of me Or all my winged white kinsfolk of the

sea

Between fresh wave and wave was ever heard,

Cleaves the clear dark enwinding tree with tree

Too close for stars to separate and to see Enmeshed in multitudinous unity? What voice of what strong God hath stormed and stirred

The fortressed rock of silence, rent apart Even to the core Night's all maternal heart?

What voice of God grown heavenlier in a bird,

Make keener of edge to smite

Than lighting,-yea, thou knowest, O mother Night,

Keen as that cry from thy strange children senti

1 In Aeschylus' Eumenides.

Wherewith the Athenian judgmentshrine was rent,

For wrath that all their wrath was vainly

spent,

Their wrath for wrong made right
By justice in her own divine despite
That bade pass forth unblamed

The sinless matricide and unashamed? Yea, what new cry is this, what note more bright

Than their song's wing of words was dark of flight,

What word is this thou hast heard, Thine and not thine or theirs, O Night, what word

More keen than lightning and more sweet than light?

As all men's hearts grew godlike in one bird

And all those hearts cried on thee, crying with might,

Hear us, O mother Night!

Dumb is the mouth of darkness as of death:

Light, sound and life are one

In the eyes and lips of dawn that draw the sun

To hear what first child's word with glimmering breath

Their weak wan weanling child the twilight saith;

But night makes answer none.

God, if thou be god,-bird, if bird thou be,

Do thou then answer me.

For but one word, what wind soever blow,

Is blown up usward ever from the sea. In fruitless years of youth dead long ago [and snow

And deep beneath their own dead leaves Buried, I heard with bitter heart and sere The same sea's word unchangeable, nor

knew

But that mine own life-days were changeless too,

And sharp and salt with unshed tear on tear,

And cold and fierce and barren; and my soul,

Sickening, swam weakly with bated breath

In a deep sea like death,

And felt the wind buffet her face with

brine

Hard, and harsh thought on thought in long bleak roll

Those water-waifs that but the sea-wind steers,

Flakes of glad foam or flowers on footless ways

That take the wind in season and the

sun.

And when the wind wills is their season done.

For all my days as all thy days from birth

My heart as thy heart was in me as thee.

Fire; and not all the fountains of the

sea

Have waves enough to quench it, nor on earth

Is fuel enough to feed,

While day sows night, and night sows day for seed.

We were not marked for sorrow. thou nor I,

For joy nor sorrow, sister, were we made, To take delight and grief to live and die,

Assuaged by pleasures or by pains affrayed

That melt men's hearts and alter; we retain

A memory mastering pleasure and all pain,

A spirit within the sense of ear and eye, A soul behind the soul, that seeks and

sings

And makes our life move only with its wings

And feed but from its lips, that in return

Feed of our hearts wherein the old fires that burn

Have strength not to consume Nor glory enough to exalt us past our doom.

Ah, ah, the doom (thou knowest whence rang that wail)

Of the shrill nightingale! (From whose wild lips, thou knowest, that wail was thrown) For round about her have the great gods cast

A wing-borne body, and clothed her close and fast

With a sweet life that hath no part in

moan.

But me, for me(how hadst thou heart to hear?) [spear. Remains a sundering with the two-edged

With eyes, but not with song, too swift to swerve;

Yet might not even thine eyes estranged estrange her,

Who seeing thee too, but inly, burn and bleed

Like that pale princess-priest of Priam's seed,

For stranger service gave thee guerdon, stranger

If this indeed be guerdon, this indeed
Her mercy, this thy meed-

That thou, being more than all we born, being higher

Than all heads crowned of him that only gives

The light whereby man lives,

The bay that bids man moved of God's desire

Lay hand on lute or lyre,

Set lip to trumpet or deflowered green reed

If this were given thee for a grace indeed,

That thou, being first of all these, thou

alone

Shouldst have the grace to die not, but to live,

One that earth's fire could burn not, nor the sea

Quench; nor might human doom take hold on thee;

All praise, all pity, all dreams have done thee wrong,

All love, with eyes love-blinded from above;

Song's priestess, mad with joy and pain of love,

Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song.