Half-awake I walked A dimly-seen sweet hawthorn lane Until sleep came; I lingered at a gate and talked A little with a lonely lamb. He told me of the great still night, Of calm starlight, And of the lady moon, who'd stoop For a kiss sometimes; Of grass as soft as sleep, of rhymes The tired flowers sang: The ageless April tales Of how, when sheep grew old, As their faith told, They went without a pang To far green fields, where fall Perpetual streams that call To deathless nightingales. And then I saw, hard by, A shepherd lad with shining eyes, And round him gathered one by one Countless sheep, snow-white; More and more they crowded With tender cries, Till all the field was full Of voices and of coming sheep. Countless they came, and I Watched, until deep As dream-fields lie I was asleep. THE TREES AT NIGHT Under vague silver moonlight The trees are lovely and ghostly, In the pale blue of the night There are few stars to see. The leaves are green still, but brown-blent: They stir not, only known By a poignant delicate scent To the lonely moon blown. The lonely lovely trees sigh For summer spent and gone: A few homing leaves drift by, Poor souls bewildered and wan. THE DEAD How shall the living be comforted for the dead When they are gone, and nothing's left behind But a vague music of the words they said And a fast-fading image in the mind? Let no forgetting sully that dim grace; Our heart's infirmity is too easily won To set a new love in the old love's place And seek fresh vanity under the sun. Time brings to us at last, as night the stars, The starry silence of eternity: For there is no discharge in our long wars, Nor balm for wounds, nor love's security. Be patient to the end, and you shall sleep Pillowed on heartsease and forget to weep. * * * * * D.H. LAWRENCE SNAKE A snake came to my water-trough On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, To drink there. In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree I came down the steps with my pitcher And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me. He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough And rested his throat upon the stone bottom, And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness, He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently. Someone was before me at my water-trough, And I, like a second-comer, waiting. He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do, And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do, And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, And stooped and drank a little more, Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.