“The night has fallen; not a sound In the forbidden sacred grove Unless a petal hit the ground, Nor any human sight within it But the crushed grass where we have lain; And the moon is wilder every minute. Oh, Solomon! let us try again.” AN IMAGE FROM A PAST LIFE HE Never until this night have I been stirred. The elaborate star-light has thrown reflections On the dark stream, Till all the eddies gleam; And thereupon there comes that scream From terrified, invisible beast or bird: Image of poignant recollection. SHE An image of my heart that is smitten through Out of all likelihood, or reason. And when at last, Youth’s bitterness being past, I had thought that all my days were cast Amid most lovely places; smitten as though It had not learned its lesson. HE Why have you laid your hands upon my eyes? What can have suddenly alarmed you Whereon ’twere best My eyes should never rest? What is there but the slowly fading west, The river imaging the flashing skies, All that to this moment charmed you? SHE A sweetheart from another life floats there As though she had been forced to linger From vague distress Or arrogant loveliness. Merely to loosen out a tress Among the starry eddies of her hair Upon the paleness of a finger. HE But why should you grow suddenly afraid And start--I at your shoulder-- Imagining That any night could bring An image up, or anything Even to eyes that beauty had driven mad, But images to make me fonder. SHE Now she has thrown her arms above her head; Whether she threw them up to flout me, Or but to find, Now that no fingers bind, That her hair streams upon the wind, I do not know, that know I am afraid Of the hovering thing night brought me. UNDER SATURN Do not because this day I have grown saturnine Imagine that some lost love, unassailable Being a portion of my youth, can make me pine And so forget the comfort that no words can tell Your coming brought; though I acknowledge I have gone On a fantastic ride, my horses flanks were spurred By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen, And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard, And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died Before my time, seem like a vivid memory. You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay-- No, no, not said, but cried it out--“You have come again And surely after twenty years it was time to come.” I am thinking of a child’s vow sworn in vain Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home. November, 1919. EASTER, 1916