And the loneliest death is fair with a memory of her flowers, And the end of the road to Hell with the sense of her dews and showers! Who says that we shall pass, or the fame of us fade and die, While the living stars fulfil their round in the living sky? For the sire lives in his sons, and they pay their father’s debt, And the Lion has left a whelp wherever his claw was set; And the Lion in his whelps, his whelps that none shall brave, Is but less strong than Time and the great, all-whelming Grave. III A DESOLATE shore, The sinister seduction of the Moon, The menace of the irreclaimable Sea. Flaunting, tawdry and grim, From cloud to cloud along her beat, Leering her battered and inveterate leer, She signals where he prowls in the dark alone, Her horrible old man, Mumbling old oaths and warming His villainous old bones with villainous talk— The secrets of their grisly housekeeping Since they went out upon the pad In the first twilight of self-conscious Time: Growling, hideous and hoarse, Tales of unnumbered Ships, Goodly and strong, Companions of the Advance, In some vile alley of the night Waylaid and bludgeoned— Dead. Deep cellared in primeval ooze, Ruined, dishonoured, spoiled, They lie where the lean water-worm Crawls free of their secrets, and their broken sides Bulge with the slime of life. Thus they abide, Thus fouled and desecrate, The summons of the Trumpet, and the while These Twain, their murderers, Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued, Hang at the heels of their children—She aloft As in the shining streets, He as in ambush at some accomplice door. The stalwart Ships, The beautiful and bold adventurers! Stationed out yonder in the isle, The tall Policeman, Flashing his bull’s-eye, as he peers About him in the ancient vacancy, Tells them this way is safety—this way home. IV IT came with the threat of a waning moon And the wail of an ebbing tide, But many a woman has lived for less, And many a man has died; For life upon life took hold and passed, Strong in a fate set free, Out of the deep into the dark On for the years to be. Between the gloom of a waning moon And the song of an ebbing tide, Chance upon chance of love and death Took wing for the world so wide. O, leaf out of leaf is the way of the land, Wave out of wave of the sea And who shall reckon what lives may live In the life that we bade to be? V WHY, my heart, do we love her so? (Geraldine, Geraldine!) Why does the great sea ebb and flow?— Why does the round world spin? Geraldine, Geraldine, Bid me my life renew: What is it worth unless I win, Love—love and you?