You are too swift for poetry, too fleet For any musèd numbers to ensnare: Swifter than music dying on the air Or bloom upon rose-petals, fades the sweet Vanishing magic of your flying feet, Your poisèd finger, and your shining hair: Words cannot tell how wonderful you were, Or how one gesture made a joy complete. And since you know my pen may never capture The transient swift loveliness of you, Come, let us salve our sense of the world’s loss Remembering, with a melancholy rapture, How many dancing-girls ... and poets too... Dream in the dust of Hecatompylos. GHOSTLY LOVES ’Oh why,’ my darling prayeth me, ’must you sing For ever of ghostly loves, phantasmal passion? Seeing that you never loved me after that fashion And the love I gave was not a phantom thing, But delight of eager lips and strong arms folding The beauty of yielding arms and of smooth shoulder, All fluent grace of which you were the moulder: And I.... Oh, I was happy for your holding.’ ’Ah, do you not know, my dearest, have you not seen The shadow that broodeth over things that perish: How age may mock sweet moments that have been And death defile the beauty that we cherish? Wherefore, sweet spirit, I thank thee for thy giving: ’Tis my spirit that embraceth thee dead or living.’ FEBRUARY The robin on my lawn, He was the first to tell How, in the frozen dawn, This miracle befell, Waking the meadows white With hoar, the iron road Agleam with splintered light, And ice where water flowed: Till, when the low sun drank Those milky mists that cloak Hanger and hollied bank, The winter world awoke To hear the feeble bleat Of lambs on downland farms: A blackbird whistled sweet; Old beeches moved their arms Into a mellow haze Aerial, newly-born: And I, alone, agaze, Stood waiting for the thorn To break in blossom white Or burst in a green flame... So, in a single night, Fair February came, Bidding my lips to sing Or whisper their surprise, With all the joy of spring And morning in her eyes. SONG OF THE DARK AGES We digged our trenches on the down Beside old barrows, and the wet White chalk we shovelled from below; It lay like drifts of thawing snow On parados and parapet: Until a pick neither struck flint Nor split the yielding chalky soil, But only calcined human bone: Poor relic of that Age of Stone Whose ossuary was our spoil. Home we marched singing in the rain, And all the while, beneath our song, I mused how many springs should wane And still our trenches scar the plain: The monument of an old wrong.