And you, my lovely one, What can I leave to you, who, you having left, Am utterly bereft? What in my store of visionary dowers Is not already yours? What silences, what hours Of peace passing all understanding; days Made lyric by your beauty and its praise; Years neither time can tarnish, nor death mar, Wherein you shined as steadfast as a star In my bleak night, heedless of the cloud-wrack Scudding in torn fleeces black Of my dark moods, as those who rule the far Star-haunted pleasaunces of heaven are? So think but lightly of that afternoon With white clouds climbing a blue sky in June When a boy worshipped under dreaming trees, Who touched your hand, and sought your eyes. ... Ah, cease, Not these, not these... Nor yet those nights when icy Brathay thundered Under his bridges, and ghostly mountains wondered At the white blossoming of a Christmas rose More stainless than their snows; Nor even of those placid days together Mellow as early autumn’s amber weather When beech is ankleted with fire, and old Elms wear their livery of yellow gold, When orchards all are laden with increase, And the quiet earth hath fruited, and knows peace Oh, think not overmuch on those sweet years Lest their last fruit be tears,-- Your tears, beloved, that were my utmost pain,-- But rather, dream again How that a lover, half poet and half child, An eager spirit of fragile fancies wild Compact, adored the beauty and truth in you: To your own truth be true; And when, not mournfully, you turn this page Consider still your starry heritage, Continue in your loveliness, a star To gladden me from afar Even where there is no light In my last night. LOCHANILAUN This is the image of my last content: My soul shall be a little lonely lake, So hidden that no shadow of man may break The folding of its mountain battlement; Only the beautiful and innocent Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake Of churn’d cloud in a howling wind’s descent. For there shall be no terror in the night When stars that I have loved are born in me, And cloudy darkness I will hold most fair; But this shall be the end of my delight: That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see Your image in the mirrored beauty there. LETTERMORE These winter days on Lettermore The brown west wind it sweeps the bay, And icy rain beats on the bare Unhomely fields that perish there: The stony fields of Lettermore That drink the white Atlantic spray. And men who starve on Lettermore, Cursing the haggard, hungry surf, Will souse the autumn’s bruisèd grains To light dark fires within their brains And fight with stones on Lettermore Or sprawl beside the smoky turf.