Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble, Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink, Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink, Here now in his triumph where all things falter, Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread, As a god self-slain on his own strange altar, Death lies dead. RELICS This flower that smells of honey and the sea, White laurustine, seems in my hand to be A white star made of memory long ago Lit in the heaven of dear times dead to me. A star out of the skies love used to know Here held in hand, a stray left yet to show What flowers my heart was full of in the days That are long since gone down dead memory's flow. Dead memory that revives on doubtful ways, Half hearkening what the buried season says Out of the world of the unapparent dead Where the lost Aprils are, and the lost Mays. Flower, once I knew thy star-white brethren bred Nigh where the last of all the land made head Against the sea, a keen-faced promontory, Flowers on salt wind and sprinkled sea-dews fed. Their hearts were glad of the free place's glory; The wind that sang them all his stormy story Had talked all winter to the sleepless spray, And as the sea's their hues were hard and hoary. Like things born of the sea and the bright day, They laughed out at the years that could not slay, Live sons and joyous of unquiet hours, And stronger than all storms that range for prey. And in the close indomitable flowers A keen-edged odour of the sun and showers Was as the smell of the fresh honeycomb Made sweet for mouths of none but paramours. Out of the hard green wall of leaves that clomb They showed like windfalls of the snow-soft foam, Or feathers from the weary south-wind's wing, Fair as the spray that it came shoreward from. And thou, as white, what word hast thou to bring? If my heart hearken, whereof wilt thou sing? For some sign surely thou too hast to bear, Some word far south was taught thee of the spring. White like a white rose, not like these that were Taught of the wind's mouth and the winter air, Poor tender thing of soft Italian bloom, Where once thou grewest, what else for me grew there? Born in what spring and on what city's tomb, By whose hand wast thou reached, and plucked for whom? There hangs about thee, could the soul's sense tell, An odour as of love and of love's doom. Of days more sweet than thou wast sweet to smell, Of flower-soft thoughts that came to flower and fell, Of loves that lived a lily's life and died, Of dreams now dwelling where dead roses dwell. O white birth of the golden mountain-side That for the sun's love makes its bosom wide At sunrise, and with all its woods and flowers Takes in the morning to its heart of pride! Thou hast a word of that one land of ours, And of the fair town called of the Fair Towers, A word for me of my San Gimignan, A word of April's greenest-girdled hours.