As its bordering poplars bent To gusts off the plains above. Old stone château and farms, Home of her birth and her love! On the thread of the pasture you trace, By the river, their milk, for miles, Spotted once with the English tent, In days of the tocsin’s alarms, To tower of the tallest of piles, The country’s surveyor breast-high. Home of her birth and her love! Home of a diligent race; Thrifty, deft-handed to ply Shuttle or needle, and woo Sun to the roots of the pear Frogging each mud-walled cot. The elders had known her in arms. There plucked we the bluet, her hue Of the deeper forget-me-not; Well wedding her ripe-wheat hair. I saw, unsighting: her heart I saw, and the home of her love There printed, mournfully rent: Her ebbing adieu, her adieu, And the stride of the Shadow athwart. For one of our Autumns there! . . . Straight as the flight of a dove We went, swift winging we went. We trod solid ground, we breathed air, The heavens were unbroken. Break they, The word of the world is adieu: Her word: and the torrents are round, The jawed wolf-waters of prey. We stand upon isles, who stand: A Shadow before us, and back, A phantom the habited land. We may cry to the Sunderer, spare That dearest! he loosens his pack. Arrows we breathe, not air. The memories tenderly bound To us are a drifting crew, Amid grey-gapped waters for ground. Alone do we stand, each one, Till rootless as they we strew Those deeps of the corse-like stare At a foreign and stony sun. Eyes had I but for the scene Of my circle, what neighbourly grew. If haply no finger lay out To the figures of days that had been, I gathered my herb, and endured; My old cloak wrapped me about. Unfooted was ground-ivy blue, Whose rustic shrewd odour allured In Spring’s fresh of morning: unseen Her favourite wood-sorrel bell As yet, though the leaves’ green floor Awaited their flower, that would tell Of a red-veined moist yestreen, With its droop and the hues it wore, When we two stood overnight One, in the dark van-glow On our hill-top, seeing beneath Our household’s twinkle of light Through spruce-boughs, gem of a wreath.