And there the pickers come, picking for town Those dancing daffodils; all day they pick; Hard-featured women, weather-beaten brown, Or swarthy-red, the colour of old brick. At noon they break their meats under the rick. The smoke of all three farms lifts blue in air As though man’s passionate mind had never suffered there. And sometimes as they rest an old man comes, Shepherd or carter, to the hedgerow-side, And looks upon their gangrel tribe, and hums, And thinks all gone to wreck since master died; And sighs over a passionate harvest-tide Which Death’s red sickle reaped under those hills, There, in the quiet fields among the daffodils. THE RIVER. The steaming river loitered like old blood On which the tugboat bearing Michael beat, Past whitened horse bones sticking in the mud. The reed stems looked like metal in the heat. Then the banks fell away, and there were neat; Red herds of sullen cattle drifting slow. A fish leaped, making rings, making the dead blood flow. Wormed hard-wood piles were driv’n in the river bank, The steamer threshed alongside with sick screws Churning the mud below her till it stank; Big gassy butcher-bubbles burst on the ooze. There Michael went ashore; as glad to lose One not a native there, the Gauchos flung His broken gear ashore, one waved, a bell was rung. The bowfast was cast off, the screw revolved, Making a bloodier bubbling; rattling rope Fell to the hatch, the engine’s tune resolved Into its steadier beat of rise and slope; The steamer went her way; and Michael’s hope Died as she lessened; he was there alone. The lowing of the cattle made a gradual moan. He thought of Mary, but the thought was dim; That was another life, lived long before. His mind was in new worlds which altered him. The startling present left no room for more. The sullen river lipped, the sky, the shore Were vaster than of old, and lonely, lonely. Sky and low hills of grass and moaning cattle only. THE RETURN. Soon he was at the Foxholes, at the place Whither, from over sea, his heart had turned Often at evening-ends in times of grace. But little outward change his eye discerned; A red rose at her bedroom window burned, Just as before. Even as of old the wasps Poised at the yellow plums; the gate creaked on its hasps And the white fantails sidled on the roof Just as before; their pink feet, even as of old, Printed the frosty morning’s rime with proof. Still the zew-tallat’s thatch was green with mould; The apples on the withered boughs were gold. Men and the times were changed: “And I,” said he, “Will go and not return, since she is not for me.