Go, spend your penny, Beauty, when you will, In the grave’s darkness let the stamp be lost. The water still will bubble from the hill, And April quick the meadows with her ghost; Over the grass the daffodils will shiver, The primroses with their pale beauty abound, The blackbird be a lover and make quiver With his glad singing the great soul of the ground; So that if the body rot, it will not matter; Up in the earth the great game will go on, The coming of spring and the running of the water, And the young things glad of the womb’s darkness gone. And the joy we felt will be a part of the glory In the lover’s kiss that makes the old couple’s story. Let that which is to come be as it may, Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense, The flies are happy in the summer day, Flies will be happy many summers hence. Time with his antique breeds that built the Sphinx, Time with her men to come whose wings will tower, Poured and will pour, not as the wise man thinks, But with blind force, to each his little hour. And when the hour has struck, comes death or change, Which, whether good or ill we cannot tell, But the blind planet will wander through her range Bearing men like us who will serve as well. The sun will rise, the winds that ever move Will blow our dust that once were men in love. _From GALLIPOLI_ EPILOGUE Even so was wisdom proven blind, So courage failed, so strength was chained; Even so the gods, whose seeing mind Is not as ours, ordained. _Selections from_ _REYNARD THE FOX_ On old Cold Crendon’s windy tops Grows wintrily Blown Hilcote Copse, Wind-bitten beech with badger barrows, Where brocks eat wasp-grubs with their marrows, And foxes lie on short-grassed turf, Nose between paws, to hear the surf Of wind in the beeches drowsily. There was our fox bred lustily Three years before, and there he berthed, Under the beech-roots snugly earthed, With a roof of flint and a floor of chalk And ten bitten hens’ heads each on its stalk, Some rabbits’ paws, some fur from scuts, A badger’s corpse and a smell of guts. And there on the night before my tale He trotted out for a point in the vale. * * * * *