In the _Place d’Armes_, the dusty planes, all Summer through Dozed with the market women in the sun and scarcely stirred To see the quiet things that crossed the Square--, A tiny funeral, the flying shadow of a bird, The hump-backed barber Célestin Lemaire, Old madame Michel in her three-wheeled chair, And filing past to Vespers, two and two, The _demoiselles_ of the _pensionnat_. Towed like a ship through the harbour bar, Safe into port, where _le petit Jésus_ Perhaps makes nothing of the look they shot at you: _Si, c’est défendu, mais que voulez-vous?_ It was the sun. The sunshine weaves A pattern on dull stones: the sunshine leaves The portraiture of dreams upon the eyes Before it dies: All Summer through The dust hung white upon the drowsy planes Till suddenly they woke with the Autumn rains. It is not only the little boys Who have hardly got away from toys, But I, who am seventeen next year, Some nights, in bed, have grown cold to hear That lonely passion of the rain Which makes you think of being dead, And of somewhere living to lay your head As if you were a child again, Crying for one thing, known and near Your empty heart, to still the hunger and the fear That pelts and beats with it against the pane. But I remember smiling too At all the sun’s soft tricks and those Autumn dreads In winter time, when the grey light broke slowly through The frosted window-lace to drag us shivering from our beds. And when at dusk the singing wind swung down Straight from the stars to the dark country roads Beyond the twinkling town, Striking the leafless poplar boughs as he went by, Like some poor, stray dog by the wayside lying dead, We left behind us the old world of dread, I and the wind as we strode whistling on under the Winter sky.