They sleep well here, These fisher-folk who passed their anxious days In fierce Atlantic ways; And found not there, Beneath the long curled wave, So quiet a grave. And they sleep well These peasant-folk, who told their lives away, From day to market-day, As one should tell, With patient industry, Some sad old rosary. And now night falls, Me, tempest-tost, and driven from pillar to post, A poor worn ghost, This quiet pasture calls; And dear dead people with pale hands Beckon me to their lands. TO WILLIAM THEODORE PETERS ON HIS RENAISSANCE CLOAK The cherry-coloured velvet of your cloak Time hath not soiled: its fair embroideries Gleam as when centuries ago they spoke To what bright gallant of Her Daintiness, Whose slender fingers, long since dust and dead, For love or courtesy embroidered The cherry-coloured velvet of this cloak. Ah! cunning flowers of silk and silver thread, That mock mortality? the broidering dame, The page they decked, the kings and courts are dead: Gone the age beautiful; Lorenzo's name, The Borgia's pride are but an empty sound; But lustrous still upon their velvet ground, Time spares these flowers of silk and silver thread. Gone is that age of pageant and of pride: Yet don your cloak, and haply it shall seem, The curtain of old time is set aside; As through the sadder coloured throng you gleam; We see once more fair dame and gallant gay, The glamour and the grace of yesterday: The elder, brighter age of pomp and pride. THE SEA-CHANGE Where river and ocean meet in a great tempestuous frown, Beyond the bar, where on the dunes the white-capped rollers break; Above, one windmill stands forlorn on the arid, grassy down: I will set my sail on a stormy day and cross the bar and seek That I have sought and never found, the exquisite one crown, Which crowns one day with all its calm the passionate and the weak. When the mad winds are unreined, wilt thou not storm, my sea? (I have ever loved thee so, I have ever done thee wrong In drear terrestrial ways.) When I trust myself to thee With a last great hope, arise and sing thine ultimate, great song Sung to so many better men, O sing at last to me, That which when once a man has heard, he heeds not over long. I will bend my sail when the great day comes; thy kisses on my face Shall seal all things that are old, outworn; and anger and regret Shall fade as the dreams and days shall fade, and in thy salt embrace, When thy fierce caresses blind mine eyes and my limbs grow stark and set, All that I know in all my mind shall no more have a place: The weary ways of men and one woman I shall forget. _Point du Pouldu_. DREGS