And you have made a secret pact with Sleep, And when she comes not, or her feet delay, Toiled in low meadows of gray asphodel Under a pale sky where no shadows fall, Then, hooded like her, to my side you steal, And the night grows like a great rumouring sea, And you a boat, and I your passenger, And the tide lifts us with an indrawn breath Out, out upon the murmurs and the scents, Through spray of splintered star-beams, or white rage Of desperate moon-drawn waters—on and on To some blue sea’s unalterable calm That ever like a slow-swung mirror rocks The balanced breasts of sea-birds.... Yet other nights, my sister, you have been The storm, and I the leaf that fled on it Terrifically down voids that never knew The pity of creation—till your touch Has drawn me back to earth, as, in the dusk, A scent of lilac from an unseen hedge Bespeaks the hidden farm, the bedded cows, And safety, and the sense of human kind.... And I have climbed with you by secret ways To meet the dews of morning, and have seen The shy gods like retreating shadows fade, Or on the thymy reaches have surprised Old Chiron sleeping, and have waked him not.... Yet farther have I fared with you, and known Love and his sacred tremors, and the rites Of his most inward temple; and beyond Have seen the long grey waste where lonely thoughts Listen and wander where a city stood. And creeping down by waterless defiles Under an iron midnight, have I kept My vigil in the waste till dawn began To walk among the ruins, and I saw A sapling rooted in a fissured plinth, And a wren’s nest in the thunder-threatening hand Of some old god of granite.... THE FIRST YEAR [ALL SOULS’ DAY] (i) Here in my darkness I lie in the depths of things, As in a black wood whereof flowers and boughs are the roots, And the moist-branching tendrils and ligaments, Woven or spiralled or spreading, the roof of my head, Blossomless, birdless, starless, skied with black earth, A ponderous heaven. But they forget, Too often forget, and too soon, who above us Brush the dead leaves from our mounds, Scrape the moss from our names, And feel safe, They forget that one day in the year our earth becomes ether, And the roots binding us loosen As Peter’s chains dropped for the Angel, In that old story they read there; Forget—do they seek to remember?— That one day in the year we are with them, Rejoin them, hear them, behold them, and walk the old ways with them— One!