High Tide o' Life's a city proudly vain, With minarets from whence men can descry, Like domes of giants' houses, chain on chain, Death's arid mountains arabesque the sky. And hoary uplands wave with tasseled corn, And long sun pencils strike the hills, afar, The walled towns smolder in the fire of morn Like embers of a sullen, fallen star. High Tide o' Life's an upland where no breath Of frost has ever crept across the grass, But days as idle as a shibboleth Like golden coins are quickly spent. They pass In hidden valleys fit for secret lust, Where strange winged-sins like griffin-hippogryphs Bask with their glittering scales in white-hot dust Along a sunstruck face of basalt cliffs. It is an isle in red, witch-haunted seas Where lovers' nights, the jade-faced moon stands still, Pouring an amber twilight through the trees, Across the copper ocean and the hill. High Tide o' Life's a plain laid easterly In realms ruled over by some fabled _Djinn_ Where rivers blue as _lapis-lazuli_ Rush down to meet the flood tides roaring in. The Third: Old Age. Old age is like a bleak plateau, About--around--the dead leaves blow In shouting, keening winter wind, Below life's plains lie cloud bedimmed Below. In long gray lines the dead leaves go, The stone blue shadows limn the snow, The thwacking branches creak and mutter In scarecrow desolation utter. In scarecrow Clothes the last leaves flutter And in dry hollows rasp and putter About the starved, old, carven faces, Around the ancient burial places About, around, below. That land is very old and lonely Beneath--among--the cliffs its only Hope is kindling firelight Before the coming of the night, Before There are no travelers there Left any more to come and share The shelter from the ghost wolves' patter, The helter-skelter, bony clatter The helter-skelter And the scatter Of riven, driven souls that chatter Beneath the cliffs, while in and out Among them raves the death wolves' rout, Beneath, among, before. And ever from each waning fire Away--away--against desire The death wolves snatch their struggling toll, And snarl and harry down a soul, And snarl And harry down one other, And then another and another, To where Death sits, an idiot, That stirs all things into a pot, That stirs Till everything is nought Except the stirrer and the pot; Beside eternities midriff, Where time is bordered by a cliff, With creaking bones and dismal whoop He makes God's bitter charnel soup-- "Away," he cries, "or we shall quarrel, Away, my wolves, for more and snarl Away! Away! and snarl." THE HERMITAGE OF BELLS. A Drama of Sound. _Dramatis Personae._ The King. The Queen. The World, The Five Bells. The Earth. _Time_: The Middle Ages. _Place_: Lusitania. I.