DESOLATION

        Here where the rugged hills

Their gnarled loose bases grip into the earth,

And nothing save the sorrow of our birth

From seeing the seeing spirit fills,

Here where, among the grim, deserted stones,

        No hope of green for desertness atones,

                Or water's sound

        Make sweet the solitude around,

                Here may I lay

                        This day

                        My head

                Upon the ground and say

                    No better bed

Can he who has but himself for life have,

                Nor better grave.

                The sterile part

        Of love, feeling, was given me.

From the humanness even of a broken heart

                God set me free.

Out of my destiny no flower was made

                To grow.

All in me fated was not even to fade

Or een a vain and transient glory show.

                The very need

For love or joy or the human part of thought,

        Pride, and the abstract greed

For truth, that lifts the heart and doth allot

A value of self and world to consciousness ­-

                Even this bliss

        My empty heart has not.

                O weary born,

                Faded begun,

Gone from unseen shores to seen shores forlorn,

Sent out of sun‑gone unto unborn sun!

        The singer of his wish

                To sing no song,

The poor spendthrift rich

With knowing not for what to long.

        The Hyperion dispossessed

                Ere birth

Of that sun‑mansion set out beyond rest

Above the wide‑lit stretches of the earth.

        The uncrowned king

        That never saw the land

        Of which he oft doth sing,

And whose lost path he cannot understand

Nor know how to dream steps him there to bring.

                The priest deferred

                From the inner shrine.

The thought but never uttered word,

        The fore‑spilt wine,

The anxiousness for hope, the cold divine

Of anguish that no anguish human is,

        The solitary pine

On the cold hill of consciousness.

                The hour

                The lord

                Returns

Back to the polluted bower,

Home to the intransitable ford,

Again to the ice‑padlocked burns.

                The shadow

                Fixedly thrown

                On the green meadow

                By a tree overgrown

With leaves, but fruitless, flowerless and lone.

                The last

                Sight of a shore

Which the unhalting ship doth pass

And where it never shall pass more;

        But where the heart‑dim sailor knows

        Homes are happy because not his,

Lips warm because never his lips to kiss,

        Gardens fair because therein grows

                The unfound rose,

Hours soft, fate fresh, life a real fair elf

Because somewhere outside himself.