As I drive to the junction of lane and highway, And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette, I look behind at the fading byway, And see on its slope, now glistening wet, Distinctly yet Myself and a girlish form benighted In dry March weather. We climb the road Beside a chaise. We had just alighted To ease the sturdy pony's load When he sighed and slowed.
What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of Matters not much, nor to what it led, -
Something that life will not be balked of Without rude reason till hope is dead, And feeling fled.
It filled but a minute. But was there ever A time of such quality, since or before, In that hill's story? To one mind never, Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore, By thousands more.
Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border, And much have they faced there, first and last, Of the transitory in Earth's long order;
But what they record in colour and cast Is--that we two passed.
And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour, In mindless rote, has ruled from sight The substance now, one phantom figure Remains on the slope, as when that night Saw us alight.
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking, I look back at it amid the rain For the very last time; for my sand is sinking, And I shall traverse old love's domain Never again.
March 1913.
PLACES
Nobody says: Ah, that is the place Where chanced, in the hollow of years ago, What none of the Three Towns cared to know--
The birth of a little girl of grace -
The sweetest the house saw, first or last;
Yet it was so On that day long past.
Nobody thinks: There, there she lay In a room by the Hoe, like the bud of a flower, And listened, just after the bedtime hour, To the stammering chimes that used to play The quaint Old Hundred-and-Thirteenth tune In Saint Andrew's tower Night, morn, and noon.
Nobody calls to mind that here Upon Boterel Hill, where the carters skid, With cheeks whose airy flush outbid Fresh fruit in bloom, and free of fear, She cantered down, as if she must fall (Though she never did), To the charm of all.
Nay: one there is to whom these things, That nobody else's mind calls back, Have a savour that scenes in being lack, And a presence more than the actual brings;
To whom to-day is beneaped and stale, And its urgent clack But a vapid tale.
PLYMOUTH, March 1913.