Wreckt ones and dark of mind,
With the poor fruit, after their piteous kind.
And if you take some Old One to the fields,
To see what Nature yields
With fullest hands to men already free,
It well may be,
As on some indecipherable book
The Guest will look,
With eyes too old,--too old, too dim to see;
Too old, too old to learn;
Or to discern--
Before it slips away,
The joy of such a late half-holiday!
Proffer those starved eyes your belated cup:
They look not up.
Too late, too late for any sky to do
Brief kindness with its blue.
And what behold they, then?
In the shamed moment, when
Old eyes bow down again?

_Down in the night and blackness of the heart,
The drowned things start.
And he recks nothing of the meadow air,
Because of what is There.
Lost things of hope and sorrow without tongue:
The human lilies, sprung
Out of the ooze, and trodden,
Even as they breathed and clung!
Lost lilies, bruised and sodden;