Your hardships and your joys,
Robust, rough-spoken, gentle-hearted
Sunburnt boys!




Gray Days



A soaking sedge,
A faded field, a leafless hill and hedge,

Low clouds and rain,
And loneliness and languor worse than pain.

Mottled with moss,
Each gravestone holds to heaven a patient Cross.

Shrill streaks of light
Two sycamores' clean-limbed, funereal white,

And low between,
The sombre cedar and the ivy green.

Upon the stone
Of each in turn who called this land his own

The gray rain beats