With his old familiar loves.

Sheffield, 1917




BOOK IV
THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS


I

As dreamers through their dreams surmise
The stealthy passage of the night,
We half-remember smoky skies
And city streets and hurrying flight,
Another world from this clear height
Whereon our starry altars rise.

Beneath our towering waste of stone
The fragile ships creep to and fro,
By tempest riven and overthrown,
The toys of these same tides that flow
Against our pillars far below
With faint, insistent monotone.

The snarling winds against our rocks
Hurl breakers in a fleecy mass,
Like wolves that chase stampeding flocks