Rise wistfully, and fall away, and pass,
Frail music of impossible delight,
Steal into silence over the dark grass,
Dreams of the inner caverns of the night.
Strange that in those few hesitating bars
Are life and death, the orbits of the stars.


IX

Calmer than mirrored waters after rain,
Calmer than all the swaying tides of sleep,
Profounder than the stony eyes that keep
Afternoon vigil on the ruined plain;
So drift they by, the cloudy forms that creep
In stealthy whiteness through the windless grain;
The twilight ebbs, and washed in the long rain,
I am their shepherd, pasturing my sheep.

They can not change; they can but wander here;
That is their destiny and also mine;
The fuel that I was, the flames they were,
Are vanished down the lost horizon line.
Likewise the stars have died; the silence hears
Only the footfall of the pastured years.


X

I stood like some worn image carved of stone