have no spirit of skill with equal fingers
At sign to sharpen or to slacken strings;
I keep no time of song with gold-perched singers
And chirp of linnets on the wrists of kings.

I am thy storm-thrush of the days that darken,
Thy petrel in the foam that bears thy bark
To port through night and tempest; if thou hearken,
My voice is in thy heaven before the lark.

My song is in the mist that hides thy morning,
My cry is up before the day for thee;

I have heard thee and beheld thee and give warning,
Before thy wheels divide the sky and sea.

Birds shall wake with thee voiced and feathered fairer, To see in summer what I see in spring;

I have eyes and heart to endure thee, O thunder-bearer,
And they shall be who shall have tongues to sing.

I have love at least, and have not fear, and part not
From thine unnavigable and wingless way;
Thou tarriest, and I have not said thou art not,
Nor all thy night long have denied thy day.

Darkness to daylight shall lift up thy pæan,

Hill to hill thunder, vale cry back to vale, With wind-notes as of eagles Eschylean,

And Sappho singing in the nightingale.

Sung to by mighty sons of dawn and daughters,
Of this night's songs thine ear shall keep but one;
That supreme song which shook the channelled waters,
And called thee skyward as God calls the sun.

Come, though all heaven again be fire above thee;
Though death before thee come to clear thy sky;
Let us but see in his thy face who love thee;
Yea, though thou slay us, arise and let us die.

FROM "HERTHA”

The tree many-rooted
That swells to the sky

With frondage red-fruited,

The life-tree am I;

In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye

shall live and not die.

But the Gods of your fashion

That take and that give,

In their pity and passion

That scourge and forgive,

They are worms that are bred in the bark that falls

off; they shall die and not live.

My own blood is what stanches
The wounds in my bark;

Stars caught in my branches

Make day of the dark,

And are worshipped as suns till the sunrise shall tread out their fires as a spark.

Where dead ages hide under

The live roots of the tree,
In my darkness the thunder

Makes utterance of me;

In the clash of my boughs with each other ye hear the waves sound of the sea.

That noise is of Time,

As his feathers are spread

And his feet set to climb

Through the boughs overhead,

And my foliage rings round him and rustles, and branches are bent with his tread.

The storm-winds of ages

Blow through me and cease,

The war-wind that rages,

The spring-wind of peace,

Ere the breath of them roughen my tresses, ere one of

my blossoms increase.

All sounds of all changes,

All shadows and lights

On the world's mountain-ranges

And stream-riven heights,

Whose tongue is the wind's tongue and language of storm-clouds on earth-shaking nights;

All forms of all faces,

All works of all hands

In unsearchable places

Of time-stricken lands,

All death and all life, and all reigns and all ruins, drop through me as sands.

Though sore be my burden.

And more than ye know,

And my growth have no guerdon

But only to grow,

Yet I fail not of growing for lightnings above me or deathworms below.

These too have their part in me,

As I too in these ;

Such fire is at heart in me,

Such sap is this tree's,

Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite

lands and of seas.

In the spring-coloured hours
When my mind was as May's,
There brake forth of me flowers
By centuries of days,

Strong blossoms with perfume of manhood, shot
out from my spirit as rays.

And the sound of them springing

And smell of their shoots

Were as warmth and sweet singing

And strength to my roots;

And the lives of my children made perfect with freedom of soul were my fruits.

A FORSAKEN GARDEN

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland, At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee, Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.

A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the

graves of

its roses

Now lie dead.