THE SUNDEW

A little marsh-plant, yellow green,
And pricked at lip with tender red.
Tread close, and either way you tread
Some faint black water jets between
Lest you should bruise the curious head.

A live thing may be; who shall know?
The summer knows and suffers it;
For the cool moss is thick and sweet
Each side, and saves the blossom so
That it lives out the long June heat.

The deep scent of the heather burns
About it; breathless though it be,
Bow down and worship; more than we
Is the least flower whose life returns,
Least weed renascent in the sea.

We are vexed and cumbered in earth's sight
With wants, with many memories;

These see their mother what she is,
Glad-growing, till August leave more bright
The apple-coloured cranberries.

Wind blows and bleaches the strong grass,
Blown all one way to shelter it

From trample of strayed kine, with feet

Felt heavier than the moorhen was,

Strayed up past patches of wild wheat.

You call it sundew: how it

grows,
If with its colour it have breath,
If life taste sweet to it, if death
Pain its soft petal, no man knows :
Man has no sight or sense that saith.

My sundew, grown of gentle days,
In these green miles the spring begun
Thy growth ere April had half done
With the soft secret of her ways
Or June made ready for the sun.

O red-lipped mouth of marsh-flower,
I have a secret halved with thee.
The name that is love's name to me
Thou knowest, and the face of her
Who is my festival to see.

The hard sun, as thy petals knew,
Coloured the heavy moss-water :
Thou wert not worth green midsummer
Nor fit to live to August blue,

O sundew, not remembering her.

FROM PRELUDE TO "SONGS BEFORE SUNRISE"

Play then and sing; we too have played,
We likewise, in that subtle shade.

We too have twisted through our hair
Such tendrils as the wild Loves wear,
And heard what mirth the Mænads made,
Till the wind blew our garlands bare
And left their roses disarrayed,

And smote the summer with strange air,

And disengirdled and discrowned

The limbs and locks that vine-wreaths bound.

We too have tracked by star-proof trees

The tempest of the Thyiades

Scare the loud night on hills that hid

The blood-feasts of the Bassarid,

Heard their song's iron cadences

Fright the wolf hungering from the kid, Outroar the lion-throated seas,

Outchide the north-wind if it chid, And hush the torrent-tongued ravines With thunders of their tambourines.

But the fierce flute whose notes acclaim
Dim goddesses of fiery fame,

S

Cymbal and clamorous kettledrum,
Timbrels and tabrets, all are dumb
That turned the high chill air to flame;
The singing tongues of fire are numb
That called on Cotys by her name
Edonian, till they felt her come
And maddened, and her mystic face
Lightened along the streams of Thrace.

For Pleasure slumberless and pale,
And Passion with rejected veil,

Pass, and the tempest-footed throng
Of hours that follow them with song
Till their feet flag and voices fail,

And lips that were so loud so long
Learn silence, or a wearier wail;

So keen is change, and time so strong,
To weave the robes of life and rend
And weave again till life have end.

But weak is change, but strengthless time,
To take the light from heaven, or climb

The hills of heaven with wasting feet.
Songs they can stop that earth found meet,

But the stars keep their ageless rhyme ;

Flowers they can slay that spring thought sweet, But the stars keep their spring sublime;

Passions and pleasures can defeat,

Actions and agonies control,

And life and death, but not the soul.

Because man's soul is man's God still,
What wind soever waft his will

Across the waves of day and night
To port or shipwreck, left or right,
By shores and shoals of good and ill;

And still its flame at mainmast height
Through the rent air that foam-flakes fill
Sustains the indomitable light
Whence only man hath strength to steer
Or helm to handle without fear.

Save his own soul's light overhead,
None leads him, and none ever led,
Across birth's hidden harbour-bar,

Past youth where shoreward shallows are, Through age that drives on toward the red Vast void of sunset hailed from far,

To the equal waters of the dead;

Save his own soul he hath no star, And sinks, except his own soul guide, Helmless in middle turn of tide.

No blast of air or fire of sun

Puts out the light whereby we run

With girdled loins our lamplit race,

And each from each takes heart of grace