the waters, here and here these perished days
Haunt me with their sweet dead faces and their old divided ways.
You that helped and you that loved me, take this song, and when you read,
Let the lost things come about you, set your thoughts and hear and heed.
Time has laid his burden on us--we who wear our manhood now,
We would be the boys we have been, free of heart and bright of brow--
Be the boys for just an hour, with the splendour and the speech
Of thy lights and thunders, Coogee, flying up thy gleaming beach.
Heart's desire and heart's division! who would come and say to me,
With the eyes of far-off friendship, "You are as you used to be"?
Something glad and good has left me here with sickening discontent,
Tired of looking, neither knowing what it was or where it went.
So it is this sight of Coogee, shining in the morning dew,
Sets me stumbling through dim summers once on fire with youth and you--
Summers pale as southern evenings when the year has lost its power
And the wasted face of April weeps above the withered flower.
Not that seasons bring no solace, not that time lacks light and rest;
But the old things were the dearest and the old loves seem the best.
We that start at songs familiar, we that tremble at a tone
Floating down the ways of music, like a sigh of sweetness flown,
We can never feel the freshness, never find again the mood
Left among fair-featured places, brightened of our brotherhood.
This and this we have to think of when the night is over all,
And the woods begin to perish and the rains begin to fall.
Ogyges
Stand out, swift-footed leaders of the horns,
And draw strong breath, and fill the hollowy cliff
With shocks of clamour,--let the chasm take
The noise of many trumpets, lest the hunt
Should die across the dim Aonian hills,
Nor break through thunder and the surf-white cave
That hems about the old-eyed Ogyges
And bars the sea-wind, rain-wind, and the sea!
Much fierce delight hath old-eyed Ogyges
(A hairless shadow in a lion's skin)
In tumult, and the gleam of flying spears,
And wild beasts vexed to death; "for," sayeth he,
"Here lying broken, do I count the days
For every trouble; being like the tree--
The many-wintered father of the trunks
On yonder ridges: wherefore it is well
To feel the dead blood kindling in my veins
At sound of boar or battle
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