lay...
And if you startle us with rude surprise,
You'll beg--and win--forgiveness with those eyes.

IN SUMMER

I think these stars that draw so strangely near,
That lean and listen for the turning earth,
Are never wholly careless when they hear
The murmur of her hushed and quiet mirth,--
But looking out upon a world in bloom,
They half-remember, and they heed and hark:
An old, old sweetness in the scented gloom,
An old, old music in the singing dark.

Their own full Summers gone, such aeons past,
Bird-song and bloom and swallow from the sky,
These dead, desireless worlds find here, at last,
Something remembered when the earth turns by,
Sweet with these blowing odours they had known,
This happy music that was once their own.

SURVIVAL

Men building ships, and women cooking meals,
The mothering girl-child with her doll in arms,
The ploughman trudging at his horse's heels,
The fires we lay, our chill at war's alarms:--
These epic, ancient gestures of the race
Have still the greatness of those great who wrought
In other days than ours, who keep their place
Along our shadowy borderlands of thought.

A word evokes them,--aye, a lifted hand
Stirs slumbrous queens whose sceptres were upraised
For life or death in what forgotten land!--
Where cowherds pass, old Grecian kine are grazed,
And many a rocking-horse and laughing boy
Lead back the tragic chariots of Troy.

NOMENCLATURE

There is a magic in the shining name,
A legacy that beauty yields to speech,
Something more quick and subtle than her fame,--
Who else had blown beyond our stunted reach.
By what occult divining does the will
Fashion the cryptic word whose sound and sense
Evoke the trembling image, lovely still,
Of something lost but for this recompense?

There have been ships whose names were music's own;
But speak them--and the lifted prows go by!
Women who stir as from the sculptor's stone,
For syllables still tender as a sigh ...
And banished Aprils that we saw and heard,
Return their lights and colours ... in a word.

TO ONE RETURNED FROM A JOURNEY

You have come home with old seas in your speech,
And glimmering sea-roads meeting in your mind:
The curve of creeping silver up the beach,
And mornings whose white splendours daze a