OLD ROADS

I have been glad in such unlikely places That now I walk in the same ways alone The very stones are thronged by vanished faces And echoes of dead laughter’s undertone. Mellow stone courts, a bridge across a river, A frosty road whose flints strike leaping fire— The dead days stab me till I stand and shiver, Because of rose-light over a gray spire. And there’s a cliff-road with the white gulls wheeling, Where ev’ry time, they catch me unaware; And still the happy ghosts come stealing, stealing, At just one corner of Trafalgar Square.... At city crossings and in heather spaces, There’s not a pathway that my feet have known But mocks me, with its throng of vanished faces And echoes of dead laughter’s undertone.