LES SALETTES [December 1923]

13Let all my waning senses reach

To clasp again that secret beach,

Pine-roofed and rock-embrasured, turned

To where the winter sunset burned

Beyond a purpling dolphin-cape

On charmèd seas asleep....

Let every murmur, every shape,

Fanned by that breathing hour’s delight,

Against the widening western deep

Hold back the hour, hold back the night....

For here, across the molten sea,

From golden islands lapped in gold,

Come all the shapes that used to be

Part of the sunset once to me,

And every breaker’s emerald arch

Bears closer their ethereal march,

And flings its rose and lilac spray

To dress their brows with scattered day.

As trooping shoreward, one by one,

Swift in the pathway of the sun,

With lifted arms and eyes that greet,

The lost years hasten to my feet.

All is not pain, their eyes declare;

The shoreward ripples are their voice,

The sunset, streaming through their hair,

Coils round me in a fiery flood,

And all the sounds of that rich air

Are in the beating of my blood,

Crying: Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!

Rejoice, because such skies are blue,

Each dawn, above a world so fair,

Because such glories still renew

To transient eyes the morning’s hue.

Such buds on every fruit-tree smile,

Such perfumes blow on every gale,

Such constellated hangings veil

The outer emptiness awhile;

14And these frail senses that were thine,

Because so frail, and worn so fine,

Are as a Venice glass, wherethrough

Life’s last drop of evening wine

Shall like a draught of morning shine.

The glories go; their footsteps fade

Into an all-including shade,

And isles and sea and clouds and coasts

Wane to an underworld of ghosts.

But as I grope with doubtful foot

By myrtle branch and lentisk root

Up the precipitous pine-dark way,

Through fringes of the perished day

Falters a star, the first alight,

And threaded on that tenuous ray

The age-long promise reappears,

And life is Beauty, fringed with tears.

15