A DOUBLE BALLAD OF AUGUST.

All Afric, winged with death and fire,

Pants in our pleasant English air.

Each blade of grass is tense as wire,

And all the wood's loose trembling hair

Stark in the broad and breathless glare

Of hours whose touch wastes herb and tree.

This bright sharp death shines everywhere;

Life yearns for solace toward the sea.

Earth seems a corpse upon the pyre;

The sun, a scourge for slaves to bear.

All power to fear, all keen desire,

Lies dead as dreams of days that were

Before the new-born world lay bare

In heaven's wide eye, whereunder we

Lie breathless till the season spare:

Life yearns for solace toward the sea.

Fierce hours, with ravening fangs that tire

On spirit and sense, divide and share

The throbs of thoughts that scarce respire,

The throes of dreams that scarce forbear

One mute immitigable prayer

For cold perpetual sleep to be

Shed snowlike on the sense of care.

Life yearns for solace toward the sea.

The dust of ways where men suspire

Seems even the dust of death's dim lair.

But though the feverish days be dire

The sea-wind rears and cheers its fair

Blithe broods of babes that here and there

Make the sands laugh and glow for glee

With gladder flowers than gardens wear.

Life yearns for solace toward the sea.

The music dies not off the lyre

That lets no soul alive despair.

Sleep strikes not dumb the breathless choir

Of waves whose note bids sorrow spare.

As glad they sound, as fast they fare,

As when fate's word first set them free

And gave them light and night to wear.

Life yearns for solace toward the sea.

For there, though night and day conspire

To compass round with toil and snare

And changeless whirl of change, whose gyre

Draws all things deathwards unaware,

The spirit of life they scourge and scare,

Wild waves that follow on waves that flee

Laugh, knowing that yet, though earth despair,

Life yearns for solace toward the sea.