Poem: The Night-Walk

Awakes for me and leaps from shroud

All radiantly the moon's own night

Of folded showers in streamer cloud;

Our shadows down the highway white

Or deep in woodland woven-boughed,

With yon and yon a stem alight.

I see marauder runagates

Across us shoot their dusky wink;

I hear the parliament of chats

In haws beside the river's brink;

And drops the vole off alder-banks,

To push his arrow through the stream.

These busy people had our thanks

For tickling sight and sound, but theme

They were not more than breath we drew

Delighted with our world's embrace:

The moss-root smell where beeches grew,

And watered grass in breezy space;

The silken heights, of ghostly bloom

Among their folds, by distance draped.

‘ Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,

That cried to have its chaos shaped:

Absorbing, little noting, still

Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;

With wistful looks on each far hill

For something hidden, something owed.

Unto his mantled sister, Day

Had given the secret things we sought

And she was grave and saintly gay;

At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;

She flew on it, then folded wings,

In meditation passing lone,

To breathe around the secret things,

Which have no word, and yet are known;

Of thirst for them are known, as air

Is health in blood: we gained enough

By this to feel it honest fare;

Impalpable, not barren, stuff.

A pride of legs in motion kept

Our spirits to their task meanwhile,

And what was deepest dreaming slept:

The posts that named the swallowed mile;

Beside the straight canal the hut

Abandoned; near the river's source

Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;

The roadway missed; were our discourse;

At times dear poets, whom some view

Transcendent or subdued evoked

To speak the memorable, the true,

The luminous as a moon uncloaked;

For proof that there, among earth's dumb,

A soul had passed and said our best.

Or it might be we chimed on some

Historic favourite's astral crest,

With part to reverence in its gleam,

And part to rivalry the shout:

So royal, unuttered, is youth's dream

Of power within to strike without.

But most the silences were sweet,

Like mothers’ breasts, to bid it feel

It lived in such divine conceit

As envies aught we stamp for real.

To either then an untold tale

Was Life, and author, hero, we.

The chapters holding peaks to scale,

Or depths to fathom, made our glee;

For we were armed of inner fires,

Unbled in us the ripe desires;

And passion rolled a quiet sea,

Whereon was Love the phantom sail.