RUINS

The spring comes in to me like spring in Rome,—

As year by year those ruins, dead to mirth,

Sense a strange quickening in the sweetened loam,

Where new, returning Aprils take the earth;

Something they lost, so many centuries gone,

Something too swift and subtle for a word,

Is half-remembered — in a shattered faun,

A stained and broken bird-bath, and its bird.

But otherwise, all alien comes the Spring,

Touching but not transforming what they are:

Flowers in the cranny but a foolish thing,

Grass in the pavements, foreign as a star...

Each reminiscent, half-insensate stone

Mocked with new life it cannot call its own.