THE ETERNAL FLUX

Let us hold April back

One splendid hour

To bless the passionate earth

With golden shower

Of sunlight from the blue;

Oh April skies,

That earth yearns up to; blue has burned to gold,

Gold pales and dies

In delicate faint rose,

Oh flowing time, oh flux eternal. Hold

The hour back. The April hour goes.

Then, let it be of May,

When sound and sight

And all that's beauty manifest

Through all the day,

Of deep on deep with green,

Of light on light

Across the waves of blossom, when the white

Is lovelier than the rose, except the rose

Is loveliest of all;

When through the day the cuckoo calls unseen,

And at nightfall

The nightingale, whose music no man knows

The magic heart of, sitting in the dark

Sings still the world-old way;

When all of these,

Flowers and birds, and sunset and pale skies

Seem gathered up in scent,

And all of sound and sight

Dissolved, ethereal, not of ears and eyes

But only the soul-beauty of the brain

Flows, in such waves of perfume, over all

— Or like a song in colour, of such strain

As spirits finer than our own must hear

( The beautiful made clear );

Then, then, when it is May,

Surely our hand must touch eternity.

Day pales to night, stars pale upon the day,

And May's last blossoming hour flows away.

Not of June either, though the hanging skies

Make but a little span

‘ Twixt light and growing light;

And when through that short darkness palely flies

The silent great white moth

— A spirit lost in the night,

A soul, without will or way —;

When the arch of trees

Is duskily green, and close as a builded house

Where love with love might stay,

Guarded and still, from sight;

When the hay is sweet in the fields

And love is as sweet as hay;

When the life-impulse of the wonderful untamed earth

Has reached its fulness and height,

Is broad and steady and wide

As sweeps into splendid bays the flowing tide;

When God might look on the land,

When God might look on the sea,

And say: “For ever be

Perfect, completed, achieved,

As now at this moment you stand.”

Neither in June shall we stay the eternal flow

Nor grasp the present with pitiful, mortal hand,

For sliding past like water the June hours go.