For it is over, over, and the spring
Is not quite spring to you who sit alone;
A paradise entire has taken wing;
Love and her merry company are gone
The way of all delight and lyric measures,
And the lone miser mourns his vanished treasures.

VI

The snow is thawing on the hanging eaves,
The buds unroll upon the basking limb,
And hidden birds are practising a hymn
To sing when petals fall among the leaves. 
And yet in life there is an interim
So dull that stagnant loneliness bereaves
Beauty of tenderness, and hope deceives
Until the eyes grow sceptical and dim.

I know I have no right to solitude
When every friendly grove is loud with calls
From bird to mating bird, and all the wood
Is throbbing with the voice of waterfalls,
But merry song and liquid interlude
Ring in my heart like mirth in empty halls.

VII

So ends the day with beauty in the west,
Bending in holy peace above the land;
It is not needful that we understand;
Oblivion is ours, and that is best. 
Oblivion of battles that command
Our wan reluctance, and a starless rest
Borne on in tideless twilight, where all quest
Ends in the pressure of a quiet hand.

There is no morrow to this final dream
That paints the past so wonderfully fair;
No rising sun shall desecrate that gleam
Of fragile colour hanging on the air. 
Enshrined in sunset are all things that seem
Happy and beautiful; and Thou art there.

VIII

Across the evening calm I faintly hear
The melody you loved; a violin
Sings through the listening air, far-off and thin,
The infinite music of our happy year. 
The soul’s dim gates are broken to let in
That gush of memories, and you are near,
Poised on the shadowy threshold whence appear
The prospects of the dreams we strove to win.

Rise wistfully, and fall away, and pass,
Frail music of impossible delight,
Steal into silence over the dark grass,
Dreams of the inner caverns of the night. 
Strange that in those few hesitating bars
Are life and death, the orbits of the stars.

IX

Calmer than mirrored waters after rain,
Calmer than all the swaying tides of sleep,
Profounder than the stony eyes that keep
Afternoon vigil on the ruined plain;
So drift they by, the cloudy forms that creep
In stealthy whiteness through the windless grain;
The twilight ebbs, and washed in the long rain,
I am their shepherd, pasturing my sheep.

They can not change; they can but wander here;
That is their destiny and also mine;
The fuel that I was, the flames they were,
Are vanished down the lost horizon line. 
Likewise the stars have died; the silence hears
Only the footfall of the pastured years.