But sight holds a soberer space. 
     Colourless dogwood low
     Curled up a twisted root,
     Nigh yellow-green mosses, to flush
     Redder than sun upon rocks,
     When the creeper clematis-shoot
     Shall climb, cap his branches, and show,
     Beside veteran green of the box,
     At close of the year’s maple blush,
     A bleeding greybeard is he,
     Now hale in the leafage lush. 
     Our parasites paint us.  Hard by,
     A wet yew-trunk flashed the peel
     Of our naked forefathers in fight;
     With stains of the fray sweating free;
     And him came no parasite nigh: 
     Firm on the hard knotted knee,
     He stood in the crown of his dun;
     Earth’s toughest to stay her wheel: 
     Under whom the full day is night;
     Whom the century-tempests call son,
     Having striven to rend him in vain.

     I walked to observe, not to feel,
     Not to fancy, if simple of eye
     One may be among images reaped
     For a shift of the glance, as grain: 
     Profitless froth you espy
     Ashore after billows have leaped. 
     I fled nothing, nothing pursued: 
     The changeful visible face
     Of our Mother I sought for my food;
     Crumbs by the way to sustain. 
     Her sentence I knew past grace. 
     Myself I had lost of us twain,
     Once bound in mirroring thought. 
     She had flung me to dust in her wake;
     And I, as your convict drags
     His chain, by the scourge untaught,
     Bore life for a goad, without aim. 
     I champed the sensations that make
     Of a ruffled philosophy rags. 
     For them was no meaning too blunt,
     Nor aspect too cutting of steel. 
     This Earth of the beautiful breasts,
     Shining up in all colours aflame,
     To them had visage of hags: 
     A Mother of aches and jests: 
     Soulless, heading a hunt
     Aimless except for the meal. 
     Hope, with the star on her front;
     Fear, with an eye in the heel;
     Our links to a Mother of grace;
     They were dead on the nerve, and dead
     For the nature divided in three;
     Gone out of heart, out of brain,
     Out of soul:  I had in their place
     The calm of an empty room. 
     We were joined but by that thin thread,
     My disciplined habit to see. 
     And those conjure images, those,
     The puppets of loss or gain;
     Not he who is bare to his doom;
     For whom never semblance plays
     To bewitch, overcloud, illume. 
     The dusty mote-images rose;
     Sheer film of the surface awag: 
     They sank as they rose; their pain
     Declaring them mine of old days.