on my neck. 
     She beckoned, I gazed, unaware
     How a shaft of the blossoming tree
     Was shot from the yew-wood’s core. 
     I stood to the touch of a key
     Turned in a fast-shut door.

     They rounded my garden, content,
     The small fry, clutching their fee,
     Their fruit of the wreath and the pole;
     And, chatter, hop, skip, they were sent,
     In a buzz of young company glee,
     Their natural music, swift shoal
     To the next easy shedders of pence. 
     Why not? for they had me in tune
     With the hungers of my kind. 
     Do readings of earth draw thence,
     Then a concord deeper than cries
     Of the Whither whose echo is Whence,
     To jar unanswered, shall rise
     As a fountain-jet in the mind
     Bowed dark o’er the falling and strewn.

* * *

     Unwitting where it might lead,
     How it came, for the anguish to cease,
     And the Questions that sow not nor spin,
     This wisdom, rough-written, and black,
     As of veins that from venom bleed,
     I had with the peace within;
     Or patience, mortal of peace,
     Compressing the surgent strife
     In a heart laid open, not mailed,
     To the last blank hour of the rack,
     When struck the dividing knife: 
     When the hand that never had failed
     In its pressure to mine hung slack.

     But this in myself did I know,
     Not needing a studious brow,
     Or trust in a governing star,
     While my ears held the jangled shout
     The children were lifting afar: 
     That natures at interflow
     With all of their past and the now,
     Are chords to the Nature without,
     Orbs to the greater whole: 
     First then, nor utterly then
     Till our lord of sensations at war,
     The rebel, the heart, yields place
     To brain, each prompting the soul. 
     Thus our dear Earth we embrace
     For the milk, her strength to men.

     And crave we her medical herb,
     We have but to see and hear,
     Though pierced by the cruel acerb,
     The troops of the memories armed
     Hostile to strike at the nest
     That nourished and flew them warmed. 
     Not she gives the tear for the tear. 
     Weep, bleed, rave, writhe, be distraught,
     She is moveless.  Not of her breast
     Are the symbols we conjure when Fear
     Takes leaven of Hope.  I caught,
     With Death in me shrinking from Death,
     As cold from cold, for a sign
     Of the life beyond ashes:  I cast,
     Believing the vision divine,
     Wings of that dream of my Youth
     To the spirit beloved:  ’twas unglassed
     On her breast, in her depths austere: 
     A flash through the mist, mere breath,
     Breath on a buckler of steel. 
     For the flesh in revolt