“Well; your very simplicity made me love you
      Mid such town dross,
Till I set not Heaven itself above you,
      Who grew my Cross;
For you’d only nod, despite how I sighed for you;
So you tortured me, who fain would have died for you! 
     —­What I suffered then
   Would have paid for the sins of ten!

“Thus went the days.  I feared you despised me
      To fling me a nod
Each time, no more:  till love chastised me
      As with a rod
That a fresh bland boy of no assurance
Should fire me with passion beyond endurance,
      While others all
   I hated, and loathed their call.

“I said:  ’It is his mother’s spirit
      Hovering around
To shield him, maybe!’ I used to fear it,
      As still I found
My beauty left no least impression,
And remnants of pride withheld confession
      Of my true trade
   By speaking; so I delayed.

“I said:  ’Perhaps with a costly flower
      He’ll be beguiled.’ 
I held it, in passing you one late hour,
      To your face:  you smiled,
Keeping step with the throng; though you did not see there
A single one that rivalled me there! . . . 
      Well:  it’s all past. 
   I died in the Lock at last.”

So walked the dead and I together
      The quick among,
Elbowing our kind of every feather
      Slowly and long;
Yea, long and slowly.  That a phantom should stalk there
With me seemed nothing strange, and talk there
      That winter night
   By flaming jets of light.

She showed me Juans who feared their call-time,
      Guessing their lot;
She showed me her sort that cursed their fall-time,
      And that did not. 
Till suddenly murmured she:  “Now, tell me,
Why asked you never, ere death befell me,
      To have my love,
   Much as I dreamt thereof?”

I could not answer.  And she, well weeting
      All in my heart,
Said:  “God your guardian kept our fleeting
      Forms apart!”
Sighing and drawing her furs around her
Over the shroud that tightly bound her,
      With wafts as from clay
   She turned and thinned away.

London, 1918.

“IF IT’S EVER SPRING AGAIN” (SONG)

If it’s ever spring again,
   Spring again,
I shall go where went I when
Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,
Seeing me not, amid their flounder,
Standing with my arm around her;
If it’s ever spring again,
   Spring again,
I shall go where went I then.

If it’s ever summer-time,
   Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime,
And the cuckoos—­two—­in rhyme,
As they used to be, or seemed to,
We shall do as long we’ve dreamed to,
If it’s ever summer-time,
   Summer-time,
With the hay, and bees achime.

THE TWO HOUSES