Atlantis

What poets sang in Atlantis? Who can tell
The epics of Atlantis or their names?
The sea hath its own murmurs, and sounds not
The secrets of its silences beneath,
And knows not any cadences enfolded
When the last bubbles of Atlantis broke
Among the quieting of its heaving floor.
O, years and tides and leagues and all their billows
Can alter not man's knowledge of men's hearts —
While trees and rocks and clouds include our being
We know the epics of Atlantis still:
A hero gave himself to lesser men,
Who first misunderstood and murdered him,
And then misunderstood and worshipped him;
A woman was lovely and men fought for her,
Towns burnt for her, and men put men in bondage,
But she put lengthier bondage on them all;
A wanderer toiled among all the isles
That fleck this turning star of shifting sea,
Or lonely purgatories of the mind,
In longing for his home or his lost love.
Poetry is founded on the hearts of men:
Though in Nirvana or the Heavenly courts
The principle of beauty shall persist,
Its body of poetry, as the body of man,
Is but a terrene form, a terrene use,
That swifter being will not loiter with;
And, when mankind is dead and the world cold,
Poetry's immortality will pass.

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New Year's Eve, 1913

O, Cartmel bells ring soft to-night,
And Cartmel bells ring clear,
But I lie far away to-night,
Listening with my dear;
Listening in a frosty land
Where all the bells are still
And the small-windowed bell-towers stand
Dark under heath and hill.
I thought that, with each dying year,
As long as life should last
The bells of Cartmel I should hear
Ring out an aged past:
The plunging, mingling sounds increase
Darkness's depth and height,
The hollow valley gains more peace
And ancientness to-night:
The loveliness, the fruitfulness,
The power of life lived there
Return, revive, more closely press
Upon that midnight air.
But many deaths have place in men
Before they come to die;
Joys must be used and spent, and then
Abandoned and passed by.
Earth is not ours; no cherished space
Can hold us from life's flow,
That bears us thither and thence by ways
We knew not we should go.
O, Cartmel bells ring loud, ring clear,
Through midnight deep and hoar,
A year new-born, and I shall hear
The Cartmel bells no more.

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In Memoriam, A. M. W.

SEPTEMBER 1910
(For a Solemn Music)

Out of a silence
The voice of music speaks.
When words have no more power,
When tears can tell no more,
The heart of all regret
Is uttered by a falling wave
Of melody.
No more, no more
The voice that gathered us
Shall hush us with deep joy;
But in this hush,
Out of its silence,
In the awaking of music,
It shall return.
For music can renew
Its gladness and communion,
Until we also sink,
Where sinks the voice of music,
Into a silence.

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