Five Songs for Voice and Pianoforte , opus 163

I fear you, Loveliness;
Before the look of you,
Your far yet intimate face,
My song crumbles in two.

Less am I than a tower;
Or a pool's thin, wrecked gold;
Or great bells loose at dusk;
Or a shepherd and a fold;

Or a few violets —
That straggle April-clear,
Within a tumbled wood
At ending of the year.

Yet spend me at your will;
Yet spend me low and high,
Though I am naught at all;
For if you go, I die!

The sun goes out, and leaves
To the young dusk a cry,
The cry of one who grieves
And is like to die.

There the old houses stand
Down the sunken road;
It clutches them like hand
At throat; it drives like goad.

Along the salmon dusk
A hundred hurts of life;
Around and through it all,
The smell of the wild musk
Is sharp as any knife.

Once I forgot all, everything,
In any day of fall or spring;
And even when I went to bed,
The little prayer I should have said.

I cannot now forget at all
Anything of spring or fall; —
The splutter of wind within a hedge;
Or smell of hyssop from the edge
Of a hot field; the field itself
Dry as a bone upon a shelf;
Or deer that fleet across a wood;
Or an old woman in a hood.

My prayers rise up, each like a spear,
So sharp that God cannot but hear.

My seven lovers are come back;
They stand about my gilded bed:
One says: "Of mirths she had no lack;"
One says: "Now all her griefs are sped."

I lie there a white apricot bough
The rain has tumbled to the grass,
That folk will lift in a moment now
Out of the cumbered road, and pass.

One of the seven stands alone,
His stark blue cloak like a gust behind;
He stares down at me as at stone,
With not a word of any kind.

"Pay me my wages, Grief;
Pay, and be done with me."
"I gave you ears to hear;
I gave you eyes to see.

"More music has the wind
Than you can ever hold;
A dogwood flower is white
Laburnum stormy gold."

"Pay me my broken house,
My twelve month bare of him."
"With melting memories
I packed them to the brim.

"You need but crook your hand,
And he is at your side,
More loving and more loved
Than if he had not died!"