A Song of Life

"Dearest, when I am dead,
   Make one last song for me:
Sing what I would have said --
   Righting life's wrong for me.

"Tell them how, early and late,
   Glad ran the days with me,
Seeing how goodly and great,
   Love, were your ways with me."

Gray hills, gray skies, gray lights,
And still, gray sea --
O fond, O fair,
The Mays that were,
When the wild days and wilder nights
Made it like heaven to be!

Gray head, gray heart, gray dreams --
O, breath by breath,
Night-tide and day
Lapse gentle and gray,
As to a murmur of tired streams,
Into the haze of death.

I talked one midnight with the jolly ghost
Of a gray ancestor, Tom Heywood hight;
And, "Here's," says he, his old heart liquor-lifted --
"Here's how we did when Gloriana shone:"

All in a garden green
   Thrushes were singing;
Red rose and white between,
   Lilies were springing;
It was the merry May;
   Yet sang my Lady: --
"Nay, Sweet, now nay, now nay!
   I am not ready."

Then to a pleasant shade
   I did invite her:
All things a concert made,
   For to delight her;
Under, the grass was gay;
   Yet sang my Lady: --
"Nay, Sweet, now nay, now nay!
   I am not ready."

The wind on the wold,
   With sea-scents and sea-dreams attended,
      Is wine!
The air is as gold
   In elixir -- it takes so the splendid
      Sunshine!

O, the larks in the blue!
   How the song of them glitters, and glances,
      And gleams!
The old music sounds new --
   And it's O, the wild Spring, and his chances
      And dreams!

There's a lift in the blood --
   O, this gracious, and thirsting, and aching
      Unrest!
All life's at the bud,
   And my heart, full of April, is breaking
      My breast.

Sing to me, sing, and sing again,
   My glad, great-throated nightingale:
Sing, as the good sun through the rain --
   Sing, as the home-wind in the sail!

Sing to me life, and toil, and time,
   O bugle of dawn, O flute of rest!
Sing, and once more, as in the prime,
   There shall be naught but seems the best.

And sing me at the last of love:
   Sing that old magic of the May,
That makes the great world laugh and move
   As lightly as our dream to-day!

A sigh sent wrong,
A kiss that goes astray,
A sorrow the years endlong --
So they say.

So let it be --
Come the sorrow, the kiss, the sigh!
They are life, dear life, all three,
And we die.