The Pine Boughs Past Music

My heart makes songs on lonely roads
To comfort me while you're away,
And strives with lovely sounding words
Its crowded tenderness to say.
Glimmering against the forward dark,
Your face I see with pride, with pain
So that one time I did desire
Never to see that face again.
But I am glad that Love has come
To bind me fast and try my worth;
For Love's a powerful Lord and gives
His friends dominion over the earth.

Soft rain beats upon my windows
Hardly harming.
But by the great gusts guessed further off
Up by the bare moor and brambly headland
Heaven and earth make war.
That savage toss of the pine boughs past music
And the roar of the elms . . .
Here come, in the candle light, soft reminder
Of poetry’s truth, while rain beats softly here
As sleep, or shelter of farms.

All night the fierce wind blew --
All night I knew
Time, like a dark wind, blowing
All days, all lives, all memories
Down empty, endless skies --
A blind wind, strowing
Bright leaves of life’s torn tree
Through blank eternity:
Dreadfully swift, Time blew.
All night I knew
The outrush of its going.

At dawn a thin rain wept.
Worn out, I slept
And woke to a fair morning.
My days were amply long, and I content
In their accomplishment --
Lost the wind’s warning.

These Severn meadows knew
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