Three Hardy Songs

 When I set out for Lyonnesse,
   A hundred miles away,
   The rime was on the spray,
 And starlight lit my lonesomeness
 When I set out for Lyonnesse
   A hundred miles away.

 What would bechance at Lyonnesse
   While I should sojourn there
   No prophet durst declare,
 Nor did the wisest wizard guess
 What would bechance at Lyonnesse
   While I should sojourn there.

 When I came back from Lyonnesse
   With magic in my eyes,
   [None managed to surmise
 What meant my godlike gloriousness]1,
 When I came back from Lyonnesse
   With magic in my eyes!

I leaned upon a coppice gate
  When frost was specter-gray,
And winter's dregs made desolate
  The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
  Like strings [from]1 broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
  Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
  The Century's corpse outleant;
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
  The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
  Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
  Seemed fervorless as I.

At once a voice [burst forth]2 among
  The bleak twigs overhead
In full-hearted evensong
  Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
  In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
  Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
  Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
  Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
  His happy good-night air
Some blessed hope, whereof he knew
  And I was unaware.

 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.