I did not know your names and yet I saw The handiwork of Beauty in your boughs, I worshipped as the Druids did, in awe, Feeling at Spring my pagan soul arouse To see your leaf-buds open to the day, And dull green moss upon your ragged girth, The hoary sanctity of your decay, Life and Death glimmering upon the Earth.
I shall come back to die From a far place at last After my life's carouse In the old bed to lie, Remembering the past In this dark house.
Because of a clock's chime In the long waste of night I shall awake and wait At that calm lonely time Each smell and sound and sight Mysterious and innate: Some shadow on the wall When curtains by the door Move in a draught of wind; Or else a light footfall In a near corridor; Even to feel the kind Caress of a cool hand Smoothing the draggled hair Back from my shrunken brow, And strive to understand The woman's presence there, And whence she came, and how.
What gust of wind that night Shall mutter her lost name Through windows open wide, And twist the nickering light Of a sole candle's flame Smoking from side to side, Till the last spark it blows Sets a moth's wings aflare As the faint flame goes out?
Some distant door may close; Perhaps a heavy chair On bare floors dragged about O'er the low ceiling sound, And the thin twig of a tree Knock on my window-pane Till all the night around Is listening with me, While like a noise of rain Leaves rustle in the wind.
Then from the inner gloom The scratching of a mouse May echo down my mind And sound around the room In this dark house.
The vague scent of a flower, Smelt then in that warm air From gardens drifting in, May slowly overpower The vapid lavender, Till feebly I begin To count the scents I knew And name them one by one, And search the names for this.
Dreams will be swift and few Ere that last night be done, And gradual silences In each long interim Of halting time awake Confuse all conscious sense. Shadows will grow more dim, And sound and scent forsake The dark ere dawn commence,
In the new morning then, So fixed the stare and fast, The calm unseeing eye Will never close again.
I shall come back at last To this dark house to die.
"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; And his horse in the silence champed the grasses Of the forest's ferny floor: And a bird flew up out of the turret, Above the Traveller's head: And he smote upon the door again a second time; "Is there anybody there?" he said. But no one descended to the Traveller; No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still. But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moon beams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken By the lonely traveller's call. And he felt in his heart their strangeness, Their stillness answering his cry, While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 'Neath the starred and leafy sky; For he suddenly smote on the door, even Louder, and lifted his head:-- "Tell them I came, and no one answered, That I kept my word," he said. Never the least stir made the listeners, Though every word he spake Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake: Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, And the sound of iron on stone And how the silence surged softly backward When the plunging hoofs were gone.