No sails beat up to the harbour, With creaking cordage and sailors' song. Somnolent, bare-poled, indifferent, They sleep, and the city sleeps.
Mid-winter about them casts, Its dreary fortifications: Each day is a gaunt grey rock, And death is the last of them all.
Over the sluggish snow, Drifts now a pallid weak shower of bloom; Boredom of fresh creation, Death-weariness of old returns.
White, white blossom, Fall of the shattered cups day on day: Is there anything here that is not ancient, That has not bloomed a thousand years ago?
Under the glare of the white-hot day, Under the restless wind-rakes of the winter, White blossom or white snow scattered, And beneath them, dark, the graves.
Dark graves never changing, White dream drifting, never changing above them: O that the white scroll of heaven might be rolled up, And the naked red lightning thrust at the smouldering earth!
There is a tall white weed growing at the top of this sand hill: In the grass It is very still.
It lifts its heavy bracts of flattened bloom Against the sky Hazily grey with brume.
Out over yonder boats pass And the swallows Flatten themselves on the grass.
The lake is silvering beneath the heat. The wind's feet Touch lazily each crest, Like white gulls slow flapping To windward.
One rose white cloud slowly disengages, loosening itself, And stands Above the larkspur-coloured water: Like Dione's daughter Braiding up her wet hair with her pale, hands.
The moon puts out her face at a rift between the trees, Which do not lift one drooping leaf, this night of June. There is no lazy breeze to set them clashing adrift.
Thin gleams of silver rise and break in the air, Fireflies--here and there.
Forest of blue masses suddenly quivering with rapid points of white, Are the forests beneath the sea where no breeze passes As still as you to-night?
The moon puts out her face at a rift between the trees; Through my window, the bed cut evenly with diagonal shafts of light, Is a boat rocking out adrift.
Under it bend the silver tips of the dark blue coral trees, And fireflies like glass fish Drift and ripple upwards in the breeze.
We are drifting slowly, you and I, To where the clouds are lifting High-fretted towers in the sky: Palaces of ivory, Which we look at dreamily. Over our sail Frail white clouds, Drift as slowly Over the undulant pale blue silk of the water, As we.