And the June sky glares on my prime-- But there in the gloom, with Time, Huddled, with Time on its back, Is a shadow that is my wrack. Yes, it is I in the lair, Peering and watching me there.
Under the chestnut bloom My old age hides in the gloom. And the years to be have been, Could I spell the lore of that brain. But the river flows between, Over the weeds of pain, Over the snares of death, Maybe, should I leap to hold, With myself grown old, Council there in the gloom Under the chestnut bloom.
And so, with instruction none, I go, and leave it there, My ghost with Time in its lair, And the things that must yet be done Tear at my heart unknown, And the years have tongues of stone With no syllable to make For consolation's sake.
But peradventure yet I shall return To dare the weeds of death, And plunge through the coned pink bloom, And cry on that spectre set In its silent ring of gloom, And stay my youth to learn The thing that my old age saith.
TROOPSHIP, (s.s. Baltic: Mid-Atlantic: July, 1917)
Dark waters into crystalline brilliance break About the keel, as through the moonless night The dark ship moves in its own moving lake Of phosphorescent cold moon-coloured light; And to the clear horizon, all around Drift pools of fiery beryl flashing bright As though, still flashing, quenchless, cold and white, A million moons in the dark green waters drowned.
And staring at the magic with eyes adream, That never till now have looked upon the sea, Boys from the Middle-West lounge listlessly In the unlanterned darkness, boys who go Beckoned by some unchallengeable gleam To unknown lands to fight an unknown foe.
Indifferent, flippant, earnest, but all bored, The doctors sit in the glare of electric light Watching the endless stream of naked white Bodies of men for whom their hasty award Means life or death, maybe, or the living death Of mangled limbs, blind eyes or darkened brain: And the chairman, as his monocle falls again, Pronounces each doom with easy, indifferent breath.
Then suddenly they all shudder as they see A young man move before them wearily, Pallid and gaunt as one already dead; And they are strangely troubled as he stands With arms outstretched and drooping, thorn-crowned head, The nail-marks glowing in his feet and hands.