Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/124

 124 OXFORD IN WAR-TIME

HAT alters you, familiar lawn and tower,

Arched alley, and garden green to the grey wall

With crumbling crevice and the old wine-red flower,

Solitary in summer sun? for all

Is like a dream: I tread on dreams! No stir

Of footsteps, voices, laughter! Even the chime

Of many memoried bells is lonelier

In this neglected ghostliness of Time.

What stealing touch of separation numb

Absents you? Yet my heart springs up to adore

The shrining of your soul, that is become

Nearer and oh, far dearer than before.

It is as if I looked on the still face

Of a Mother, musing where she sits alone.

She is with her sons, she is not in this place;

She is gone out into far lands unknown.

Because that filled horizon occupies

Her heart with mute prayer and divining fear,

Therefore her hands so calm lie, and her eyes

See nothing; and men wonder at her here:

But far in France; on the torn Flanders plain;

By Sinai; in the Macedonian snows;

The fly-plagued sands of Tigris, heat and rain;

On wandering water, where the black squall blows

Less danger than the bright wave ambushes,

She bears it out. All the long day she bears,

And the sudden hour of instant challenges

To act, that searches all men, no man spares.

She is with her sons, leaving a virtue gone

Out of her sacred places; what she bred

Lives other life than this, that sits alone,

Though still in dream starrily visited!