Page:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919.djvu/382

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Though now beyond earth's farthest hills you fare,

Song-crowned, immortal, sometimes it seems to me

That, if I listen very quietly,

Perhaps I'll hear a light foot on the stair

And see you, standing with your angel air,

Fresh from the uplands of eternity.

Your eyes rejoiced in colour's ecstasy,

Fulfilling even their uttermost desire,

When, over a great sunlit field afire

With windy poppies streaming like a sea

Of scarlet flame that flaunted riotously

Among green orchards of that western shire,

You gazed as though your heart could never tire

Of life's red flood in summer revelry.

And as I watched you, little thought had I

How soon beneath the dim low-drifting sky

Your soul should wander down the darkling way,

With eyes that peer a little wistfully,

Half-glad, half-sad, remembering, as they see

Lethean poppies, shrivelling ashen grey.

October chestnuts showered their perishing gold

Over us as beside the stream we lay

In the Old Vicarage garden that blue day,

Talking of verse and all the manifold

Delights a little net of words may hold,

While in the sunlight water-voles at play

Dived under a trailing crimson bramble-spray,

And walnuts thudded ripe on soft black mould.

Your soul goes down unto a darker stream

Alone, O friend, yet even in death's deep night

Your eyes may grow accustomed to the dark

And Styx for you may have the ripple and gleam

Of your familiar river, and Charon's bark

Tarry by that old garden of your delight. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson