Page:Collected poems Robinson, Edwin Arlington.djvu/352

  "I wish the ghost would give his name," said he; And searching gratitude was in his eyes.

He stood then by the window for a time, And only after the last midnight chime Smote the day dead did he say anything: "Come out, my little one, the stars are bright; Come out, you lælaps, and inhale the night." And so he went away with Clavering.

 

—faded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember? Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign. Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle, Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea.

Never again will he come, with rings in his ears like a pirate, Back to be living and seen, here with his roses and vines; Here where the tenants are shadows and echoes of years uneventful, Memory meets the event, told from afar by the sea.

Smoke that floated and rolled in the twilight away from the chimney Floats and rolls no more. Wheeling and falling, instead, Down with a twittering flash go the smooth and inscrutable swallows, Down to the place made theirs by the cold work of the sea.

Roses have had their day, and the dusk is on yarrow and wormwood Dusk that is over the grass, drenched with memorial dew; 