Page:Lollingdon Downs and other poems, Masefield, 1917.djvu/46

40 XVIII

Night is on the downland, on the lonely moorland,

On the hills where the wind goes over sheep-bitten turf,

Where the bent grass beats upon the unploughed poorland

And the pine woods roar like the surf.

Here the Roman lived on the wind-barren lonely,

Dark now and haunted by the moorland fowl;

None comes here now but the peewit only,

And moth-like death in the owl.

Beauty was here, on this beetle-droning downland;

The thought of a Cæsar in the purple came

From the palace by the Tiber in the Roman townland

To this wind-swept hill with no name.

Lonely Beauty came here and was here in sadness,

Brave as a thought on the frontier of the mind,