Page:Lollingdon Downs and other poems, Masefield, 1917.djvu/54

48 XXII

A hundred years ago, they quarried for the stone here;

The carts came through the wood by the track still plain;

The drills shew in the rock where the blasts were blown here,

They shew up dark after rain.

Then the last cart of stone went away through the wood,

To build the great house for some April of a woman,

Till her beauty stood in stone, as her man's thought made it good,

And the dumb rock was made human.

The house still stands, but the April of its glory

Is gone, long since, with the beauty that has gone,

She wandered away west, it is an old sad story,

It is best not talked upon.