Page:Poems, Alan Seeger, 1916.djvu/159



So when the verdure of his life was shed,

With all the grace of ripened manlihead,

And on his locks, but now so lovable,

Old age like desolating winter fell,

Leaving them white and flowerless and forlorn:

Then from his bed the Goddess of the Morn

Softly withheld, yet cherished him no less

With pious works of pitying tenderness;

Till when at length with vacant, heedless eyes,

And hoary height bent down none otherwise

Than burdened willows bend beneath their weight

Of snow when winter winds turn temperate,—

So bowed with years—when still he lingered on:

Then to the daughter of Hyperion

This counsel seemed the best: for she, afar

By dove-gray seas under the morning star,

Where, on the wide world's uttermost extremes,

Her amber-walled, auroral palace gleams,

High in an orient chamber bade prepare

An everlasting couch, and laid him there,

And leaving, closed the shining doors. But he,

Deathless by Jove's compassionless decree,

Found not, as others find, a dreamless rest.

There wakeful, with half-waking dreams oppressed,

Still in an aural, visionary haze

Float round him vanished forms of happier days;

Still at his side he fancies to behold 109