Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/101

 Far out in the fierce, bitter front of the sea

I stand, and remember

Dead things that were brothers and sisters of thee,

Resplendent September!

The West, when it blows at the fall of the noon

And beats on the beaches,

Is filled with a tender and tremulous tune

That touches and teaches;

The stories of Youth, of the burden of Time,

And the death of Devotion,

Come back with the wind, and are themes of the rhyme

In the waves of the ocean.

We, having a secret to others unknown,

In the cool mountain-mosses,

May whisper together, September, alone

Of our loves and our losses!

One word for her beauty, and one for the grace

She gave to the hours;

And then we may kiss her, and suffer her face

To sleep with the flowers.

High places that knew of the gold and the white

On the forehead of Morning

Now darken and quake, and the steps of the Night

Are heavy with warning.

Her voice in the distance is lofty and loud

Through the echoing gorges;

She hath hidden her eyes in a mantle of cloud,

And her feet in the surges.

On the tops of the hills, on the turreted cones—

Chief temples of thunder—

The gale, like a ghost, in the middle watch moans,

Gliding over and under.

The sea, flying white through the rack and the rain,

Leapeth wild at the forelands;

And the plover, whose ery is like passion with pain,

Complains in the moorlands.