he sound
Of clicking embers ...
watch the play
Of shadows ...
till the implacable call
Of morning turn our faces grey;
And, or ever we go, we lift and kiss
Some idle thing that your hands may touch,
Some paper or book that your hands let fall,
And we never--when living--had cared so much
As to glance upon twice ...
But now, O bliss
To kiss and to cherish it, moaning our pain,
Ere we creep to the silence again.

THE DAY OF REMEMBRANCE

Dazzle of the sea, azure of the sky, glitter of the dew on the grass,
Pass to Oblivion
In the darkness
With all that ever is or ever was.

Yet, O flocks of cloud with your violet shadows, O white may crowding
o'er the lane,
The Shepherd that drives you
To the darkness
Shall lead you thro' the crimson dawn again.

Bear your load of beauty to the sunset, and the golden gates of death.
The Eternal shall remember
In the darkness
And recall you at a word, at a breath.

Even as the mind of a man may remember his lost and linkless hours,
This world that is scattered
To the darkness
Dismembered and dis-petalled, clouds and flowers,

Cities, suns, and systems, as He said of old, they sleep! Not a bird,
not a leaf shall pass by,
But on the day of remembrance
In the darkness,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,

They shall flash to their places in the music of the whole, even as our
fathers said!
For a Power shall remember
In the darkness,
And the universal sea give up her dead.

ON THE EMBANKMENT

Within, it was colour and laughter, warmth and wine.
Without, it was darkness, hunger and bitter cold,
Where those white globes on the wet Embankment shine,
Greasing the Thames with gold.

And was it a bundle of fog in the dark drew nigh?
A bundle of rags and bones it crept to the light,--
A monstrous thing that coughed as it shuffled by,
A shape of the shapeless night,

Spawned as brown things that mimic their mothering earth,
Green creeping things that the grass lifts to the sun,
Out of its wrongs the City had brought to the birth
The shape of those wrongs, in one.

A woman, a woman whose lips had once been kissed,
(It was Christmas Eve, and the