bough, or man and wife?
Or wave and spar?
Or I the beating sea, and you the bar
On which it breaks? I know not, I!
But this, O this, my Very Dear, I know:
Your voice awakes old echoes in my heart;
And things I say to you now are said once more;
And, Sweet, when we two part,
I feel I have seen you falter and linger so,
So hesitate, and turn, and cling--yet go,
As once in some immemorable Before,
Once on some fortunate yet thrice-blasted shore.
Was it for good?
O, these poor eyes are wet;
And yet, O, yet,
Now that we know, I would not, if I could,
Forget.

XLIII

The rain and the wind, the wind and the rain--
They are with us like a disease:
They worry the heart, they work the brain,
As they shoulder and clutch at the shrieking pane,
And savage the helpless trees.

What does it profit a man to know
These tattered and tumbling skies
A million stately stars will show,
And the ruining grace of the after-glow
And the rush of the wild sunrise?

Ever the rain--the rain and the wind!
Come, hunch with me over the fire,
Dream of the dreams that leered and grinned,
Ere the blood of the Year got chilled and thinned,
And the death came on desire!

XLIV

_He made this gracious Earth a hell_
_With Love and Drink_. _I cannot tell_
_Of which he died_. _But Death was well_.

Will I die of drink?
Why not?
Won't I pause and think?
--What?
Why in seeming wise
Waste your breath?
Everybody dies--
And of death!

Youth--if you find it's youth
Too late?
Truth--and the back of truth?
Straight,
Be it love or liquor,
What's the odds,
So it slide you quicker
To the gods?

XLV

O, these long nights of days!
All the year's baseness in the ways,
All the year's wretchedness in the skies;
While on the blind, disheartened sea
A tramp-wind plies
Cringingly and dejectedly!
And rain and darkness, mist and mud,
They cling, they close, they sneak into the blood,
They crawl and crowd upon the brain:
Till in a dull, dense monotone of pain
The past is found a kind of maze,
At whose every coign and crook,
Broad angle and privy nook,
There waits a hooded Memory,
Sad, yet with strange, bright, unreproaching eyes.

XLVI

In Shoreham River, hurrying down
To the live sea,
By working, marrying, breeding Shoreham Town,
Breaking the sunset's wistful and solemn dream,
An old, black rotter of a boat
Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote,
Lay strand