-Have-Beens,
These fatuous, ineffectual Yesterdays!

XIV

Time and the Earth--
The old Father and Mother--
Their teeming accomplished,
Their purpose fulfilled,
Close with a smile
For a moment of kindness
Ere for the winter
They settle to sleep.

Failing yet gracious,
Slow pacing, soon homing,
A patriarch that strolls
Through the tents of his children,
The Sun, as he journeys
His round on the lower
Ascents of the blue,
Washes the roofs
And the hillsides with clarity;
Charms the dark pools
Till they break into pictures;
Scatters magnificent
Alms to the beggar trees;
Touches the mist-folk
That crowd to his escort
Into translucencies
Radiant and ravishing,
As with the visible
Spirit of Summer
Gloriously vaporised,
Visioned in gold.

Love, though the fallen leaf
Mark, and the fleeting light
And the loud, loitering
Footfall of darkness
Sign, to the heart
Of the passage of destiny,
Here is the ghost
Of a summer that lived for us,
Here is a promise
Of summers to be.

XV

You played and sang a snatch of song,
A song that all-too well we knew;
But whither had flown the ancient wrong;
And was it really I and you?
O since the end of life's to live
And pay in pence the common debt,
What should it cost us to forgive
Whose daily task is to forget?

You babbled in the well-known voice--
Not new, not new, the words you said.
You touched me off that famous poise,
That old effect, of neck and head.
Dear, was it really you and I?
In truth the riddle's ill to read,
So many are the deaths we die
Before we can be dead indeed.

XVI

One with the ruined sunset,
The strange forsaken sands,
What is it waits and wanders
And signs with desperate hands?

What is it calls in the twilight--
Calls as its chance were vain?
The cry of a gull sent seaward
Or the voice of an ancient pain?

The red ghost of the sunset,
It walks them as its own,
These dreary and desolate reaches . . .
But O that it walked alone!

XVII
_CARMEN PATIBULARE_
(To H. S.)

Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Crook
And the rope of the Black Election,
'Tis the faith of the Fool that a race you rule
Can never achieve perfection:
And 'It's O for the time of the New Sublime
And the better than human way
When the Wolf (poor beast) shall come to his own
And the Rat shall have his day!'

For Tree, Old Tree of the Triple Beam
And the power of provocation,
Y