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    ’Mid all the passionate choristers
Of time and tide and love and death,
Philomel with jewelled breath
Dreams of flight, but never stirs.
    On rose and peach their droppings bled;
Love a sacrifice has lain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is dead.
    Then the Raven, bleak and blent
With all the slow despair of time,
Lets Philomel about him chime
Until her quiring voice is spent.
    Philomel, on pain’s red root
Bloomed and sang, and pain was not;
When she has sung and is forgot,
The Raven speaks, no longer mute.
    The Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed.
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed,
On rose and peach their droppings fell.

XXVIII
    O VER the world’s rim, drawing bland November
Reluctant behind them, drawing the moons of cold:
What do their lonely voices wake to remember
In this dust ere ’twas flesh? what restless old
    Dream a thousand years was safely sleeping
Wakes my blood to sharp unease? what horn
Rings out to them? Was I free once, sweeping
Their wild and lonely skies ere I was born?
    The hand that shaped my body, that gave me vision,
Made me a slave to clay for a fee of breath.
Sweep on, O wild and lonely: mine the derision,
Then the splendor and speed, the cleanness of death.
    Over the world’s rim, out of some splendid noon,
Seeking some high desire, and not in vain,
They fill and empty the red and dying moon
And, crying, cross the rim of the world again.

XXIX
    A S to an ancient music’s hidden fall
Her seed in the huddled dark was warm and wet
And three cold stars were riven in the wall:
Rain and fire and death above her door were set.
    Her hands moaned on her breast in blind and supple fire,
Made light within her cave: she saw her harried
Body wrung to a strange and bitter lyre
Whose music once was pure strings simply married.
    One to another in sleepy difference
Her thin and happy sorrows once were wed,
And what tomorrow’s chords are recompense
For yesterday’s single song unravished?
    Three stars in her heart when she awakes
As winter’s sleep breaks greening in soft rain,
And in the caverned earth spring’s rumor shakes
As in her loins, the tilled and quickened grain.

XXX
    G RAY the day, and all the year is cold,
Across the empty land the swallows’ cry
Marks the southflown spring. Naught is bowled
Save winter, in the sky.
    O sorry earth, when this bleak bitter sleep
Stirs and turns and time once more is green,
In empty path and lane grass will creep
With none to tread it clean.
    April and May and June, and all the dearth
Of heart to green it for, to hurt and wake;
What good is budding, gray November earth?
No need to break your sleep for greening’s sake.
    The hushed plaint of wind in stricken trees
Shivers the grass in path and lane
And Grief and Time are tideless golden seas—
Hush, hush! He’s home again.

XXXI
    H E WINNOWED it with bayonets
And planted it with guns,
And now the final cannonade
Is healed with rains and suns
    He looks about—and leaps to stamp
The stubborn grinning seeds
Of olden plantings back beneath
His field of colored weeds.

XXXII
    look, cynthia,
how abelard evaporates
the brow of time, and paris
tastes his bitter thumbs—
    the worm grows fat, eviscerate,
but not on love, o cynthia.

XXXIII
    D ID I know love once? Was it love or grief,
This grave body by where I had lain,
And my heart, a single stubborn leaf
That will not die, though root and branch be slain?
    Though warm in dark between the breasts of Death,
That other breast forgot where I did lie,
And from the tree are stripped the leaves of breath,
There’s still one stubborn leaf that will not die
    But restless in the sad and bitter earth,
Gains with each dawn a death, with dusk a birth.

XXXIV
    T HE ship of night, with twilightcolored sails,
Dreamed down the golden river of the west,
And Jesus’ mother mused the sighing gales
While Jesus’ mouth shot drinking on her breast.
    Her soft doveslippered eyes strayed in the dusk
Creaming backward from