| DISCOVERY Life is a long discovery, isn�t it? You only get your wisdom bit by bit. If you have luck, you find in early youth How dangerous it is to tell the Truth; And next you learn how dignity and peace Are the ripe fruits of patient avarice. You find that middle life goes racing past. you find despair: and, at the very last, You find as you are giving up the ghost, That those who loved you best, despised you most. ----------------------- HOME IS SO SAD Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, Shaped to the comfort of those the last to go As if to win them back. Instead, bereft Of anyone to please, it withers so, Having no heart to put aside the theft And turns again to what it started as, A joyous shot at how things ought to be, Long fallen wide. You can see how it was: Look at the pictures and the cutlery. The music in the piano stool. That vase. ---------------------- CHILDHOOD I used to think that grown-up people chose To have stiff backs and wrinkles round their nose, And veins like small fat snakes on either hand, On purpose to be grand. �Till through the banisters I watched one day My great aunt Etty�s friend who was going away, And how her onyx beads had come unstrung. I saw her grope to find them as they rolled; And then I knew that she was helplessly old, As I was helplessly young. -------------------- Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away. -------------------------- TO A YOUNG POET Time cannot break the bird�s wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. Nothing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do. ------------------ BE FRUGAL Be frugal in the gift of love, Lest you should kindle in return Love like your own, that may survive Long after yours has ceased to burn. For in life�s later years you may Meet with the ghost of what you woke And shattered at a second stroke. God help you on that fatal day. ------------------- NIGHT CROW When I saw that clumsy crow Flap from a wasted tree, A shape in the mind rose up: Over the gulfs of dream Flew a tremendous bird further and further away Into a moonless black, Deep in the brain, far back. |
| -------------- MIND Mind in its purest play is like some bat That beats about in caverns all alone, Contriving by a kind of senseless wit Not to conclude against a wall of stone. It has no need to falter or explore; Darkly it knows what obstacles are there, And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar In perfect courses through the blackest air. And has this simile a like perfection? The mind is like a bat. Precisely. Save That in the very happiest intellection A graceful error may correct the cave. |