I shall no more be I
If I forget the world’s joy and agony;
If I forget how strong
Is the assault of scarce-rebuked wrong. 
I shall no more be I
If my ears hear not earth’s embittered cry
Perpetual; and forget
The unrighteous shackles on man’s ankle set;

If no more my heart beat
Quicker because on earth is something sweet;
I shall no more be I
If the ancestral voices no more sigh
Familiar in my brain,
And leave me to cold silence and its pain,
And the bewildered stare
On an unhomely land in biting air: 

If the blood no more vex
The heart with the importunities of sex,
If indeed marriage bind
No more body to body, mind to mind,
And love be powerless, cold,
That once by love’s strength only was controlled,
And that chief spiritual force
Be dam’d back and stretch frozen to its source....

To the Heavenly Power I cry,
Foiled by these dreams of immortality,
“Let all be as Thou wilt,
And the foundations in Thy dark mind built;
Even infinity
Be but imagination’s dream of Thee;
And let thought still, still
Vainly its waves on night’s cliff break and spill.

“But, Heavenly Power,” I’d cry,
Knowing how, near or far, He still is nigh,
“When this burning flesh
Is burnt away to a little driven ash,
What thing soever shall rise
From that cold ash unseen to unseen skies,
Grant that so much of me
Shall rise as may remember Thy world, and Thee.”

SNOWS

Now the long-bearded chilly-fingered winter
Over the green fields sweeps his cloak and leaves
Its whiteness there.  It caught on the wild trees,
Shook whiteness on the hedges and left bare
South-sloping corners and south-fronting smooth
Barks of tall beeches swaying ’neath their whiteness
So gently that the whiteness does not fall. 
The ash copse shows all white between gray poles,
The oaks spread arms to catch the wandering snow. 
But the yews—­I wondered to see their dark all white,
To see the soft flakes fallen on those grave deeps,
Lying there, not burnt up by the yews’ slow fire. 
  Could Time so whiten all the trembling senses,
The youth, the fairness, the all-challenging strength,
And load even Love’s grave deeps with his barren snows? 
Even so.  And what remains? 
                The hills of thought
That shape Time’s snows and melt them and lift up
Green and unchanging to the wandering stars.

THE THORN

The days of these two years like busy ants
Have gone, confused and happy and distressed,
        Rich, yet sad with aching wants,
        Crowded, yet lonely and unblessed.

I stare back as they vanish in a swarm,
Seeming how purposeless, how mean and vain,
        Till creeping joy and brief alarm
        Are gone and prick me not again.