You are very far to-night;
So far that my beseeching hands
Clasp on the bright
Metallic lock of some forbidden portal,
Where you alone may enter in;
And my long gaze
Blurs in a memory of other lands,
And other times. 
You stand immortal. 
You have fought clear beyond these nights and days
Whose rusty chimes
Shake the frail, faded tapestries of sin. 
You stand immortal,
Intense with peace, immaculate as stone,
Raising white arms of praise,
Far from this night, triumphantly alone.

Cambridge, 1917

XI

O lonely star moving in still abodes
Where fear and strife lie indolently furled,
You cannot hear the rushing autumn hurled
Against these wanderers bent with futile loads. 
Our broken dreams like withered leaves are swirled
Where wind-dashed lanterns fail upon the roads,
And all our tragic gestured episodes
End in forgotten graveyards of the world.

But in those twilights where you spread your fires,
Tempest and clarion are heard no more;
Autumn no sorrow, spring no hope inspires,
Nor can the distant closing of a door
Affright the soul to dark imagining
Beneath deflowered boughs where no birds sing.

Pomfret, 1919

XII

A chalice singing deep with wine,
Set high among the starry groves,
Welcomes every man to dine
With his old familiar loves.

Sheffield, 1917

BOOK IV THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS

I

As dreamers through their dreams surmise
The stealthy passage of the night,
We half-remember smoky skies
And city streets and hurrying flight,
Another world from this clear height
Whereon our starry altars rise.

Beneath our towering waste of stone
The fragile ships creep to and fro,
By tempest riven and overthrown,
The toys of these same tides that flow
Against our pillars far below
With faint, insistent monotone.

The snarling winds against our rocks
Hurl breakers in a fleecy mass,
Like wolves that chase stampeding flocks
Over the brink of a crevasse,
While thunders down the Alpine pass
The deluge of the equinox.

Lost in that stormy atmosphere,
Men chart their seas and trudge their roads;
Inviolate, we scorn to hear
Their shouted warning that forebodes

An end to these fair episodes
Of life beneath our tranquil sky;
Having sought only peace, then why
Should we go down to death with fear?

Pomfret, 1920

II

The thinkers light their lamps in rows
  From street to street, and then
The night creeps up behind, and blows
  Them quickly out again.