An Anniversary

IT was at the very date to which we have come, In the month of the matching name, When, at a like minute, the sun had upswum, Its couch-time at night being the same. And the same path stretched here that people now follow, And the same stile crossed their way, And beyond the same green hillock and hollow The same horizon lay; And the same man pilgrims now hereby who pilgrimed here that day.

Let so much be said of the date-day’s sameness; But the tree that neighbours the track, And stoops like a pedlar afflicted with lameness, Knew of no sogged wound or windcrack. And the joints of that wall were not enshrouded With mosses of many tones, And the garth up afar was not overcrowded With a multitude of white stones, And the man’s eyes then were not so sunk that you saw the socket-bones.

KINGSTON-MAURWARD EWELEASE.

“BY THE RUNIC STONE” (Two who became a story)

BY the Runic Stone They sat, where the grass sloped down, And chattered, he white-hatted, she in brown, Pink-faced, breeze-blown.

Rapt there alone In the transport of talking so In such a place, there was nothing to let them know What hours had flown.

And the die thrown By them heedlessly there, the dent It was to cut in their encompassment, Were, too, unknown.

It might have strown Their zest with qualms to see, As in a glass, Time toss their history From zone to zone!