English poem
The Time And The Place
by William Lyon Phelps (1865–1943)
Will you not come? The pines are gold with evening And breathe their old-time fragrance by the sea; You loved so well their spicy exhalation,-- So smiled to smell it and old ocean's piquancy; And those weird tales of winds and waves' relation-- Could you forget? Will you not come to me?
See, 'tis the time: the last long gleams are going, The pine-spires darken, mists rise waveringly; The gloaming brings the old familiar longing To be re-crooned by twilight voices of the sea. And just such tinted wavelets shoreward thronging-- Could you forget things once so dear--and me?
Whatever of the waves is ceaseless longing, And of the twilight immortality: The urge of some wild, inchoate aspiration Akin to afterglow and stars and winds and sea: This hour makes full and pours out in libation,-- Could you forget? Will you not come to me?
What golden galleons sailed into the sunset Not to come home unto eternity: What souls went outward hopeful of returning, This time and tide might well call back across the sea. Did we not dream so while old Wests were burning? Could you forget such once-dear things--and me?
From the dimmed sky and long grey waste of waters, Lo, one lone sail on all the lonely sea A moment blooms to whiteness like a lily, As sudden fades, is gone, yet half-seems still to be; And you,--though that last time so strange and stilly,-- Though you are dead, will you not come to me?
Lee Wilson Dodd, at present in service in France, was graduated in 1899, and for some years was engaged in the practice of the law. This occupation he abandoned for literature in 1907. He is the author of several successful plays, and has published two volumes of verse, The Modern Alchemist (1906) and The Middle Miles (1915). His growth in the intervening years will be apparent to any one who compares the two books; there is in his best work a combination of fancy and humour. He loves to write about New England gardens and discovers beauty by the very simple process of opening his eyes at home. The following poem is characteristically sincere: