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MOONRISE

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,

Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us
Spread out and known at last: and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

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The great gold apples of night
Hang from the street's long bough,
Dripping their light

On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and go

Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me

Makes sickening the white

Ghost-flux of faces that 'hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by,
Without meaning or reason why

They ever should be.

D. H. Lawrence

SACRAMENT

My body, dear, like bread I break

For Love's sweet sake;

My soul like wine I give

Each day, that you may take,

And taking, love and live.

But when the altar empty lies

Before my eyes,

The veil in twain is rent

For me alone the sacrifice

Has been a sacrament.

Pauline D. Partridge

THE TREES

The house is haunted by old trees.

So close they stand, and still,

No yellow sunlight seeps through their shingled leaves

And drips down on the sill.

Beech with the mist on his flanks,

Pine whose old voice is a muffled bell,

Gaunt, wan-bodied poplar

That has a bitter smell,

Tapping elm and oak-tree—

They stoop and peer within
By the side of the twisted apple-tree,
His grey hands under his chin.

They do nothing but peer and haunt through the windows
That are dead as the eyes of the drowned;

And listen until their silence

Makes a strangeness all around.

Then suddenly they quiver and shake at the wind

Their arms that are furrowed as river sands,

And whisper "Did you see?" to one another
And beckon to one another with their hands;
And they laugh a hungry laughter

There is no one understands.

By night they creep close to the windows,
As quiet as grey lichens creep,

And pick at the catches with their fingers—
How they can get in, and peep

To see their own shadows thronging

The quiet house of sleep.

Yes, they look in at their own shadows

Stealing up by the stair

To the closed doors of the chambers

And listening there.

They watch how their shadows with pulseless fingers Noiselessly push and strain,

And beat their breasts on the dark panels

To open them, in vain;

And how the thin moonlight trickles round them

Creeping down by the banisters again.

Eloise Robinson

CRÉPUSCULE

In all the lonely places and the hills

By dusk comes down faint trumpeting; it fills
The hollows and the river-banks with sound,
And music is like mist along the ground:
In all the forest paths and secret places,
The lilies seem like small forgotten faces;
And clothed in dimming gold, and by our side,
With muted hoofs, the dead contented ride.

Maxwell Struthers Burt

THERE WAS A ROSE

There was a rose that faded where it grew;
There was a bird that could not brook the wind;
There was a sunset whose wild glory thinned
To nothing-wonder and the night's ash hue.
Pale blossoms, when they quicken, count life sped;
And there were purple asters in the fall

Of the cold year that withered by the wall
And died, with all spring's dreams about them dead.

A rose, a bird, a sunset, and a weed,

A blossom whose death sentence is its sky—
Yea, and dead waves that break on sobbing seas.
Man is a faint, frail brother, with no creed

These know not of. Behold, all things must die,
And all the vaunting ages are as these.

AN OLD MAN'S WEARINESS

I want to lie alone beside the sedges,
Where the dim-faced waters are quietly singing.
There is peace there, and a deep old happiness
That the drake knows when he is tired of winging
The far heights, and avoiding

The craft of the grey hunter.

I have long avoided the grey hunter Death,
And now I am weary and in much need of learning

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