Or if a footstep comes, 'tis mine
Sharp on the road or soft on grass:
Silence divides along my line
And shuts behind me as I pass.
No other comes, no labourer
To cut his shaggy truss of hay,
Along the road no traveller,
Day after day, day after day.
And even I, when I come here,
Move softly on, subdued and still,
Lonely as death, though I can hear
Men shouting on the other hill.
Day after day, though no one sees,
The lonely place no different seems;
The trees, the stack, still images
Constant in who can say whose dreams?
* * * * *
J.C. SQUIRE
ELEGY
I vaguely wondered what you were about,
But never wrote when you had gone away;
Assumed you better, quenched the uneasy doubt
You might need faces, or have things to say.
Did I think of you last evening? Dead you lay.
O bitter words of conscience!
I hold the simple message,
And fierce with grief the awakened heart cries out:
'It shall not be to-day;
It is still yesterday; there is time yet!'
Sorrow would strive backward to wrench the sun,
But the sun moves.
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