Poem by Charles Hamilton Sorley

Return

Still stand the downs so wise and wide?
⁠     Still shake the trees their tresses grey?
I thought their beauty might have died
⁠     Since I had been away.

I might have known the things I love,
     ⁠The winds, the flocking birds' full cry,
The trees that toss, the downs that move,
     ⁠Were longer things than I.

Lo, earth that bows before the wind,
⁠     With wild green children overgrown,
And all her bosoms, many-whinned,
⁠     Receive me as their own.

The birds are hushed and fled: the cows
     ⁠Have ceased at last to make long moan.
They only think to browse and browse
⁠     Until the night is grown.

The wind is stiller than it was,
⁠     And dumbness holds the closing day.
The earth says not a word, because
     ⁠It has no word to say.

The dear soft grasses under foot
     ⁠Are silent to the listening ear.
Yet beauty never can be mute,
     ⁠And some will always hear. 

1. Marlborough
2. To Poets
3. In Memoriam S. C. W., V.C.
4. Autumn Dawn
5. A Hundred Thousand Million Mites We Go

Ina Coolbrith Return ("I had been dead so many years")

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