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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Thomas Moult

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Here for a Time

Thomas Moult

WITH the lone hills of sheep,

Stone-scarred and gray,

And the lone bleat;

With the brown old sleeping meres that meet

The storm’s sweep,

The sun’s sway

And the stars, and all the seasons, with unaltering face;

With the moor-mists swifting

As they have swifted

Down the slow dayfall since the ancient days;

With the sound of the last curlew drifting

As it has drifted

To the nestward beat

Of tired innumerable wings:

With these most solitary things,

These pitilessly aloof

In their harsh loneliness,

These pitifully weak

Against the stress

Of the eternal rebuff,

Here, for a little span

On their illimitable bleak,

Abides the warm memory

Of man.

Here, for a time, a breath of time, he brings

Faiths groping past the hills, and visionings;

Faiths and visionings great and sure

As the calm of the moor.

With feeble scratchings has he made his mark

On the hill’s steep;

For a day and a dark

They endure,

By a dark they outlast his laughter and tears,

His song.

The feeble scratchings he has traced along

By the hill’s feet

Fainter as they uplight to the farmost crest

And the cloud-veils,

Outliving by a dark

The faiths and fears

Of his breast,

And the visionings—

By these he has made his mark.

With the lone hills of sheep

Overspreading his eyes, and on his ears

The lone bleat,

He sinks into sleep.

Deep

As the deep of dales

Is his sleep;

More deep

Than the brown old sleep of meres that meet

The storm’s sweep,

The sun’s sway,

And the stars, and all the seasons, with unaltering face.

He dreams: in his dream he passes not away.

He endures even as they

These most solitary things,

These pitilessly aloof

In their harsh loneliness,

These pitifully weak

Against the stress

Of the eternal rebuff:

The lone hills, stone-scarred and gray,

The storm’s sweep,

The stars, and the sun’s sway;

The moor-mists swifting

As they have swifted

Down the slow dayfall since the ancient days;

The sound of the last curlew drifting

As it has drifted

To the nestward beat of tired innumerable wings.