(To Mrs. Edward MacDowell)
NO sound of any storm that shakes | |
| Old island walls with older seas | |
| Comes here where now September makes | |
| An island in a sea of trees. | |
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| Between the sunlight and the shade | 5 |
| A man may learn till he forgets | |
| The roaring of a world remade, | |
| And all his ruins and regrets; | |
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| And if he still remembers here | |
| Poor fights he may have won or lost,— | 10 |
| If he be ridden with the fear | |
| Of what some other fight may cost,— | |
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| If, eager to confuse too soon, | |
| What he has known with what may be, | |
| He reads a planet out of tune | 15 |
| For cause of his jarred harmony,— | |
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| If here he venture to unroll | |
| His index of adagios, | |
| And he be given to console | |
| Humanity with what he knows,— | 20 |
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| He may by contemplation learn | |
| A little more than what he knew, | |
| And even see great oaks return | |
| To acorns out of which they grew. | |
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| He may, if he but listen well, | 25 |
| Through twilight and the silence here, | |
| Be told what there are none may tell | |
| To vanity’s impatient ear; | |
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| And he may never dare again | |
| Say what awaits him, or be sure | 30 |
| What sunlit labyrinth of pain | |
| He may not enter and endure. | |
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| Who knows to-day from yesterday | |
| May learn to count no thing too strange: | |
| Love builds of what Time takes away, | 35 |
| Till Death itself is less than Change. | |
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| Who sees enough in his duress | |
| May go as far as dreams have gone; | |
| Who sees a little may do less | |
| Than many who are blind have done; | 40 |
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| Who sees unchastened here the soul | |
| Triumphant has no other sight | |
| Than has a child who sees the whole | |
| World radiant with his own delight. | |
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| Far journeys and hard wandering | 45 |
| Await him in whose crude surmise | |
| Peace, like a mask, hides everything | |
| That is and has been from his eyes; | |
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| And all his wisdom is unfound, | |
| Or like a web that error weaves | 50 |
| On airy looms that have a sound | |
| No louder now than falling leaves. | |
