REUBEN
Fill the held void and virgin austere air,
And overwhelm the silenced mind of man,
With an almighty sense of sovereign space,
Giant, indifferent, dumb—a keen cold breath
Of pungent liberty and loneliness
Untouch’d.
But in the hollow there are trees;
Sycamores, from whose dim and misty boughs
On February dawns the wild-voiced thrush
Exults, and ’mid whose rosy buds, in May,
Some o’er-sea nightingale betwixt the brine
Alighting, and the waiting woodland green,
In this first gage of Home grateful may linger
One night, and with long shafts of passion thrill
The wistful reaches of the far blue dusk.
And ’neath the trees, ’mid all that barren waste
Vividly green and various, grew trim grass
Once, and bright hardy flowers—marigolds,
Wallflower, larkspur, snapdragon and, ranged
In rows on either side the red-brick path
That parted the broad beds of kitchen herbs,
Gooseberries and currants, all a homely wealth
Of verdure: with one wide old apple-tree,
That, for two people, pink and white in spring,
Gold in September, tinted the whole world.
At one side of the dip, behind the trees,
A tarr’d shed, built of wreck-wood, met the down.
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