Grey Evening

When you went, how was it you carried with you     My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?     My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers,     And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?     Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped     Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields     Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped     And garnered that the golden daylight yields.     Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among     The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,     As farther off the scythe of night is swung,     And little stars come rolling from their husk.     And all the earth is gone into a dust     Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold,     Covered with aged lichens, pale with must,     And all the sky has withered and gone cold.     And so I sit and scan the book of grey,     Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading,     All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding     With wounds of sunset and the dying day.