Memory

In silence and in darkness memory wakes     Her million sheathd buds, and breaks     That day-long winter when the light and noise     And hard bleak breath of the outward-looking will     Made barren her tender soil, when every voice     Of her million airy birds was muffled or still.     One bud-sheath breaks:     One sudden voice awakes.     What change grew in our hearts, seeing one night     That moth-winged ship drifting across the bay,         Her broad sail dimly white     On cloudy waters and hills as vague as they?     Some new thing touched our spirits with distant delight,     Half-seen, half-noticed, as we loitered down,     Talking in whispers, to the little town,         Down from the narrow hill         Talking in whispers, for the air so still     Imposed its stillness on our lips, and made     A quiet equal with the equal shade     That filled the slanting walk. That phantom now     Slides with slack canvas and unwhispering prow     Through the dark sea that this dark room has made.     Or the night of the closed eyes will turn to day,     And all day's colours start out of the gray.     The sun burns on the water. The tall hills     Push up their shady groves into the sky,     And fail and cease where the intense light spills     Its parching torrent on the gaunt and dry     Rock of the further mountains, whence the snow     That softened their harsh edges long is gone,         And nothing tempers now     The hot flood falling on the barren stone.         O memory, take and keep     All that my eyes, your servants, bring you home,     Those other days beneath the low white dome         Of smooth-spread clouds that creep         As slow and soft as sleep,     When shade grows pale and the cypress stands upright,         Distinct in the cool light,     Rigid and solid as a dark hewn stone;         And many another night,     That melts in darkness on the narrow quays,     And changes every colour and every tone,     And soothes the waters to a softer ease,     When under constellations coldly bright     The homeward sailors sing their way to bed     On ships that motionless in harbour float.     The circling harbour-lights flash green and red;     And, out beyond, a steady travelling boat,     Breaking the swell with slow industrious oars,         At each stroke pours     Pale lighted water from the lifted blade.     Now in the painted houses all around         Slow-darkening windows call     The empty unwatched middle of the night.     The tide's few inches rise without a sound.     On the black promontory's windless head,     The last awake, the fireflies rise and fall     And tangle up their dithering skeins of light.         O memory, take and keep     All that my eyes, your servants, bring you home!         Thick through the changing year     The unexpected, rich-charged moments come,         That you twixt wake and sleep     In the lids of the closed eyes shall make appear.         This is life's certain good,     Though in the end it be not good at all         When the dark end arises,     And the stripped, startled spirit must let fall         The amulets that could     Prevail with life's but not death's sad devices.     Then, like a child from whom an older child         Forces its gathered treasures,     Its beads and shells and strings of withered flowers,         Tokens of recent pleasures,     The soul must lose in eyes weeping and wild         Those prints of vanished hours.