In Front Of The Landscape

Plunging and labouring on in a tide of visions,         Dolorous and dear,     Forward I pushed my way as amid waste waters         Stretching around,     Through whose eddies there glimmered the customed landscape         Yonder and near,     Blotted to feeble mist. And the coomb and the upland         Foliage-crowned,     Ancient chalk-pit, milestone, rills in the grass-flat         Stroked by the light,     Seemed but a ghost-like gauze, and no substantial         Meadow or mound.     What were the infinite spectacles bulking foremost         Under my sight,     Hindering me to discern my paced advancement         Lengthening to miles;     What were the re-creations killing the daytime         As by the night?     O they were speechful faces, gazing insistent,         Some as with smiles,     Some as with slow-born tears that brinily trundled         Over the wrecked     Cheeks that were fair in their flush-time, ash now with anguish,         Harrowed by wiles.     Yes, I could see them, feel them, hear them, address them -         Halo-bedecked -     And, alas, onwards, shaken by fierce unreason,         Rigid in hate,     Smitten by years-long wryness born of misprision,         Dreaded, suspect.     Then there would breast me shining sights, sweet seasons         Further in date;     Instruments of strings with the tenderest passion         Vibrant, beside     Lamps long extinguished, robes, cheeks, eyes with the earth's crust         Now corporate.     Also there rose a headland of hoary aspect         Gnawed by the tide,     Frilled by the nimb of the morning as two friends stood there         Guilelessly glad -     Wherefore they knew not touched by the fringe of an ecstasy         Scantly descried.     Later images too did the day unfurl me,         Shadowed and sad,     Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,         Laid now at ease,     Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow         Sepulture-clad.     So did beset me scenes miscalled of the bygone,         Over the leaze,     Past the clump, and down to where lay the beheld ones;         Yea, as the rhyme     Sung by the sea-swell, so in their pleading dumbness         Captured me these.     For, their lost revisiting manifestations         In their own time     Much had I slighted, caring not for their purport,         Seeing behind     Things more coveted, reckoned the better worth calling         Sweet, sad, sublime.     Thus do they now show hourly before the intenser         Stare of the mind     As they were ghosts avenging their slights by my bypast         Body-borne eyes,     Show, too, with fuller translation than rested upon them         As living kind.     Hence wag the tongues of the passing people, saying         In their surmise,     "Ah whose is this dull form that perambulates, seeing nought         Round him that looms     Whithersoever his footsteps turn in his farings,         Save a few tombs?"