Will I die of drink? Why not? Won’t I pause and think?  —What? Why in seeming wise Waste your breath? Everybody dies—  And of death!

Youth—if you find it’s youth Too late? Truth—and the back of truth? Straight, Be it love or liquor, What’s the odds, So it slide you quicker To the gods?

p. 61XLV

p. 61

O, these long nights of days! All the year’s baseness in the ways, All the year’s wretchedness in the skies; While on the blind, disheartened sea A tramp-wind plies Cringingly and dejectedly! And rain and darkness, mist and mud, They cling, they close, they sneak into the blood, They crawl and crowd upon the brain: Till in a dull, dense monotone of pain The past is found a kind of maze, At whose every coign and crook, Broad angle and privy nook, There waits a hooded Memory, Sad, yet with strange, bright, unreproaching eyes.

p. 62XLVI

p. 62

In Shoreham River, hurrying down To the live sea, By working, marrying, breeding Shoreham Town, Breaking the sunset’s wistful and solemn dream, An old, black rotter of a boat Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote, Lay stranded in mid-stream: With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line, That made me think of legs and a broken spine: Soon, all-too soon, Ungainly and forlorn to lie Full in the eye Of the cynical, discomfortable moon That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky, A clown’s face flour’d for work. And by and by The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned; The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing; The poor old hulk remained, p. 63Stuck helpless in mid-ebb. And I knew why— Why, as I looked, my heart felt crying. [63] For, as I looked, the good green earth seemed dying— Dying or dead; And, as I looked on the old boat, I said:— ‘Dear God, it’s I!’

p. 63

p. 64XLVII

p. 64

Come by my bed, What time the gray ghost shrieks and flies; Take in your hands my head, And look, O look, into my failing eyes; And, by God’s grace, Even as He sunders body and breath, The shadow of your face Shall pass with me into the run Of the Beyond, and I shall keep and save Your beauty, as it used to be, An absolute part of me, Lying there, dead and done, Far from the sovran bounty of the sun, Down in the grisly colonies of the Grave.

p. 65XLVIII

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