Poems (Tree)/What Have I to Do With Them
WHAT have I to do with them,The red athletes in their snow-white clothes?They are sun lovers and moon haters,Toiling or playing in the fieldsWhereon no shadows lie,Pensively, whispering together—They are space lovers and haters of the stars,Soundly they sleep by night nor ever seeThe tiaraed brows of darkness.I weary of their striving upward and onward,Away from the green hush of twilight,Where silence drips from the trees,Away from the solemn avenuesWhere the ghosts blow byAlong with a drift of leaves.
Let us linger awhileFar away from the frets and wars of the world,From the strong menWith their strident hymning voices and marching feet—Let us walk aloneFor the love of our own shadowsStretching their length on lawns of powdered silver,With behind us the sky's grey curtainDrawn backward from the moon. . . .Let us sit by the firesideAnd hear the wind's shrill orchestras,Fiddle and fife and flute,And omened bagpipe screaming. . . .Let us lie abed and dreamThrough the long summer's morningOf trivial things, and beautiful. . . .Let us dance with Folly when midnight knocks on his golden gong;Let us run through pools of wineAnd be splashed with purple. Let us, being sick, make merry,And rejoice when we are weary.Let us sit by our grave as at a banquet,Drinking to Death.
What have we to do with them,Sons of the sun and the soil,Daughters of the hearth and the field?They that remake the worldMelting our idols for silver,Our goblets for gold;Tearing our temples downTo build their red brick villages.
The doomed world faints into mist,World of our indolence and dreams,And the faces and bodies we loveSink through oblivion, and are seenDimly, as divers through the waters.Old worlds and new worlds!Let us slip between them,And float on the stream that floweth nowhither—Our red ambitions burnTo a blue smoke of forgetting;Our moonshine faints on the tide that goeth out,As the sun leers to the tide that cometh in.
1918