But if our love be dying

BUT if our love be dying let it die

As the rose shedding secretly,

Or as a noble music's pause:

Let it move rhythmic as the laws

Of the sea's ebb, or the sun's ritual

When soverignly he dies:

Then let a mourner rise and three times call

Upon our love, and the long echoes fall.

Michael Field

July

THERE is a month between the swath and sheaf

When grass is gone

And corn still grassy;

When limes are massy

With hanging leaf,

And pollen-coloured blooms whereon

Bees are voices we can hear,

So hugely dumb

This silent month of the attaining year.

The white-faced roses slowly disappear

From field and hedgerow, and no more flowers come;

Earth lies in strain of powers

Too terrible for flowers:

And, would we know

Her burden, we must go

Forth from the vale, and, ere the sunstrokes slacken,

Stand at a moorland's edge and gaze

Across the hush and blaze

Of the clear-burning, verdant summer bracken;

For in that silver flame

Is writ July's own name--

The ineffectual, numbed sweet

Of passion at its heat.

Michael Field

September

BUT why is Nature at such heavy pause,

And the earth slowly ceasing to revolve?

Only the lapping tides abide their laws,

And very softly on the sand dissolve.

The fruit is gathered--not an apple drops:

In little mists above the garden bed

The petals of the last gold dahlia shed;

The spider central 'mid his wreathed dewdrops!

Oh still, oh quiet!--and no issue found;

No laying up to rest of callow things,

Or scale, or sheaf, or tissue of armed wings:

Open the tilth, open the fallow ground!

The fragrance of the air that has no home

Spreads vague and dissolute, nor cares to roam.

Michael Field

Morning-Rains

I HEARD a morning thrush salute the rains

That beat in soft, prolific rush,

Armies of angry dewdrops on the panes,

In shower across the roofs: the thrush,

Through all this liquid measure,

Sang shrilly for his pleasure,

And, as the soft and shrill together mingled,

My ears voluptuously tingled.

Michael Field