The days have closed behind my back

Since I came into these hills.

Now memory is a single field

One peasant tills and tills.

So far away, if I should turn

I know I could not find

That place again. These mountains make

The backward gaze half-blind,

Yet sharp my sight till it can catch

The ranges rising clear

Far in futurity’s high-walled land;

But I am rooted here.

And do not know where lies my way,

Backward or forward. If I could

I’d leap Time’s bound or turn and hide

From Time in my ancestral wood.

Double delusion! Here I’m held

By the mystery of the rock,

Must watch in a perpetual dream

The horizon’s gates unlock and lock,

See on the harvest fields of Time

The mountains heaped like sheaves,

And the valleys opening out

Like a volume’s turning leaves,

Dreaming of a peak whose height

Will show me every hill,

A single mountain on whose side

Life blooms for ever and is still.