O I shall miss

With one small breath these centuries

Of harvest-home uncounted!

I have known

The mead, the bread,

And the mounds of grain

As half my riches. But the fields will change,

And their harvest would be strange

If I could return. I should know again

Only the lint-white stubble plain

From which the summer-painted birds have flown

A year’s life on.

But I can never

See with these eyes the double-threaded river

That runs through life and death and death and life,

Weaving one scene. Which I and not I

Blindfold have crossed, I and not I

Will cross again, my face, my feet, my hands

Gleaned from lost lands

To be sown again.

O certain prophecy,

And faithful tragedy,

Furnished with scenery of sorrow and strife,

The Cross and the Flood

And Babel’s towers

And Abel’s blood

And Eden’s bowers,

Where I and not I

Lived and questioned and made reply:

None else to ask or make reply.

If there is none else to ask or reply

But I and not I,

And when I stretch out my hand my hand comes towards me

To pull me across to me and back to me,

If my own mind, questioning, answers me

And there is no other answer to me,

If all that I see,

Woman and man and beast and rock and sky,

Is a flat image shut behind an eye,

And only my thoughts can meet me or pass me or follow me,

O then I am alone,

I, many and many in one,

A lost player upon a hill

On a sad evening when the world is still,

The house empty, brother and sister gone

Beyond the reach of sight, or sound of any cry,

Into the bastion of the mind, behind the shutter of the eye.