I am homesick after mine own kind,

Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces,

But I am homesick after mine own kind.

“These sell our pictures! Oh well,

They reach me not, touch me some edge or that,

But reach me not and all my life’s become

One flame, that reaches not beyond

My heart’s own hearth,

Or hides among the ashes there for thee.”

“Thee?” Oh, “Thee” is who cometh first

Out of mine own soul-kin,

For I am homesick after mine own kind

And ordinary people touch me not.

And I am homesick

After mine own kind that know, and feel

And have some breath for beauty and the arts.

Aye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit

And have none about me save in the shadows

When come they, surging of power, “DAEMON,”

“Quasi KALOUN.” S.T. says Beauty is most that, a “calling to the soul.”

Well then, so call they, the swirlers out of the mist of my soul,

They that come mewards, bearing old magic.

But for all that, I am homesick after mine own kind

And would meet kindred even as I am,

Flesh-shrouded bearing the secret.

“All they that with strange sadness”

Have the earth in mockery, and are kind to all,

My fellows, aye I know the glory

Of th’ unbounded ones, but ye, that hide

As I hide most the while

And burst forth to the windows only whiles or whiles

For love, or hope, or beauty or for power,

Then smoulder, with the lids half closed

And are untouched by echoes of the world.

Oh ye, my fellows: with the seas between us some be,

Purple and sapphire for the silver shafts

Of sun and spray all shattered at the bows;

And some the hills hold off,

The little hills to east of us, though here we

Have damp and plain to be our shutting in.

And yet my soul sings “Up!” and we are one.

Yea thou, and Thou, and THOU, and all my kin

To whom my breast and arms are ever warm,

For that I love ye as the wind the trees

That holds their blossoms and their leaves in cure

And calls the utmost singing from the boughs

That ’thout him, save the aspen, were as dumb

Still shade, and bade no whisper speak the birds of how

“Beyond, beyond, beyond, there lies …”