Songs, Merry and Sad

Gray Days

     A soaking sedge,
     A faded field, a leafless hill and hedge,

     Low clouds and rain,
     And loneliness and languor worse than pain.

     Mottled with moss,
     Each gravestone holds to heaven a patient Cross.

     Shrill streaks of light
     Two sycamores' clean-limbed, funereal white,

     And low between,
     The sombre cedar and the ivy green.

     Upon the stone
     Of each in turn who called this land his own

     The gray rain beats
     And wraps the wet world in its flying sheets,

     And at my eaves
     A slow wind, ghostlike, comes and grieves and grieves.