A Double Ballad Of August

All Afric, winged with death and fire,     Pants in our pleasant English air.     Each blade of grass is tense as wire,     And all the woods loose trembling hair     Stark in the broad and breathless glare     Of hours whose touch wastes herb and tree.     This bright sharp death shines everywhere;     Life yearns for solace toward the sea.     Earth seems a corpse upon the pyre;     The sun, a scourge for slaves to bear.     All power to fear, all keen desire,     Lies dead as dreams of days that were     Before the new-born world lay bare     In heavens wide eye, whereunder we     Lie breathless till the season spare:     Life yearns for solace toward the sea.     Fierce hours, with ravening fangs that tire     On spirit and sense, divide and share     The throbs of thoughts that scarce respire,     The throes of dreams that scarce forbear     One mute immitigable prayer     For cold perpetual sleep to be     Shed snowlike on the sense of care.     Life yearns for solace toward the sea.     The dust of ways where men suspire     Seems even the dust of deaths dim lair.     But though the feverish days be dire     The sea-wind rears and cheers its fair     Blithe broods of babes that here and there     Make the sands laugh and glow for glee     With gladder flowers than gardens wear.     Life yearns for solace toward the sea.     The music dies not off the lyre     That lets no soul alive despair.     Sleep strikes not dumb the breathless choir     Of waves whose note bids sorrow spare.     As glad they sound, as fast they fare,     As when fates word first set them free     And gave them light and night to wear.     Life yearns for solace toward the sea.     For there, though night and day conspire     To compass round with toil and snare     And changeless whirl of change, whose gyre     Draws all things deathwards unaware,     The spirit of life they scourge and scare,     Wild waves that follow on waves that flee     Laugh, knowing that yet, though earth despair,     Life yearns for solace toward the sea.