A Parting Song

To a friend leaving England for a year's residence in Australia.     These winds and suns of spring     That warm with breath and wing     The trembling sleep of earth, till half awake     She laughs and blushes ere her slumber break,     For all good gifts they bring     Require one better thing,     For all the loans of joy they lend us, borrow     One sharper dole of sorrow,     To sunder soon by half a world of sea     Her son from England and my friend from me.     Nor hope nor love nor fear     May speed or stay one year,     Nor song nor prayer may bid, as mine would fain,     The seasons perish and be born again,     Restoring all we lend,     Reluctant, of a friend,     The voice, the hand, the presence and the sight     That lend their life and light     To present gladness and heart-strengthening cheer,     Now lent again for one reluctant year.     So much we lend indeed,     Perforce, by force of need,     So much we must; even these things and no more     The far sea sundering and the sundered shore     A world apart from ours,     So much the imperious hours,     Exact, and spare not; but no more than these     All earth and all her seas     From thought and faith of trust and truth can borrow,     Not memory from desire, nor hope from sorrow.     Through bright and dark and bright     Returns of day and night     I bid the swift year speed and change and give     His breath of life to make the next year live     With sunnier suns for us     A life more prosperous,     And laugh with flowers more fragrant, that shall see     A merrier March for me,     A rosier-girdled race of night with day,     A goodlier April and a tenderer May.     For him the inverted year     Shall mark our seasons here     With alien alternation, and revive     This withered winter, slaying the spring alive     With darts more sharply drawn     As nearer draws the dawn     In heaven transfigured over earth transformed     And with our winters warmed     And wasted with our summers, till the beams     Rise on his face that rose on Dante's dreams.     Till fourfold morning rise     Of starshine on his eyes,     Dawn of the spheres that brand steep heaven across     At height of night with semblance of a cross     Whose grace and ghostly glory     Poured heaven on purgatory     Seeing with their flamelets risen all heaven grow glad     For love thereof it had     And lovely joy of loving; so may these     Make bright with welcome now their southern seas.     O happy stars, whose mirth     The saddest soul on earth     That ever soared and sang found strong to bless,     Lightening his life's harsh load of heaviness     With comfort sown like seed     In dream though not in deed     On sprinkled wastes of darkling thought divine,     Let all your lights now shine     With all as glorious gladness on his eyes     For whom indeed and not in dream they rise.     As those great twins of air     Hailed once with oldworld prayer     Of all folk alway faring forth by sea,     So now may these for grace and guidance be,     To guard his sail and bring     Again to brighten spring     The face we look for and the hand we lack     Still, till they light him back,     As welcome as to first discovering eyes     Their light rose ever, soon on his to rise.     As parting now he goes     From snow-time back to snows,     So back to spring from summer may next year     Restore him, and our hearts receive him here,     The best good gift that spring     Had ever grace to bring     At fortune's happiest hour of star-blest birth     Back to love's homebright earth,     To eyes with eyes that commune, hand with hand,     And the old warm bosom of all our mother-land.     Earth and sea-wind and sea     And stars and sunlight be     Alike all prosperous for him, and all hours     Have all one heart, and all that heart as ours.     All things as good as strange     Crown all the seasons' change     With changing flower and compensating fruit     From one year's ripening root;     Till next year bring us, roused at spring's recall,     A heartier flower and goodlier fruit than all.