The Leaden Echo
How to kéep — is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere
known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce latch
or catch or key to keep
Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty...from vanishing away?
Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankéd wrinkles deep,
Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still
messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
No there's none, there's none, O no there's none,
Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
And wisdom is early to despair:
Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
To keep at bay
Age and age's evils, hoar hair,
Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death's worst, winding sheets,
tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
So be beginning, be beginning to despair,
O there's none; no no no there's none:
Be beginning to despair, to despair,
Despair, despair, despair, despair.
The Golden Echo
Spare!
There ís one, yes I have one(Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of the sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air,
Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
One. Yes I cán tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where whatever's prizéd and passes of us, everything that's fresh
and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away
with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously
sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchéd face
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! too fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth.
To it's own best being and loveliness of youth: it is an
everlasting of, O it is an all youth!
Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear,
gallantry and gaiety and grace,
Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks,
loose locks, long locks, lovelocks,
gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace —
Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them
with breath,
And with sighs soaring, soaring sighs deliver
Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death
Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God,
beauty's self and beauty's giver.
See;not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost;every hair is
Is, hair of the head, numbered,
Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind what
while we slept,
This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
What while we, while we slumbered.
O then, weary then why should we tread? O why are we so haggard
at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged, so fashed,
so cogged, so cumbered.
When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care.
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept — Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where —
Yonder.— What high as that!We follow, now we follow.— Yonder, yes
yonder, yonder.
Yonder.