IV

The wonder this. For some there are no trees; Or in the trees no beauty and no mirth:— Those dullest millions, pent In life-long banishment

From all the gifts and creatures of the earth, Shut in the inner darkness of the town; Those blighted things you see, But the Sun sees not, at its going down:—

Warped outcasts of some human forestry; Blind victims of the blind, Wreckt ones and dark of mind, With the poor fruit, after their piteous kind.

And if you take some Old One to the fields, To see what Nature yields With fullest hands to men already free, It well may be,

As on some indecipherable book The Guest will look, With eyes too old,— too old, too dim to see; Too old, too old to learn;

Or to discern — Before it slips away, The joy of such a late half-holiday! Proffer those starved eyes your belated cup:

They look not up. Too late, too late for any sky to do Brief kindness with its blue. And what behold they, then?

In the shamed moment, when Old eyes bow down again? Down in the night and blackness of the heart, The drowned things start.

And he recks nothing of the meadow air, Because of what is There. Lost things of hope and sorrow without tongue: The human lilies, sprung

Out of the ooze, and trodden, Even as they breathed and clung! Lost lilies, bruised and sodden; Lost faces, gleaming there,

Where misery blasphemes the sacred young! Mute outcry, most, of those Small suffering hands defrauded of their rose; Faces the daylight shuns;

Ruinous faces of the little ones,— Pale witness, unaware. Starved lips, and withering blood — O broken in the bud!—

Blank eyes, and blighted hair. ( O golden, golden tree! Bear yet awhile with me. ) So is it, haply, when

Dull eyes look up, and then Dull eyes look down again. Waste no vain holiday on such as these; For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.