To follow the fox at the hounds’ tails
And at their baying move a tailor’s inch
To follow, wild as the chicken stealer,
Scent through the clutches of the heather,
Leads to fool’s paradise where the redcoated killer
Deserves no brush, but a fool’s ambush.
Following the nose down dell, up rise
Into the map-backed hills where paths
Cross all directions, bracken points to the skies,
Leads, too, to a lead pit, whinny and fall,
No fox, no good, fool’s, not a fox’s, hole,
And that is the reward of labour
Through heath and heather at the mind’s will.
To follow the nose if the nose goes
Wisely at the dogs’ tails, leads
Through easier heather to the foul lair
Over a road thick with the bones of words.
If hunting means anything more than the chase
On a mare’s back of a mare’s nest or a goose,
Then only over corpses shall the feet tread,
Crunching the already broken,
And this way leads to good and bad,
Where more than snails are friends.

My heart is open again and sea flows in,
It shall fill with a summer of mists and winds and clouds and waves breaking,
Of gull-wings over the green tide, of the surf's drenching din,
Of sudden horizon-sails that come and vanish, phantom-thin,
Of arching sapphire skies, deep and unaching.

I shall lie on the rocks just over the weeds that drape
The clear sea-pools, where birth and death in sunny ooze are teeming,
Where the crab in quest of booty sidles about, a sullen shape,
Where the snail creeps and the mussel sleeps with wary valves agape,
Where life is too grotesque to be but seeming.

And the swallow shall weave my dreams with threads of flight,
A shuttle with silver breast across the warp of the waves gliding;
And an isle far out shall be a beam in the loom of my delight,
And the pattern of every dream shall be a rapture bathed in light—
Its evanescence a beauty most abiding.

And the sunsets shall give sadness all its due.
They shall stain the sands and trouble the tides with all the ache of sorrow.
They shall bleed and die with a beauty of meaning old yet ever new,
They shall burn with all the hunger for things that hearts have failed to do,
They shall whisper of a gold that none can borrow.

And the stars shall come and build a bridge of fire
For the moon to cross the boundless sea, with never a fear of sinking.
They shall teach me of the magic things of life never to tire,
And how to renew, when it is low, the lamp of my desire—
And how to hope, in the darkest deeps of thinking.