ISSUE: Winter 1926
I will get on my knees to wood and stone;
to their cold shapes, their durable dead stuffs;
to fallen herms, lying like unfleshed bone,
to leaning monoliths, the east wind roughs;
stone, in whose barren curves is bosomed peace
for fires to crouch in, and for men’s tired eyes;
wood, in whose grain the secret years’ increase
is traced like tide-marks in unchanging dyes.
There is a power brooding in these things,
stern as the slow fates that upon them creep.
Worn stump and ragged boulder rouse the mind
when every love is desperate, or asleep.
And I, delighting not in my own kind,
adore brute matter that nor thinks, nor sings.
