-
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
- (Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)
- The Leaden Echo
- How to keep–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, rankèd 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 is 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,
- Óne. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
- Where whatever’s prized 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-matchèd face,
- The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
- Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
- To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-
- lastingness 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 síghs 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, 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 whý 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.
