Many Voices

THE grass was gray with the moonlit dew,
   The stones were white as I came through;
   I came down the path by the thirteen yews,
   Through the blocks of shade that the moonlight hews.
   And when I came to the high lych-gate
   I waited awhile where the corpses wait;
   Then I came down the road where the moonlight lay
   Like the fallen ghost of the light of day.

   The bats shrieked high in their zigzag flight,
   The owls’ spread wings were quiet and white,
   The wind and the poplar gave sigh for sigh,
   And all about were the rustling shy
   Little live creatures that love the night—
   Little wild creatures timid and free.
   I passed, and they were not afraid of me.

   It was over the meadow and down the lane
   The way to come to my house again:
   Through the wood where the lovers talk,
   And the ghosts, they say, get leave to walk.
   I wore the clothes that we all must wear,
   And no one saw me walking there,
   No one saw my pale feet pass
   By my garden path to my garden grass.
   My garden was hung with the veil of spring—
   Plum-tree and pear-tree blossoming;
   It lay in the moon’s cold sheet of light
   In garlands and silence, wondrous and white
   As a dead bride decked for her burying.