Couplets for the Thirtieth Year

COMES padding in, with usual power,
The usual day, the usual hour;
Books and teacups attentively
Applaud the method of the sky,
But Time’s insistence sings within
The belly of your violin.

Therefore play six times five. The strings
Are sharpest cure for time-struck things:
Each year, each day, each minute lives
Of the impulse that your music gives.
Play then, against the hours that fall,
All hours; but this hour last of all.

Play children’s dances on shadowy lawns,
The early white of summer dawns;
Play winter afternoons in town,
Play prayers, play London Bridge is down,
Play the young mystery of God,
Play Dragon and Princess, and the broad
Shields of All Angels . . .
Play also

The later musing, the feet more slow,
The sidelong glance, the timid hand,
The kiss half lost, the dreamlike stand
Of misty stalks in the twilight field,
Slow violence, and the strange first yield
Of tears, dark eyes withdrawn ashamed,
The voice caught back, the word unnamed. (For these were truth; and even now
Their fire sings from your cúrv’d bów,
More true than newer truth of faces
That walk with us in daily places.)

Play then: play men and women, all
Old shadows wavering on the wall;
The days and nights of love and hate,
And those whose friendship stayed too late;
Play kindliness that a word betrayed,
And lust by a careful smile dismayed,
Play bedtime kiss and drowsy head,
Play all lost lovers, play the dead.

And this be all your music, lest
God know our last song for the best,
And, hurrying down, the laggard night
Shroud shining song and singer bright.
For, were we true in love and time,
Sleep were our losing, Death our rhyme,
Earth were the heavy fashion whence
We’d owe a curious innocence.
Then ours would be a stranger style,
In loveless bed a lonely while,
Our bravery of an afternoon
Forgotten, and the desolate moon
Drawn by the dead strings’ broken cry:
There never was an emptier sky!