William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. (1878–1962). Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920.
The Islands
W
what is Greece,
what is Rhodes, Samos, Chios,
what is Paros facing west,
what is Crete?
rising like a ship,
what is Imbros redning the storm-waves
with its breast?
what the circle about Lycia,
what, the Cyclades’
white necklace?
Sparta, rising like a rock,
Thebes, Athens,
what is Corinth?
with its island violets,
what is Euboia, spread with grass,
set with swift shoals,
what is Crete?
what is Greece?
What can love of land give to me
that you have not—
what do the tall Spartans know,
and gentler Attic folk?
more than this?
if you are lost—
and Delos, the clasp
of the white necklace?
What can love of land give to me
that you have not,
what can love of strife break in me
that you have not?
Though Sparta enter Athens,
salt, rising to wreak terror
Thebes wrack Sparta,
each changes as water,
and fall back.
“What has love of land given to you
that I have not?”
where they sat
on the black ships,
weighted with rich stuffs,
I have asked the Greeks
from the white ships,
and Greeks from ships whose hulks
lay on the wet sand, scarlet
with great beaks.
and tall Greeks—
“what has love of land given you?”
But beauty is set apart,
beauty is cast by the sea,
a barren rock,
beauty is set about
with wrecks of ships,
upon our coasts, death keeps
the shallows—death waits
clutching toward us
from the deeps.
the winds that slash its beach,
swirl the coarse sand
upward toward the rocks.
from the islands
and from Greece.
In my garden,
the winds have beaten
the ripe lilies;
in my garden, the salt
has wilted the first flakes
of young narcissus,
and the lesser hyacinth
and the salt has crept
under the leaves of the white hyacinth.
even the wind-flowers lie fiat,
broken by the wind at last.
What are the islands to me
if you are lost,
what is Paros to me
if your eyes draw back,
what is Milos
if you take fright of beauty,
terrible, torturous, isolated,
a barren rack?
what is Paros facing west,
what, white Imbros?
if you hesitate,
what is Greece if you draw back
from the terror
and cold splendor of song
and its bleak sacrifice?