The Knoll

All rimmed around with halcyon skies, Filled with blue air and butterflies, Mightily arched and intervalled, And leaved with solemn emerald, The century-lichened oaks arise From this high knoll against the brine Like those about Dodona's shrine: For here Apollo still is god And living dryads tread the sod And love is Grecian and divine. Not hidden with sad dreams of ill Where Venus holds her vaulted hill, For us the two, for us the three, Here dwells the fair antiquity Glad and august and pagan still. And here how often has the sun Brightened on breast and hair of One. . . But never has the sun or shade Amply and long enough delayed For love that dreads oblivion. . . . What shall the sealed horizons hold For us, on future hills, untold— The three, the two, that tarried here Through azure mornings, hushed and dear, And afternoons of forfeit gold? Haply, by some dark ocean-stream, These days shall dawn again in dream; Through films of distance and of tears We shall behold, in wintered years, These butterflies that flit and gleam.