My love is dead,

Gone to his death-bed,

All under the willow-tree.

See! the white moon shines on high;
Whiter is my true love's shroud;
Whiter than the morning sky,

Whiter than the evening cloud.
My love is dead,

Gone to his death-bed,

All under the willow-tree.

Here upon my true love's grave
Shall the barren flowers be laid;
Not one holy Saint to save

All the coldness of a maid!
My love is dead,

Gone to his death-bed,

All under the willow-tree.

With my hands I'll gird the briars
Round his holy corse to grow.
Elfin Faery, light your fires;

Here my body still shall bow.
My love is dead,

Gone to his death-bed,

All under the willow-tree.

Come, with acorn-cup and thorn,
Drain my heartè's blood away;

་

Tall trams on silver-shining rails,

With grinding wheels and swaying tops,
And lorries with their corded bales,

And screeching cars. "Buy, buy!" the sellers
Of rags and bones and sickening meat
Cry all day long in Lady Street.

And when the sunshine has its way
In Lady Street, then all the gray
Dull desolation grows in state
More dull and gray and desolate,
And the sun is a shamefast thing,
A lord not comely-housed, a god,
Seeing what gods must blush to see,
A song where it is ill to sing,
And each gold ray despiteously
Lies like a gold ironic rod.

Yet one gray man in Lady Street
Looks for the sun. He never bent
Life to his will, his travelling feet
Have scaled no cloudy continent,
Nor has the sickle-hand been strong.
He lives in Lady Street; a bed,

Four cobwebbed walls.

But all day long

A time is singing in his head

Of youth in Gloucester lanes. He hears
The wind among the barley-blades,

The tapping of the woodpeckers

134

By dingy houses, desolate rows
Of shops that stare like hopeless eyes.
Day long the sellers cry their cries,
The fortune-tellers tell no wrong
Of lives that know not any right,
And drift, that has not even the will
To drift, toils through the day until
The wage of sleep is won at night.
But this gray man heeds not at all
The hell of Lady Street. His stall
Of many-coloured merchandise
He makes a shining paradise,
As all day long chrysanthemums
He sells, and red and yellow plums
And cauliflowers. In that one spot
Of Lady Street the sun is not
Ashamed to shine and send a rare
Shower of colour through the air;
The gray man says the sun is sweet
On Gloucester lanes in Lady Street.
JOHN DRINKWATER