the frontier of the mind

Night is on the downland, on the lonely moorland,

On the hills where the wind goes over sheep-bitten turf,

Where the bent grass beats upon the unplowed poorland

And the pine-woods roar like the surf.

 

Here the Roman lived on the wind-barren lonely,

Dark now and haunted by the moorland fowl;

None comes here now but the peewit only,

And moth-like death in the owl.

 

Beauty was here in this beetle-droning downland;

The thought of a Caesar in the purple came

From the palace by the Tiber in the Roman townland

To this wind-swept hill with no name.

 

Lonely Beauty came here and was here in sadness,

Brave as a thought on the frontier of the mind,

In the camp of the wild upon the march of madness,

The bright-eyed Queen of the Blind.

 

Now where Beauty was are the wind-withered gorses,

Moaning like old men in the hill-wind's blast;

The flying sky is dark with running horses,

And the night is full of the past.

---John Masefield

Done