Age and pain and decay and death
Tower unimpeachable above every moment
And what I give and do not give
disappear tracelessly
Stones dropped into an endless well
The wind stirs the trees
I hear the builders striking with their hammers
And see the ruins
And the emptiness within the ruins
Vast and meaningless
An infinity and eternity of emptiness
Meaninglessness and waste
Hollow nothing
A boundless black veil
Swallowing all dimensions
And I know
And we know
The wind stirs the trees
Sunlight creeps through the branches
A reflection caught in a stream.

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Among the trees at dusk
Gray grass, green moss, burnt-orange fern
A fallen tree consumed by bramble
The remains of a bird devoured by insects
We are quieted by trees and stones
By the illusion of stasis
Against the encroachment of time
Eyeless gaze, partial wing, gray talons
That passed away
So may this.

Instrumental

Hermit haunter of the lonely glen
Common wild and heath
Lone heath and melancholy pond
The desolate face of rude waste landscapes
Far away from men
A feeling I cannot describe
Of lone seclusion and hermit joy
Smoke curls upwards through the naked trees
For a moment the lie becomes truth.

The old hills' indifference
The paths that lay forgotten
The skeleton weeds
And the never-dry, rough, long grasses
The ruins of presumed meaning
The impossibility of stepping
Rose-crowned
Into the darkness
The promise of equalizing putrefaction
To return to the bosom of mother earth
Like frightened children
Yearning to fall asleep on the withered bosom
Of their decrepit mother
And to sleep there forever
Death makes things appear as they are
Abject impermanence
The old hills' indifference.

A wind sways the pines,
And below
Not a breath of wild air;
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine-tree drops its dead;
They are quiet, as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase;
And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
Even we,
Even so.