* * *

…Life again has brought
Me to the patch of earth where once I spent
A brace of unobtrusive summers’ exile.
And since that time a decade’s passed already —
And many have the changes been for me,
And I myself, to common law subservient,
Have changed as well. But here once more the past
With animated power me embraces —
It seems that only yesterday I strayed
yet in these woodlands.
There’s disgraced one’s cottage,
The place where to poor nanny I was sent.
The old one’s passed away, so now I hear
No longer through the wall her heavy trudges —
The sound of her laboriously patrolling.

And there’s the wooded hill, where I would often
Unmoving sit and cast my idle gaze
Upon the lake, remembering with sadness
Those foreign shores and foreign rolling billows…
Between the gilded cornfields and green meadows
Expansively, it shimmers in its blueness;
And through its waters, somehow still uncharted,
A fisherman is floating as he drags
His wretched net. Along the sloping shoreline
The scattered hamlets trail, and there behind them
Lopsided windmill stands, its sails impelled by
The breeze’s forceful gusting…
On the boundary
Of my ancestral holding, where the road
Arises to its meeting with the hillside,
Awaiting there stand three rain-sodden pines —
One lonely at a distance, while the others
Together huddle closer — here I’d canter
By them beneath the starry moonlit heavens,
And there familiar rustle of their crowns
Would greet me as I passed. Just now I travelled
Along that road, and there again I saw them.
And they had scarcely altered, and their branches
Exactly echoed that familiar rustle —
But hard against their antiquated roots (where
It once was all deserted, even hollow)
Begun to grow had new and tender grove,
A family decked in green; the bushes crowding
Beneath their shade like children. But apart
Their sullen comrade stood in lonely splendour
Like aged bachelor, and, just as before, Around it all was barren.
Greetings, youthful
And unfamiliar clan! I shall not see
The mighty growth of your maturing summers,
When you’ll outstrip these trees I’ve known for ages
And their old verdant tops you will conceal
From gaze of passerby. But may it be
My grandson hears your welcome rustle when,
Returning from nocturnal amorous dalliance,
Replete with thoughts both cheerful and seductive,
In darkness of the night in passing by you
Remembers his grandfather.