Now sleeps the land of houses, and dead night holds the street, And there thou liest, my baby, and sleepest soft and sweet;My man is away for awhile, but safe and alone we lie;And none heareth thy breath but thy mother, and the moon looking down from the sky On the weary waste of the town, as it looked on the grass-edged road Still warm with yesterday's sun, when I left my old abode, Hand in hand with my love, that night of all nights in the year;When the river of love o'erflowed and drowned all doubt and fear, And we two were alone in the world, and once, if never again, We knew of the secret of earth and the tale of its labour and pain.
Lo amidst London I lift thee, and how little and light thou art, And thou without hope or fear, thou fear and hope of my heart!
Lo here thy body beginning, O son, and thy soul and thy life;But how will it be if thou livest, and enterest into the strife, And in love we dwell together when the man is grown in thee, When thy sweet speech I shall hearken, and yet 'twixt thee and me Shall rise that wall of distance, that round each one doth grow, And maketh it hard and bitter each other's thought to know?
Now, therefore, while yet thou art little and hast no thought of thine own, I will tell thee a word of the world, of the hope whence thou hast grown, Of the love that once begat thee, of the sorrow that hath made Thy little heart of hunger, and thy hands on my bosom laid.
Then mayst thou remember hereafter, as whiles when people say All this hath happened before in the life of another day;So mayst thou dimly remember this tale of thy mother's voice, As oft in the calm of dawning I have heard the birds rejoice, As oft I have heard the storm-wind go moaning through the wood, And I knew that earth was speaking, and the mother's voice was good.
Now, to thee alone will I tell it that thy mother's body is fair, In the guise of the country maidens who play with the sun and the air, Who have stood in the row of the reapers in the August afternoon, Who have sat by the frozen water in the highday of the moon, When the lights of the Christmas feasting were dead in the house on the hill, And the wild geese gone to the salt marsh had left the winter still.
Yea, I am fair, my firstling; if thou couldst but remember me!
The hair that thy small hand clutcheth is a goodly sight to see;I am true, but my face is a snare; soft and deep are my eyes, And they seem for men's beguiling fulfilled with the dreams of the wise.
Kind are my lips, and they look as though my soul had learned Deep things I have never heard of. My face and my hands are burned By the lovely sun of the acres; three months of London-town And thy birth-bed have bleached them indeed--"But lo, where the edge of the gown"(So said thy father one day) "parteth the wrist white as curd From the brown of the hands that I love, bright as the wing of a bird."Such is thy mother, O firstling, yet strong as the maidens of old, Whose spears and whose swords were the warders of homestead, of field and of fold.
Oft were my feet on the highway, often they wearied the grass;From dusk unto dusk of the summer three times in a week would I pass To the downs from the house on the river through the waves of the blossoming corn.
