The Journey
THE days have dosed behind my back Since I came into these Wits. . Now 'memory is a distant field One peasant tills and tills.
So far away, if I should turn I know I would never find That place again. These mountains make The backward gazer blind, And sharp his sight till it can catch The ranges rising clear In far futurity's high-vvalled land ; But I am rooted here.
And do not know which way lies home, Backward or forward. If I could I'd leap Time's bound, or turn and hide From Time in my ancestral wood.
Double delusion I Here I'm held By the mystery of the rock, Must watch in an unchanging dream The horizon's gates unlock and leek, See on the harvest fields of Time The mountains heaped like sheaves, And. the wide valleys opening out Like a great volume's turning leaves, Dreaming of a peak whose height Will show me every hill, • • A heavenhigh mountain on whose side Life blooms forever and is still.
EDWIN MUIR.
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