31 DECEMBER 1921, Page 15

POETRY.

CONTEMPLATION OF LIFE.

'Cron a scene of endless transformation I gazed unhappy, rivers came and faded, Dragging a momentary brightness from the clouds Into the monochrome of rolling seas Which leapt and fell with steady oscillation.

And in the crystal of eternity Hung with a quivering, wave-like repetition The trees and mountains and the hollow valleys, With towns and peoples and a few fearful places Where the soul hunted had leapt up and printed On rock or tree or sheeted, falling water Its sudden bright and diamond-burning visage.

And as I gazed upon that deathless scene—

Which is and is not—above that flickering desert I saw a black flag floating soundlessly :

Ha Death I thought—but down the silence came A noise of the cold breaking of felicity.

O'er boundless snow I saw that waving fragment, Love's small black flag, stiff in the crystal globe.

The sky was carved with icy tombs of lovers Whose spirits as bodiless as running water Sat sculptured marble in Antarctio cold, Their frozen beauty in the spring-tide clouding,

Now freed by shattering currents, slowly drifting Into the open oeean, and there dimming Among the dimmed and =remembering waters

Until bright lovers' faces all were vanished And Love's black flag an unseen, rippling wind.

Then in that formless, never-ending motion,

Dim lumps of slowness came and stiffly settling Began to dream ; until, the stillness growing, I gazed once more upon a frozen silence Filled with those tombs of beauty, lovers' faces.

And love's black flag was stiff and small above them, Which seeing, my heart wept distractedly.

W. J. TURNER.