Permanence

VIOLETS, with rare and thin and reaching smell,
What is it you would tell?
Five thousand, fifty thousand years from us Your scent was even thus,
In dusks before the Spring, O cry intense,
Thrilling within the sense.
O whither would you have us yearn and reach Following your spirit-speech?
O love, first love, and all its keen regrets Call with you, violets;
You draw us down all woodlands that have been Since first the world was green —
Draw us with ache through graves of all the days To grasp what beauty stays,
What Permanence behind all perishings,
What Spring behind the springs.

And you reply: we have not known jour grief,
Untricked to your belief
In Time delusive, that unreal shade
By your own thinking made;
We have not known your Forward and Behind,
Vext individual mind;
We are the happy features of one Face,
The graces of one Grace;
With us the hours are one immortal Hour;
All fading flowers, one Flower.