Zennor Cottages

(Once sheltering D. H. Lawrence)
What pledge of honour
Obsessing the whole mind,
Broken near Zennor
Into stone and wind,

Shows one inhabiting
A cottage, who gave wrongs
A name, while he would sing
His German songs?

Who would have thought that here
Where the yellow flower breaks stone
His presence should appear,
And those years gone?

Two wars, two cottages,
Where famished the hawk falls;
The heart’s imprisoned seas
In granite walls

Revive with a sigh
The man’s peculiar load
When before Italy
He trod this road.

Here is the landscape he
Knew bitterly; but now,
Where breaks the exterior sea,
I notice how

The fields he knew, though bleak,
Still nourish for their own
A strength which cannot speak
Till life is gone.