SUMMER PAST
TO OSCAR WILDE
There was the summer. There
Warm hours of leaf-lipped song,
And dripping amber sweat.
O sweet to see
The great trees condescend to cast a pearl
Down to the myrtles; and the proud leaves curl
In ecstasy.
Fruit of a quest, despair.
Smart of a sullen wrong.
Where may they hide them yet?
One hour, yet one,
To find the mossgod lurking in his nest,
To see the naiads' floating hair, caressed
By fragrant sun.
Beams. Softly lulled the eves
The song-tired birds to sleep,
That other things might tell
Their secrecies.
The beetle humming neath the fallen leaves.
Deep in what hollow do the stern gods keep
Their bitter silence? By what listening well
Where holy trees,
Song-set, unfurl eternally the sheen
Of restless green?
Gray had “come out to Rome” in 1890, but his Catholicism was little more than the kind of fashionable affectation undertaken by More Adey, Eric Stenbock, Ronald Firbank, Montague Summers, Lord Alfred Douglas and other gay men of letters. However as Gray escaped London with French poet Marc-André Raffalovich, he appeared to undergo a second, more sincere conversion. The lovers came to an unconventional accommodation with their shared, adoptive faith, moving to Edinburgh where Gray became a parish priest. The two men died in 1934, months apart.
