Before she pass’d behind the glacier wall

that hides her white eternal sorceries

the northern witch, in clinging ermine pall,

cast one last look along the shallow seas,

a look that held them in its numbing thrall

and melted onward to the sandy leas

where our lorn city lives its lingering fall

and wistful summer shrinks in scant-clad trees.

Hence came one greyness over grass and stone:

the silent-lapping waters fade and tone

into the air and into them the land;

and all along our stagnant waterways

a drown’d and dusky gleaming sleeps, unbann’d,

the lurking twilight of her vanish’d gaze.