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Are wafted by slow airs to empty coasts;

There are they sadly glimmering borne

Across the plumbless ocean of oblivion.

Bare are thy trees become, Kortirion,

120

And all their summer glory swiftly gone.

The seven lampads of the Silver Bear

Are waxen to a wondrous flare

That flames above the fallen year.

Though cold thy windy squares and empty streets;

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Though elves dance seldom in thy pale retreats

(Save on some rare and moonlit night,

A flash, a whispering glint of white),

Yet would I never need depart from here.

The Last Verse

I need not know the desert or red palaces

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Where dwells the sun, the great seas or the magic isles,

The pinewoods piled on mountain-terraces;

And calling faintly down the windy miles

Touches my heart no distant bell that rings

In populous cities of the Earthly Kings.

135

Here do I find a haunting ever-near content

Set midmost of the Land of withered Elms

(Alalminórë of the Faery Realms);

Here circling slowly in a sweet lament

Linger the holy fairies and immortal elves

140

Singing a song of faded longing to themselves.

I give next the text of the poem as my father rewrote it in 1937, in the later of slightly variant forms.

Kortirion among the Trees

I

O fading town upon an inland hill,

Old shadows linger in thine ancient gate,

Thy robe is grey, thine old heart now is still;

Thy towers silent in the mist await

5

Their crumbling end, while through the storeyed elms

The Gliding Water leaves these inland realms,

And slips between long meadows to the Sea,

Still bearing downward over murmurous falls

One day and then another to the Sea;

10

And slowly thither many years have gone,

Since first the Elves here built Kortirion.

O climbing town upon thy windy hill

With winding streets, and alleys shady-walled

Where now untamed the peacocks pace in drill

15

Majestic, sapphirine, and emerald;

Amid the girdle of this sleeping land,

Where silver falls the rain and gleaming stand

The whispering host of old deep-rooted trees

That cast long shadows in many a bygone noon,

20

And murmured many centuries in the breeze;

Thou art the city of the Land of Elms,

Alalminórë in the Faery Realms.

Sing of thy trees, Kortirion, again:

The beech on hill, the willow in the fen,

25

The rainy poplars, and the frowning yews

Within thine agéd courts that muse

In sombre splendour all the day;

Until the twinkle of the early stars

Comes glinting through their sable bars,

30

And the white moon climbing up the sky

Looks down upon the ghosts of trees that die

Slowly and silently from day to day.

O Lonely Isle, here was thy citadel,

Ere bannered summer from his fortress fell.

35

Then full of music were thine elms:

Green was their armour, green their helms,

The Lords and Kings of all thy trees.

Sing, then, of elms, renowned Kortirion,

That under summer crowd their full sail on,

40

And shrouded stand like masts of verdurous ships,

A fleet of galleons that proudly slips

Across long sunlit seas.

II

Thou art the inmost province of the fading isle,

Where linger yet the Lonely Companies;

45

Still, undespairing, here they slowly file

Along thy paths with solemn harmonies:

The holy people of an elder day,

Immortal Elves, that singing fair and fey

Of vanished things that were, and could be yet,

50

Pass like a wind among the rustling trees,

A wave of bowing grass, and we forget

Their tender voices like wind-shaken bells

Of flowers, their gleaming hair like golden asphodels.

Once Spring was here with joy, and all was fair

55

Among the trees; but Summer drowsing by the stream

Heard trembling in her heart the secret player

Pipe, out beyond the tangle of her forest dream,

The long-drawn tune that elvish voices made

Foreseeing Winter through the leafy glade;

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The late flowers nodding on the ruined walls

Then stooping heard afar that