Charleston Plantations: Drayton House - Middleton - Runnymede

Drayton House — Middleton — Runnymede

You cannot see them from the road: go far and deep
Down the long avenues where mosses cover up the leaves,
Across the empty terraced lawns, neglected and asleep,
To the still place where no dog barks and no dove grieves,
Where a black mirror gives you back your face too white
In pools jet-dyed by cypress-roots: go deep and far,
Deep into time, far into crumbling spaces and half-light,
To where they stand: our Egypt and our Nineveh:
Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

The garlands and the little foxes’ faces carved
Upon the mantels look on empty walls and water stains,
And the stairs tremble though so elegantly curved
(Outside are waiting the bright creeping vines)
And as your foot falls in the silences you guess
Decay has been arrested for a moment in the wall,
But the plumes on the trees in deathly loveliness
Will stir when you have passed, somewhere a stone fall:
Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

There is no rice now, and the world that sprang from it,
Like an azalea brilliant from the swamps, has crumbled;
A single century, it is embalmed as Egypt,
A single century and all that elegance is humbled;
While we who fired that world and watched it burn
Come every spring in crowds to whisper near the tomb,
To stare, a little shaken, where the mosses mourn
And the azaleas and magnolias have not ceased to bloom.
Deep in a deathly stillness stand the planters’ houses.

MAY SARTON