Betrayal

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Because thou wast most delicate,
A woman fair for men to see,
The earth did compass thy estate,
Thou didst hold life and death in fee,
And every soul did bend the knee.

[Sidenote: (Wherein the corrupt spirit of privilege is symbolized by Delilah and the People by Samson.)]

Much pleasure also made thee grieve
For that the goblet had been drained.
The well spiced viand thou didst leave
To frown on want whose throat was strained,
And violence whose hands were stained.

The purple of thy royal cloak,
Made the sea paler for its hue.
Much people bent beneath the yoke
To fetch thee jewels white and blue,
And rings to pass thy gold hair through.

Therefore, Delilah wast thou called,
Because the choice wines nourished thee
In Sorek, by t...

Loth to depart, but yet at last each one
Back must now go to's habitation;
Not knowing thus much when we once do sever,
Whether or no that we shall meet here ever.
As for myself, since time a thousand cares
And griefs hath filed upon my silver hairs,
'Tis to be doubted whether I next year
Or no shall give ye a re-meeting here.
If die I must, then my last vow shall be,
You'll with a tear or two remember me.
Your sometime poet; but if fates do give
Me longer date and more fresh springs to live,
Oft as your field shall her old age renew,
Herrick shall make the meadow-verse for you.

What can I do in poetry
Now the good spirit's gone from me?
Why, nothing now but lonely sit
And over-read what I have writ.

I was a queen, and I have lost my crown;
A wife, and I have broken all my vows;
A lover, and I ruined him I loved:,
There is no other havoc left to do.

A little month ago I was a queen,
And mothers held their babies up to see
When I came riding out of Camelot.
The women smiled, and all the world smiled too.

And now, what woman's eyes would smile on me?
I still am beautiful, and yet what child
Would think of me as some high, heaven-sent thing,
An angel, clad in gold and miniver?

The world would run from me, and yet am I
No different from the queen they used to love.
If water, flowing silver over stones,
Is forded, and beneath the horses' feet
Grows turbid suddenly, it clears again,
And men will drink it with no thought of harm.
Yet I...

Across the Eastern sky has glowed
The flicker of a blood-red dawn,
Once more the clarion cock has crowed,
Once more the sword of Christ is drawn.
A million burning rooftrees light
The world-wide path of Israel's flight.


Where is the Hebrew's fatherland?
The folk of Christ is sore bestead;
The Son of Man is bruised and banned,
Nor finds whereon to lay his head.
His cup is gall, his meat is tears,
His passion lasts a thousand years.


Each crime that wakes in man the beast,
Is visited upon his kind.
The lust of mobs, the greed of priest,
The tyranny of kings, combined
To root his seed from earth again,
His record is one cry of pain.


When the long roll of Christian guilt
Against his sires and kin is known,
The...

        When my blood flows calm as a purling river,
    When my heart is asleep and my brain has sway,
        It is then that I vow we must part forever,
    That I will forget you, and put you away
        Out of my life, as a dream is banished
    Out of the mind when the dreamer awakes;
        That I know it will be, when the spell has vanished,
    Better for both of our sakes.

        When the court of the mind is ruled by Reason,
    I know it is wiser for us to part;
        But Love is a spy who is plotting treason,
    In league with that warm, red rebel, the Heart.
        They whisper to me that the King is cruel,
    That his reign is wicked, his law a sin;
        And every word they utter is fuel
    To the flame that smoulders within.
<...

Here, where we stood together, we three men,
Before the war had swept us to the East
Three thousand miles away, I stand again
And hear the bells, and breathe, and go to feast.
We trod the same path, to the selfsame place,
Yet here I stand, having beheld their graves,
Skyros whose shadows the great seas erase,
And Seddul Bahr that ever more blood craves.
So, since we communed here, our bones have been
Nearer, perhaps, than they again will be,
Earth and the worldwide battle lie between,
Death lies between, and friend-destroying sea.
Yet here, a year ago, we talked and stood
As I stnad now, with pulses beating blood.

I saw her like a shadow on the sky
In the last light, a blur upon the sea,
Then the gale's darkness put the shadow by,
But from one grave...

(Noel.)


By the sad fellowship of human suffering,
    By the bereavements that are thine and mine,
I venture--oh, forgive me!--with this offering,
    I would it were to thee God's oil and wine

I too have suffered--is it then surprising
    If to thy sacred grief I enter in?
My spirit draws near thine all sympathising,
    Sorrow, like love, "makes aliens near of kin."

Thou'rt weeping for thy gathered blossoms, mother,
    The Lord had need of him, and called him soon,
In morning freshness ere the dews of heaven
    Were chased before the burning rays of noon.

Thy darling child, like to God's summer blossom,
    Was very fair and pleasant to the sight,
The sunny head that rested on thy bosom,
    The loving eyes that were thy hear...

The little dream she had forgot
Oh, long and long ago,
Came back across the April fields
And touched her garment so
(As might a wind-blown primrose cling
And one scarce guess or know.)

A little beggared outcast dream
Forgot of Love and men,
And all because a fiddler played
An old song in the glen,
And two Young Lovers hand in hand,
Sent back its tune again.

The little dream she had forgot
Crept near and clung and stayed--
A roving, ragged vagabond
Half daring, half afraid,
And all because young love went by
And one old fiddler played.

In these days of peace and money, free to all the Commonweal,
There are ancient dames in Buckland wearing wedding rings of steel;
Wedding rings of steel and iron, worn on wrinkled hands and old,
And the wearers would not give them, not for youth nor wealth untold.

In the days of black oppression, when the best abandoned hope,
And all Buckland crouched in terror of the prison and the rope,
Many fair young wives in Buckland prayed beside their lonely beds
For the absent ones who knew not where to lay their outlawed heads.

But a whisper went through Buckland, to the rebels only known,
That the man across the border had a chance to hold his own.
There were men that came in darkness, quiet, grim and travel-worn,
And, by twos, and threes, the young men stole away to join Kinghor...

How many times, like lotus lilies risen
Upon the surface of a river, there
Have risen floating on my blood the rare
Soft glimmers of my hope escaped from prison.

So I am clothed all over with the light
And sensitive beautiful blossoming of passion;
Till naked for her in the finest fashion
The flowers of all my mud swim into sight.

And then I offer all myself unto
This woman who likes to love me: but she turns
A look of hate upon the flower that burns
To break and pour her out its precious dew.

And slowly all the blossom shuts in pain,
And all the lotus buds of love sink over
To die unopened: when my moon-faced lover,
Kind on the weight of suffering, smiles again.

The treacherous sands had caught our boat,
    And held it with a strong embrace
And death at our imprisoned crew
    Was sternly looking face to face.

With anxious hearts, but failing strength,
    We strove to push the boat from shore;
But all in vain, for there we lay
    With bated breath and useless oar.

Around us in a fearful storm
    The fiery hail fell thick and fast;
And we engirded by the sand,
    Could not return the dreadful blast.

When one arose upon whose brow
    The ardent sun had left his trace,
A noble purpose strong and high
    Uplighting all his dusky face.

Perchance within that fateful hour
    The wrongs of ages thronged apace;
But with it came the glorious hope
    Of swift deliverance to his rac...

Podas Okus
Am I waking? Was I sleeping?
Dearest, are you watching yet?
Traces on your cheeks of weeping
Glitter, 'tis in vain you fret;
Drifting ever! drifting onward!
In the glass the bright sand runs
Steadily and slowly downward;
Hushed are all the Myrmidons.


Has Automedon been banish'd
From his post beside my bed?
Where has Agamemnon vanished?
Where is warlike Diomed?
Where is Nestor? where Ulysses?
Menelaus, where is he?
Call them not, more dear your kisses
Than their prosings are to me.

Daylight fades and night must follow,
Low, where sea and sky combine,
Droops the orb of great Apollo,
Hostile god to me and mine.
Through the tent's wide entrance streaming,
In a flood of glory rare,
Glides the golden su...

The night lamp is faintly gleaming
    Within my chamber still,
And the heavy shades of midnight
    Each gloomy angle fill,
And my worn and weary watchers
    Scarce dare to move or weep,
For they think that I am buried
    In deep and quiet sleep.

But, hush! what are those voices
    Heard on the midnight air,
Of strange celestial sweetness,
    Breathing of love and prayer?
Nearer they grow and clearer,
    I hear now what they say -
To the Kingdom of God's glory,
    They're calling me away!

See my gentle mother softly
    To me approaches now,
What is the change she readeth
    Upon my pale damp brow?
She clasps her hands in anguish
    Whose depth no words might say?
Has she, too, heard the voices
    That a...

The Year's twelve daughters had in turn gone by,
Of measured pace tho' varying mien all twelve,
Some froward, some sedater, some adorn'd
For festival, some reckless of attire.
The snow had left the mountain-top; fresh flowers
Had withered in the meadow; fig and prune
Hung wrinkling; the last apple glow'd amid
Its freckled leaves; and weary oxen blinkt
Between the trodden corn and twisted vine,
Under whose bunches stood the empty crate,
To creak ere long beneath them carried home.
This was the season when twelve months before,
O gentle Hamadryad, true to love!
Thy mansion, thy dim mansion in the wood
Was blasted and laid desolate: but none
Dared violate its precincts, none dared pluck
The moss beneath it, which alone remain'd
Of what was thine.

...

Deep in the hush of a mighty wood
I came to a place of dread and dream,
And forms of shadows, whose shapes elude
The searching swords of the sun's dim gleam,
Builders of silence and solitude.
And there where a glimmering water crept
From rock to rock with a slumberous sound,
Tired to tears, on the mossy ground,
Under a tree I lay and slept.
Was it the heart of an olden oak?
Was it the soul of a flower that died?
Or was it the wildrose there that spoke,
The wilding lily that palely sighed?
For all on a sudden it seemed I awoke:
And the leaves and the flowers were all intent
On a visible something of light and bloom
A presence, felt as a wild perfume
Or beautiful music, that came and went.
And all the grief, I had known, was gone;
And all the angu...

A Suggestion From Hogarth.


One knows the scene so well,--a touch,
A word, brings back again
That room, not garnished overmuch,
In gusty Drury Lane;

The empty safe, the child that cries,
The kittens on the coat,
The good-wife with her patient eyes,
The milkmaid's tuneless throat;

And last, in that mute woe sublime,
The luckless verseman's air:
The "Bysshe," the foolscap and the rhyme,--
The Rhyme ... that is not there!

Poor Bard! to dream the verse inspired--
With dews Castalian wet--
Is built from cold abstractions squired
By "Bysshe," his epithet!

Ah! when she comes, the glad-eyed Muse,
No step upon the stair
Betrays the guest that none refuse,--
She takes us unaware;

And tips with fire our ly...