Betrayal

The princess has her lovers,
A score of knights has she,
And each can sing a madrigal,
And praise her gracefully.

But Love that is so bitter
Hath put within her heart
A longing for the scornful knight
Who silent stands apart.

And tho’ the others praise and plead,
She maketh no reply,
Yet for a single word from him,
I ween that she would die.

The season of parting has come up with the wind;
My girl has hollowed my heart with the hot iron of separation.

Keep away, doctor, your roots and your knives are useless.
None ever cured the ills of the ill of separation.

There is no one near me noble enough to be told;
I tear my collar in the "Alas! Alas!" of separation.

She was a branch of santal; she closed her eyes and left me.
Autumn has come and she has gone, broken to pieces in the wind of separation.

I am Pir Muhammad and I am stumbling away to die;
She stamped on my eyes with the foot of separation.

From the Pus'hto (Afghans, nineteenth century).

    My little old man and I fell out,
    I'll tell you what 'twas all about:
    I had money, and he had none,
    And that's the way the row begun.

    My soul spoke low to Discontent:
    Long hast thou lodged with me,
    Now, ere the strength of me is spent,
    I would be quit of thee.

    Thy presence means revolt, unrest,
    Means labor, longing, pain;
    Go, leave me, thou unwelcome guest,
    Nor trouble me again.

    I longed for peace - for peace I cried;
    You would not let her in;
    No room was there for aught beside
    The turmoil and the din.

    I longed for rest, prayed life might yield
    Soft joy and dear delight;
    You urged me to the battlefield,
    And flung me in the fight.

    We two part company to-day.
    Now, ere my strength be spent,
    I open wide my doors and say:
    "Begone, thou Discontent!"

    Then something s...

"I rode to death, for I fought for shame--
The Lady Maurine of noble name,

"The fair and faithless!--Though life be long
Is love the wiser?--Love made song

"Of all my life; and the soul that crept
Before, arose like a star and leapt:

"Still leaps with the love that it found untrue,
That it found unworthy.--Now run me through!

"Yea, run me through! for meet and well,
And a jest for laughter of fiends in hell,

"It is that I, who have done no wrong,
Should die by the hand of Hugh the Strong,

"Of Hugh her leman!--What else could be
When the devil was judge twixt thee and me?

"He splintered my lance, and my blade he broke--
Now finish me thou 'neath the trysting oak!" ...

The crest of his foeman,--a heart of white

This book is not about heroes.    English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.    Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, dominion or power,

                        except War.
            Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
            The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
            The Poetry is in the pity.
            Yet these elegies are not to this generation,
                        This is in no sense consolatory.

            They may be to the next.
            All the poet can do to-day is to warn.
            That is why the true Poets must be truthful.
            If I thought the letter of this book would last,
        I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives Prussia,--my ambition ...

A farewell for a Gentlewoman, vertuous and noble

False world, good-night, since thou hast brought
That houre upon my morne of age,
Hence-forth I quit thee from my thought,
My part is ended on thy stage.
Doe not once hope, that thou canst tempt
A spirit so resolv'd to tread
Upon thy throat, and live exempt
From all the nets that thou canst spread.
I know thy formes are studied arts,
Thy subtill wayes, be narrow straits;
Thy curtesie but sudden starts,
And what thou call'st thy gifts are baits.
I know too, though thou strut, and paint,
Yet art thou both shrunke up, and old;
That onely fooles make thee a saint,
And all thy good is to be sold.
I know thou whole art but a shop
Of toyes, and trifles, traps, and snares,
To take the weake, or make...

i.

I tell thee Sweet! there lives not on the earth
    A love like mine in all the height and girth
And all the vast completion of the sphere.
I should be proud, to-day, to shed a tear
If I could weep. But tears are most denied
When most besought; and joys are sanctified
    By joys' undoing in this world of ours
From dusk to dawn and dawn to eventide.


ii.

Wert thou a marble maid and I endow'd
    With power to move thee from thy seeming shroud
Of frozen splendour,--all thy whiteness mine
And all the glamour, all the tender shine
Of thy glad eyes,--ah God! if this were so,
And I the loosener, in the summer-glow,
    Of thy long tresses! I were licensed then
To gaze, unchidden, on thy limbs of snow.


iii.

...

Like pensive cattle, lying on the sands,
they turn their eyes towards the sea’s far hills,
and, feet searching each other’s, touching hands,
know sweet languor and the bitterest thrills.


Some, where the stream babbles, deep in the woods,
their hearts enamoured of long intimacies,
go spelling out the loves of their own girlhoods,
and carving the green bark of young trees.


Others, like Sisters, walk, gravely and slow,
among the rocks, full of apparitions,
where Saint Anthony saw, like lava flows,
the bared crimson breasts of his temptations.


There are those, in the melting candle’s glimmer,
who in mute hollows of caves still pagan,
call on you to relieve their groaning fever,
O Bacchus, to soothe the remorse of the ancients!
<...

Raze these long blocks of brick and stone,
These huge mill-monsters overgrown;
Blot out the humbler piles as well,
Where, moved like living shuttles, dwell
The weaving genii of the bell;
Tear from the wild Cocheco's track
The dams that hold its torrents back;
And let the loud-rejoicing fall
Plunge, roaring, down its rocky wall;
And let the Indian's paddle play
On the unbridged Piscataqua!
Wide over hill and valley spread
Once more the forest, dusk and dread,
With here and there a clearing cut
From the walled shadows round it shut;
Each with its farm-house builded rude,
By English yeoman squared and hewed,
And the grim, flankered block-house bound
With bristling palisades around.
So, haply shall before thine eyes
The dusty veil of centuries ...

        A lad brought up in Highland vale
        Who did believe each fairy tale,
        Which his grannie oft' to him told,
        And of witches and of warlocks bold,
        And he himself would often pour
        For hours reading wizard lore.
        One night his mother to the town
        In a hurry sent him down,
        So o'er his pony he did stride,
        And to the town did fearful ride,
        He thought that demons they would rush
        On him from every rock and bush,
        And as he rode through the quarry
        It did great increase his flurry,
        He felt that fiends with fiercest hate
        Would surely there seal fast his fate.

        But town he reached and 'neath his vest
        He parcel pressed close to hi...

1

My voice rings out, this time, from Damascus
It rings out from the house of my mother and father
In Sham. The geography of my body changes.
The cells of my blood become green.
My alphabet is green.
In Sham. A new mouth emerges for my mouth
A new voice emerges for my voice
And my fingers
Become a tribe

2

I return to Damascus
Riding on the backs of clouds
Riding the two most beautiful horses in the world
The horse of passion.
The horse of poetry.
I return after sixty years
To search for my umbilical cord,
For the Damascene barber who circumcised me,
For the midwife who tossed me in the basin under the bed
And received a gold lira from my father,
She left our house
On that day in March of 1923
Her hands stain...

Still flowed the music, flowed the wine.
    The youth in silence went;
Through naked streets, in cold moonshine,
    His homeward way he bent,
Where, on the city's seaward line,
    His lattice seaward leant.

He knew not why he left the throng,
    But that he could not rest;
That something pained him in the song,
    And mocked him in the jest;
And a cold moon-glitter lay along
    One lovely lady's breast.

He sat him down with solemn book
    His sadness to beguile;
A skull from off its bracket-nook
    Threw him a lipless smile;
But its awful, laughter-mocking look,
    Was a passing moonbeam's wile.

An hour he sat, and read in vain,
    Nought but mirrors were his eyes;
For to and fro through his helpless brain,
...

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
(If our loves remain)
In an English lane,
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
Hark, those two in the hazel coppice
A boy and a girl, if the good fates please,
Making love, say,
The happier they!
Draw yourself up from the light of the moon,
And let them pass, as they will too soon,
With the bean-flowers’ boon,
And the blackbird’s tune,
And May, and June!


What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine
Or look for me, old fellow of mine,
(If I get my head from out the mouth
O’ the grave, and loose my spirit’s bands,
And come again to the land of lands)
In a sea-side house to the farther South,
Where the baked cicala die...

    We all end up badly and
    it's not the season nor the salt
    rather, I suspect but type of gherkin used.

    We all end, badly, at least
    the more modest of us do.
    the old salts they dine on
    limericks anyways.

    We all end up, sadly, the distances
    and the wiles only last up,
    sideways, and barely with
    the edge-ways of a smile.

    Some of us, sadly,
    limit our losses
    call off the posse
    quit deals, the
    quicksilver steals.

    Some of us, gladly,
    surrender or catch
    a slow boat to Twillingate,
    if not willingly,
    at least painstakingly.

The clouds fast gather,
    The forest-oaks roar
A maiden is sitting
    Beside the green shore,
The billows are breaking with might, with might,
And she sighs aloud in the darkling night,
Her eyelid heavy with weeping.

"My heart's dead within me,
    The world is a void;
To the wish it gives nothing,
    Each hope is destroyed.
I have tasted the fulness of bliss below
I have lived, I have loved, Thy child, oh take now,
Thou Holy One, into Thy keeping!"

"In vain is thy sorrow,
    In vain thy tears fall,
For the dead from their slumbers
    They ne'er can recall;
Yet if aught can pour comfort and balm in thy heart,
Now that love its sweet pleasures no more can impart,
Speak thy wish, and thou granted shalt find it!"

"...

The old gate clicks, and down the walk,
Between clove-pink and hollyhock,
Still young of face though gray of lock,
Among her garden's flowers she goes
At evening's close,
Deep in her hair a yellow rose.

The old house shows one gable-peak
Above its trees; and sage and leek
Blend with the rose their scents: the creek,
Leaf-hidden, past the garden flows,
That on it snows
Pale petals of the yellow rose.

The crickets pipe in dewy damps;
And everywhere the fireflies' lamps
Flame like the lights of Faery camps;
While, overhead, the soft sky shows
One star that glows,
As, in gray hair, a yellow rose.

There is one spot she seeks for, where
The roses make a fragrant lair,
A spot where once he kissed her hair,
And told his love,...

Here are old trees, tall oaks and gnarled pines,
That stream with gray-green mosses; here the ground
Was never trenched by spade, and flowers spring up
Unsown, and die ungathered. It is sweet
To linger here, among the flitting birds
And leaping squirrels, wandering brooks, and winds
That shake the leaves, and scatter, as they pass,
A fragrance from the cedars, thickly set
With pale blue berries. In these peaceful shades,
Peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old,
My thoughts go up the long dim path of years,
Back to the earliest days of liberty.

Oh FREEDOM! thou art not, as poets dream,
A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,
And wavy tresses gushing from the cap
With which the Roman master crowned his slave
When he took off the gyves. A bearded man...