Identity

(Old English Manner.)

A MORN OF MAY.

All the clouds about the sun lay up in golden creases,
(Merry rings the maiden's voice that sings at dawn of day;)
Lambkins woke and skipped around to dry their dewy fleeces,
So sweetly as she carolled, all on a morn of May.

Quoth the Sergeant, "Here I'll halt; here's wine of joy for drinking;
To my heart she sets her hand, and in the strings doth play;
All among the daffodils, and fairer to my thinking,
And fresh as milk and roses, she sits this morn of May."

Quoth the Sergeant, "Work is work, but any ye might make me,
If I worked for you, dear lass, I'd count my holiday.
I'm your slave for good and all, an' if ye will but take me,
So sweetly as ye carol upon this morn of May."

"Medals count for ...

My sons, and ye the children of my sons,
Jacob your father goes upon his way,
His pilgrimage is being accomplished.
Come near and hear him ere his words are o’er.
Not as my father’s or his father’s days,
As Isaac’s days or Abraham’s, have been mine;
Not as the days of those that in the field
Walked at the eventide to meditate,
And haply, to the tent returning, found
Angels at nightfall waiting at their door.
They communed, Israel wrestled with the Lord.
No, not as Abraham’s or as Isaac’s days,
My sons, have been Jacob your father’s days,
Evil and few, attaining not to theirs
In number, and in worth inferior much.
As a man with his friend, walked they with God,
In His abiding presence they abode,
And all their acts were open to His face.
But I have ha...

Ah, child, thou art but half thy darling mother's;
Hers couldst thou wholly be,
My light in thee would outglow all in others;
She would relive to me.
But niggard Nature's trick of birth
Bars, lest she overjoy,
Renewal of the loved on earth
Save with alloy.

The Dame has no regard, alas, my maiden,
For love and loss like mine -
No sympathy with mind-sight memory-laden;
Only with fickle eyne.
To her mechanic artistry
My dreams are all unknown,
And why I wish that thou couldst be
But One's alone!

Amor fra l' orbe una leggiadra rete.

HE COMPARES HIMSELF TO A BIRD CAUGHT IN A NET.


    Love 'mid the grass beneath a laurel green--
The plant divine which long my flame has fed,
Whose shade for me less bright than sad is seen--
A cunning net of gold and pearls had spread:
Its bait the seed he sows and reaps, I ween
Bitter and sweet, which I desire, yet dread:
Gentle and soft his call, as ne'er has been
Since first on Adam's eyes the day was shed:
And the bright light which disenthrones the sun
Was flashing round, and in her hand, more fair
Than snow or ivory, was the master rope.
So fell I in the snare; their slave so won
Her speech angelical and winning air,
Pleasure, and fond desire, and sanguine hope.

MACGREGOR.

Oh city, whom grey stormy hands have sown
With restless drift, scarce broken now of any,
Out of the dark thy windows dim and many
Gleam red across the storm. Sound is there none,
Save evermore the fierce wind's sweep and moan,
From whose grey hands the keen white snow is shaken
In desperate gusts, that fitfully lull and waken,
Dense as night's darkness round thy towers of stone.

Darkling and strange art thou thus vexed and chidden;
More dark and strange thy veilèd agony,
City of storm, in whose grey heart are hidden
What stormier woes, what lives that groan and beat,
Stern and thin-cheeked, against time's heavier sleet,
Rude fates, hard hearts, and prisoning poverty.

    I will not know when I am dead
    If sun or moon is overhead;
    I'll stretch out flat without a sound
    Inside a box beneath the ground,
    And never rise again to see
    Branches lifting on a tree,
    Nor hear the song the finches sing
    In the spring.

    I'll not, while sunny ages go,
    Lift a hand or wag a toe;
    But in a wooden box will be
    Hidden for eternity
    From sea and sun, from sight and sound,
    From touch of people, voice of friend,
    From all that makes my heart to bound,
    Denying such an end:
    It is so strange, I wonder why
    People die!

Far are those tranquil hills,
Dyed with fair evening's rose;
On urgent, secret errand bent,
A traveller goes.

Approach him strangers three,
Barefooted, cowled; their eyes
Scan the lone, hastening solitary
With dumb surmise.

One instant in close speech
With them he doth confer:
God-sped, he hasteneth on,
That anxious traveller ...

I was that man - in a dream:
And each world's night in vain
I patient wait on sleep to unveil
Those vivid hills again.

Would that they three could know
How yet burns on in me
Love - from one lost in Paradise -
For their grave courtesy.

Now light the candles; one; two; there's a moth;
What silly beggars they are to blunder in
And scorch their wings with glory, liquid flame -
No, no, not that, - it's bad to think of war,
When thoughts you've gagged all day come back to scare you;
And it's been proved that soldiers don't go mad
Unless they lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive them out to jabber among the trees.

Now light your pipe; look, what a steady hand,
Draw a deep breath; stop thinking, count fifteen,
And you're as right as rain...
    Why won't it rain? ...
I wish there'd be a thunder-storm to-night,
With bucketsful of water to sluice the dark,
And make the roses hang their dripping heads.

Books; what a jolly company they are,
Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves...

    I know a mountain thrilling to the stars,
    Peerless and pure, and pinnacled with snow;
    Glimpsing the golden dawn o'er coral bars,
    Flaunting the vanisht sunset's garnet glow;
    Proudly patrician, passionless, serene;
    Soaring in silvered steeps where cloud-surfs break;
    Virgin and vestal - Oh, a very Queen!
    And at her feet there dreams a quiet lake.

    My lake adores my mountain - well I know,
    For I have watched it from its dawn-dream start,
    Stilling its mirror to her splendid snow,
    Framing her image in its trembling heart;
    Glassing her graciousness of greening wood,
    Kissing her throne, melodiously mad,
    Thrilling responsive to her every mood,
    Gloomed with her sadness, gay when she is glad.

    ...

I skimmed the strings; I sang quite low;
I hoped she would not come or know
That the house next door was the one now dittied,
Not hers, as when I had played unpitied;
- Next door, where dwelt a heart fresh stirred,
My new Love, of good will to me,
Unlike my old Love chill to me,
Who had not cared for my notes when heard:
Yet that old Love came
To the other's name
As hers were the claim;
Yea, the old Love came

My viol sank mute, my tongue stood still,
I tried to sing on, but vain my will:
I prayed she would guess of the later, and leave me;
She stayed, as though, were she slain by the smart,
She would bear love's burn for a newer heart.
The tense-drawn moment wrought to bereave me
Of voice, and I turned in a dumb despair
At her finding I'd ...

    'Tis hard to say if greater waste of time
    Is seen in writing or in reading rhyme;
    But, of the two, less dangerous it appears
    To tire our own than poison others' ears.
    Time was, the owner of a peevish tongue,
    The pebble of his wrath unheeding flung,
    Saw the faint ripples touch the shore and cease,
    And in the duckpond all again was peace.
    But since that Science on our eyes hath laid
    The wondrous clay from her own spittle made,
    We see the widening ripples pass beyond,
    The pond becomes the world, the world a pond,
    All ether trembles when the pebble falls,
    And a light word may ring in starry halls.
    When first on earth the swift iambic ran
    Men here and there were found but nowhere Man.
    From whenceso...

What girl but, having gathered flowers,
Stript the beds and spoilt the bowers,
From the lapful light she carries
Drops a careless bud? nor tarries
To regain the waif and stray:
“Store enough for home” she’ll say.

So say I too: give your lover
Heaps of loving, under, over,
Whelm him, make the one the wealthy!
Am I all so poor who, stealthy
Work it was! picked up what fell:
Not the worst bud, who can tell?

Da Roma ad Ostia.


From Rome to Ostia a poor man went;
        Thieves robbed and wounded him upon the way;
        Some monks, great saints, observed him where he lay,
        And left him, on their breviaries intent.
A Bishop passed thereby, and careless bent
        To sign the cross, a blessing brief to say;
        But a great Cardinal, to clutch their prey,
        Followed the thieves, falsely benevolent.
At last there came a German Lutheran,
        Who builds on faith, merit of works withstands;
        He raised and clothed and healed the dying man.
        Now which of these was worthiest, most humane?
The heart is better than the head, kind hands
        Than cold lip-service; faith without works is vain.
                        Who un...

They were three old men with hoary hair
    And beards of wintry gray,
And they digged a grave in the yellow soil,
And they crooned this song as they plied their toil,
    In the fading light of day:

Hither ye bring your workmen,
    Like tools that are broken and bent,
To pay your due to their cunning
    After their skill is spent;
Hither ye bring them and lay them,
    And go when your prayers are said,
Back where the stress of your living
    Makes mock of the peace of your dead.

From the iron-paved roads of traffic,
    From the shell-scarred fields of war,
From the lands of earth's burning girdle
    To the snows of her uttermost star,
Ye bring in your sons and daughters
    From the glare and the din of today,
Giving th...

        There is a courage, a majestic thing
    That springs forth from the brow of pain, full-grown,
    Minerva-like, and dares all dangers known,
        And all the threatening future yet may bring;
        Crowned with the helmet of great suffering;
    Serene with that grand strength by martyrs shown,
    When at the stake they die and make no moan,
        And even as the flames leap up are heard to sing:

        A courage so sublime and unafraid,
    It wears its sorrows like a coat of mail;
    And Fate, the archer, passes by dismayed,
        Knowing his best barbed arrows needs must fail
        To pierce a soul so armored and arrayed
    That Death himself might look on it and quail.

    Her thought that, like a brook beside the way,
        Sang to my steps through all the wandering year,
    Has ceased from melody--O Love, allay
                My sudden fear!

    She cannot fail--the beauty of that brow
        Could never flower above a desert heart--
    Somewhere beneath, the well-spring even now
                Lives, though apart.

    Some day, when winter has renewed her fount
        With cold, white-folded snows and quiet rain,
    O Love, O Love, her stream again will mount
                And sing again!

I

There dwells a mighty pair -
Slow, statuesque, intense -
Amid the vague Immense:
None can their chronicle declare,
Nor why they be, nor whence.

II

Mother of all things made,
Matchless in artistry,
Unlit with sight is she. -
And though her ever well-obeyed
Vacant of feeling he.

III

The Matron mildly asks -
A throb in every word -
"Our clay-made creatures, lord,
How fare they in their mortal tasks
Upon Earth's bounded bord?

IV

"The fate of those I bear,
Dear lord, pray turn and view,
And notify me true;
Shapings that eyelessly I dare
Maybe I would undo.

V

"Sometimes from lairs of life
Methinks I catch a groan,
Or multitudinous moan,
As though I had...

6.
No trump tells thy virtues - the grave where they rest
With thy dust shall remain unpolluted by fame,
Till thy foes, by the world and by fortune caressed,
Shall pass like a mist from the light of thy name.

7.
When the storm-cloud that lowers o'er the day-beam is gone,
Unchanged, unextinguished its life-spring will shine;
When Erin has ceased with their memory to groan,
She will smile through the tears of revival on thine.