Loneliness

When days grow long, and brain and hands grow weary,
    And hot the city street,
Forth to the haunts, by cooling winds made cheery
    We fly with willing feet.

We leave our cares and labours all behind us,
    The city's noise and din,
And, hid securely where they cannot find us,
    We drink the sunshine in.

But when the days grow long with bitter sorrow,
    And hearts grow sick with woe,
Where are the haunts that we may seek to-morrow?
    Where can we hide or go?

Holds earth no nook, where hearts with sorrow breaking,
    May find a summer's rest?
A season's respite from the weary aching
    That gnaws within the breast?

O God! if we could fly and leave behind us
    Our crosses and our grief,
Could hide a season where t...

Ye shadowy forms, again ye're drawing near,

So wont of yore to meet my troubled gaze!
Were it in vain to seek to keep you here?

Loves still my heart that dream of olden days?
Oh, come then! and in pristine force appear,

Parting the vapor mist that round me plays!
My bosom finds its youthful strength again,
Feeling the magic breeze that marks your train.

Ye bring the forms of happy days of yore,

And many a shadow loved attends you too;
Like some old lay, whose dream was well nigh o'er,

First-love appears again, and friendship true;
Upon life's labyrinthine path once more

Is heard the sigh, and grief revives anew;
The friends are told, who, in their hour of pride,
Deceived by fortune, vanish'd from my side.

No long...

Vivid with love, eager for greater beauty
Out of the night we come
Into the corridor, brilliant and warm.
A metal door slides open,
And the lift receives us.
Swiftly, with sharp unswerving flight
The car shoots upward,
And the air, swirling and angry,
Howls like a hundred devils.
Past the maze of trim bronze doors,
Steadily we ascend.
I cling to you
Conscious of the chasm under us,
And a terrible whirring deafens my ears.

The flight is ended.

We pass thru a door leading onto the ledge,
Wind, night and space
Oh terrible height
Why have we sought you?
Oh bitter wind with icy invisible wings
Why do you beat us?
Why would you bear us away?
We look thru the miles of air,
The cold blue miles between us and the city,

Silence, whose drowsy eyelids are soft leaves,
    And whose half-sleeping eyes are the blue flowers,
On whose still breast the water-lily heaves,
    For all her speech the whisper of the showers.

Made of all things that in the water sway,
    The quiet reed kissing the arrowhead,
The willows murmuring, all a summer day,
    "Silence" - sweet word, and ne'er so softly said

As here along this path of brooding peace,
    Where all things dream, and nothing else is done
But all such gentle businesses as these
    Of leaves and rippling wind, and setting sun

Turning the stream to a long lane of gold,
    Where the young moon shall walk with feet of pearl,
And, framed in sleeping lilies, fold on fold,
    Gaze at herself, like any mortal girl.

After having read a Great Deal of Good Current Poetry in the Magazines and Newspapers



    Ah, they are passing, passing by,
    Wonderful songs, but born to die!
    Cries from the infinite human seas,
    Waves thrice-winged with harmonies.
    Here I stand on a pier in the foam
    Seeing the songs to the beach go home,
    Dying in sand while the tide flows back,
    As it flowed of old in its fated track.
    Oh, hurrying tide that will not hear
    Your own foam-children dying near:
    Is there no refuge-house of song,
    No home, no haven where songs belong?
    Oh, precious hymns that come and go!
    You perish, and I love you so!

Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.

Step not out on the dew-dashed lawn
To view the Lady's Chair,
Immense Orion's glittering form,
The Less and Greater Bear:
Stay in; to such sights we were drawn
When faded ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents
That come forth lingeringly,
And wake the same sweet sentiments
They breathed to you and me
When living seemed a laugh, and love
All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room
Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too fragrant was Lif...

Oh! give me the night, the dark, dark night,
    The night with never a star.
When the stars are veiled and the moon has sailed
    Beyond the horizon's bar.
When thought grows weary of groping its way
    Through darkness dense and deep,
And buries its head in oblivion's bed,
    Wrapped warm in the mantle of sleep.

For I hate the night, the moon-white night,
    The night with a pallid face,
When a million eyes from the watchful skies
    Peers into each secret place.
For thought awakes and the old wound aches,
    And Sorrow she cannot rest,
But all night long walks to and fro
    Through the aisles of my troubled breast.

And Memory thinks it her royal hour
    When the heavens glitter and shine;
And she fills the cup of the past well ...

Though you are in your shining days,
Voices among the crowd
And new friends busy with your praise,
Be not unkind or proud,
But think about old friends the most:
Time’s bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.

Reader - gentle - if so be
Such still live, and live for me,
Will it please you to be told
What my tenscore pages hold?

Here are verses that in spite
Of myself I needs must write,
Like the wine that oozes first
When the unsqueezed grapes have burst.

Here are angry lines, "too hard!"
Says the soldier, battle-scarred.
Could I smile his scars away
I would blot the bitter lay,

Written with a knitted brow,
Read with placid wonder now.
Throbbed such passion in my heart?
Did his wounds once really smart?

Here are varied strains that sing
All the changes life can bring,
Songs when joyous friends have met,
Songs the mourner's tears have wet.

See the banquet's dead bouquet,
Fair and fragrant in its day;
Do they...

On your brow, the steppes of Asia
are fetched by deep set eyes
A colouring distict with mystery
perceives the Polos greeting the Great Khan,
the golden isle of Ciphangu, the sultry east.

I revel in the mystery
of my warm, wet flower.
A pollen bee laden with honey
squirms, embraces with me,
in the abrupt opening of our jar,
serrated edge of the known world.

The air, buoyed and elastic with pleasure, belongs to me.
Tawny, pale rose, your oriental skin
peels back
the tiny veils separating our cultures.
I peer in to find Confucian
lilac, towers of silence,
opal pheasants.

Harmony strains all dogmas.
Rain darts penetrate the gathering pools.
The tiny plastic cup
my life,
inseparable from your hand.

I need not ask thee, for my sake,
To read a book which well may make
Its way by native force of wit
Without my manual sign to it.
Its piquant writer needs from me
No gravely masculine guaranty,
And well might laugh her merriest laugh
At broken spears in her behalf;
Yet, spite of all the critics tell,
I frankly own I like her well.
It may be that she wields a pen
Too sharply nibbed for thin-skinned men,
That her keen arrows search and try
The armor joints of dignity,
And, though alone for error meant,
Sing through the air irreverent.
I blame her not, the young athlete
Who plants her woman's tiny feet,
And dares the chances of debate
Where bearded men might hesitate,
Who, deeply earnest, seeing well
The ludicrous and laughable,
Ming...

High on a broad unfertile tract of forest-skirted Down,
Nor kept by Nature for herself, nor made by man his own,
From home and company remote and every playful joy,
Served, tending a few sheep and goats, a ragged Norman Boy.

Him never saw I, nor the spot; but from an English Dame,
Stranger to me and yet my friend, a simple notice came,
With suit that I would speak in verse of that sequestered child
Whom, one bleak winter's day, she met upon the dreary Wild.

His flock, along the woodland's edge with relics sprinkled o'er
Of last night's snow, beneath a sky threatening the fall of more,
Where tufts of herbage tempted each, were busy at their feed,
And the poor Boy was busier still, with work of anxious heed.

There 'was' he, where of branches rent and withered and ...

The morning shone on Tagus' rocky side,
And airs of summer swelled the yellow tide,
When, rising from his melancholy bed,
And faint, and feebly by Antonio[2] led,
Poor Camoens, subdued by want and woe,
Along the winding margin wandered slow,
His harp, that once could each warm feeling move
Of patriot glory or of tenderest love,
His sole and sable friend[3] (while a faint tone
Rose from the wires) placed by a mossy stone.
How beautiful the sun ascending shines
From ridge to ridge, along the purple vines!
How pure the azure of the opening skies!
How resonant the nearer rock replies
To call of early mariners! and, hark!
The distant whistle from yon parting bark,
That down the channel as serene she strays,
Her gray sail mingles with the ...

No new delights to our desire
    The singers of the past can yield.
    I lift mine eyes to hill and field,
And see in them your yet dumb lyre,
    Poets unborn and unrevealed.

Singers to come, what thoughts will start
    To song? what words of yours be sent
    Through man's soul, and with earth be blent?
These worlds of nature and the heart
    Await you like an instrument.

Who knows what musical flocks of words
    Upon these pine-tree tops will light,
    And crown these towers in circling flight
And cross these seas like summer birds,
    And give a voice to the day and night?

Something of you already is ours;
    Some mystic part of you belongs
    To us whose dreams your future throngs,
Who look on hills, and trees, and flo...

    Not in this chamber only at my birth--
        When the long hours of that mysterious night
        Were over, and the morning was in sight--
    I cried, but in strange places, steppe and firth
    I have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;
        And never shall one room contain me quite
        Who in so many rooms first saw the light,
    Child of all mothers, native of the earth.

    So is no warmth for me at any fire
        To-day, when the world's fire has burned so low;
    I kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,
    At that cold hearth which one time roared so strong,
    And straighten back in weariness, and long
        To gather up my little gods and go.

I heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night;
I went to the window to see the sight;
All the Dead that ever I knew
Going one by one and two by two.

On they pass'd, and on they pass'd;
Townsfellows all, from first to last;
Born in the moonlight of the lane,
Quench'd in the heavy shadow again.

Schoolmates, marching as when they play'd
At soldiers once, but now more staid;
Those were the strangest sight to me
Who were drown'd, I knew, in the awful sea.

Straight and handsome folk, bent and weak, too;
Some that I loved, and gasp'd to speak to;
Some but a day in their churchyard bed;
Some that I had not known were dead.

A long, long crowd, where each seem'd lonely,
Yet of them all there was one, one only,
Raised a head or look'd my ...

The sunsets fall and the sunsets fade,
But still I walk this shadowy land;
And grapple the dark and only the dark
In my search for a loving hand.

For it’s here a still, deep woodland lies,
With spurs of pine and sheaves of fern;
But I wander wild, and wail like a child
For a face that will never return!

And it’s here a mighty water flows,
With drifts of wind and wimpled waves;
But the darling head of a dear one dead
Is hidden beneath its caves.

    This is the valley where we sojourn now,
        Cut up by narrow brooks and rich and green
    And shaded sweetly by the waving bough
        About the trench where floats the soft serene
    Arun with waters running low and low
        Through banks where lately still the tide has been;
    Here is our resting-place, you walk with me
    And watch the light die out in Amberley.

    The light that dies is soft and flooding still,
        Shed from the broad expanse of all the skies
    And brimming up the space from hill to hill,
        Where yet the sheep in their sweet exercise,
    Roaming the meadows, crop and find their fill
        And to each other speak with moaning cries;
    We on the hill-side standing rest and see
    The light die out in br...