Loneliness

It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.
Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chips in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.
It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!—
The green earth tilts through a sphere of air
And bathes in a flame of space.

A spirit is out to-night!
His steeds are the winds; oh, list,
How he madly sweeps o'er the clouds,
And scatters the driving mist.

We will let the curtains fall
Between us and the storm;
Wheel the sofa up to the hearth,
Where the fire is glowing warm.

Little student, leave your book,
And come and sit by my side;
If you dote on Tennyson so,
I'll be jealous of him, my bride.

There, now I can call you my own!
Let me push back the curls from your brow,
And look in your dark eyes and see
What my bird is thinking of now.

Is she thinking of some high perch
Of freedom, and lofty flight?
You smile; oh, little wild bird,
You are hopelessly bound to-night!

You are bound with a golden ring,
And your captor, like some g...

Gray is the palace where she dwells,
Grimly the poplars stand
There by the window where she sits,
My Lady of Castle Grand.

There does she bide the livelong day,
Grim as the poplars are,
Ever her gaze goes reaching out,
Steady, but vague and far.

Bright burn the fires in the castle hall,
Brightly the fire-dogs stand;
But cold is the body and cold the heart
Of my Lady of Castle Grand.

Blue are the veins in her lily-white hands,
Blue are the veins in her brow;
Thin is the line of her blue drawn lips,
Who would be haughty now?

Pale is the face at the window-pane,
Pale as the pearl on her breast,
"Roderick, love, wilt come again?
Fares he to east or west?"

The shepherd pipes to the shepherdess,
The bird to his ...

In your arms was still delight,
Quiet as a street at night;
And thoughts of you, I do remember,
Were green leaves in a darkened chamber,
Were dark clouds in a moonless sky.
Love, in you, went passing by,
Penetrative, remote, and rare,
Like a bird in the wide air,
And, as the bird, it left no trace
In the heaven of your face.
In your stupidity I found
The sweet hush after a sweet sound.
All about you was the light
That dims the greying end of night;
Desire was the unrisen sun,
Joy the day not yet begun,
With tree whispering to tree,
Without wind, quietly.
Wisdom slept within your hair,
And Long-Suffering was there,
And, in the flowing of your dress,
Undiscerning Tenderness.
And when you thought, it seemed to me,
Infinitely, an...

A shadowed form before the light,
A gleaming face against the night,
Clutched hands across a halo bright
Of blowing hair, - her fixed sight
Stares down where moving black, below,
The river's deathly waves in murmurous silence flow.

The moon falls fainting on the sky,
The dark woods bow their heads in sorrow,
The earth sends up a misty sigh:
A soul defies the morrow!

    Know you her secret none can utter?
        Hers of the Book, the tripled Crown?
    Still on the spire the pigeons flutter,
        Still by the gateway flits the gown;
    Still on the street, from corbel and gutter,
        Faces of stone look down.

    Faces of stone, and stonier faces--
        Some from library windows wan
    Forth on her gardens, her green spaces,
        Peer and turn to their books anon.
    Hence, my Muse, from the green oases
        Gather the tent, begone!

Nay, should she by the pavement linger
        Under the rooms where once she played,
    Who from the feast would rise to fling her
        One poor sou for her serenade?
    One short laugh for the antic finger
        Thrumming a lute-strin...

    Sorrow:

A garland for a grave! Fair flowers that bloom,
And only bloom to fade as fast away,
We twine your leaflets 'round our Claudia's tomb,
And with your dying beauty crown her clay.

Ye are the tender types of life's decay;
Your beauty, and your love-enfragranced breath,
From out the hand of June, or heart of May,
Fair flowers! tell less of life and more of death.

My name is Sorrow. I have knelt at graves,
All o'er the weary world for weary years;
I kneel there still, and still my anguish laves
The sleeping dust with moaning streams of tears.

And yet, the while I garland graves as now,
I bring fair wreaths to deck the place of woe;
Whilst joy is crowning many a living brow,
I crown the poor, frail dust that sleeps below.

Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
All know their tale, all know what leaf and twig,
What juncture of the apple and the yew,
Surmount their bones; but speak what none ha've
heard.
The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touching here, nor touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;
For the intercourse of angels is a light
Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.
Here in the pitch-dark atmosphere above
...

    Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache,
        Plunged in this squalid city's filthy sea,
    For another ocean where the splendours break
        Blue, clear, and deep as is virginity.
    Agatha, tell me, does thy heart not ache?

    The sea, the sea unending, comforts us!
        What demon gave the hoarse old sea who sings
    To her mumbling hurricanes' organ thunderous
        The god-like power to cradle sorrowful things?
    The sea, the sea unending, comforts us.

    Carry me, wagon, bear me, barque, away!
        Far! Far! For here the mud is made of tears!
    Does Agatha's sad heart not sometimes say:
        "O far from shudderings and crimes and fears,
    Carry me, wagon; bear me barque, away?"

    How far thou art, O scented...

The snow had fallen many nights and days;
The sky was come upon the earth at last,
Sifting thinly down as endlessly
As though within the system of blind planets
Something had been forgot or overdriven.
The dawn now seemed neglected in the grey
Where mountains were unbuilt and shadowless trees
Rootlessly paused or hung upon the air.
There was no wind, but now and then a sigh
Crossed that dry falling dust and rifted it
Through crevices of slate and door and casement.
Perhaps the new moon's time was even past.
Outside, the first white twilights were too void
Until a sheep called once, as to a lamb,
And tenderness crept everywhere from it;
But now the flock must have strayed far away.
The lights across the valley must be veiled,
The smoke lost in the greyness...

Oh! take, young Seraph, take thy harp,
And play to me so cheerily;
For grief is dark, and care is sharp,
And life wears on so wearily.
Oh! take thy harp!
Oh! sing as thou wert wont to do,
When, all youth's sunny season long,
I sat and listened to thy song,
And yet 'twas ever, ever new,
With magic in its heaven-tuned string--
The future bliss thy constant theme.
Oh! then each little woe took wing
Away, like phantoms of a dream;
    As if each sound
    That flutter'd round,
Had floated over Lethe's stream!

By all those bright and happy hours
We spent in life's sweet eastern bow'rs,
Where thou wouldst sit and smile, and show,
Ere buds were come, where flowers would blow,
And oft anticipate the rise
Of life's warm sun that scaled th...

Do not because this day I have grown saturnine
Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought
Because I have no other youth, can make me pine;
For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,
The comfort that you made? Although my wits have gone
On a fantastic ride, my horse's flanks are spurred
By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen,
And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard,
And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died
Before my time, seem like a vivid memory.
You heard that labouring man who had served my
people. He said
Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay --
No, no, not said, but cried it out -- "You have come again,
And surely after twenty years it was time to come."
I am thinking of a child's vow sworn in vain
Neve...

"Since that day till now our life is one unbroken paradise. We live a true brotherly life. Every evening after supper we take a seat under the mighty oak and sing our songs." - Extract from a letter of a Russian refugee in Texas.


Twilight is here, soft breezes bow the grass,
Day's sounds of various toil break slowly off,
The yoke-freed oxen low, the patient ass
Dips his dry nostril in the cool, deep trough.
Up from the prairie the tanned herdsmen pass
With frothy pails, guiding with voices rough
Their udder-lightened kine. Fresh smells of earth,
The rich, black furrows of the glebe send forth.


After the Southern day of heavy toil,
How good to lie, with limbs relaxed, brows bare
To evening's fan, and watch the smoke-wreaths coil
Up from one's pipe-stem thro...

This was her home; one mossy gable thrust
Above the cedars and the locust trees:
This was her home, whose beauty now is dust,
A lonely memory for melodies
The wild birds sing, the wild birds and the bees.
Here every evening is a prayer: no boast
Or ruin of sunset makes the wan world wroth;
Here, through the twilight, like a pale flower's ghost,
A drowsy flutter, flies the tiger-moth;
And dusk spreads darkness like a dewy cloth.
In vagabond velvet, on the placid day,
A stain of crimson, lolls the butterfly;
The south wind sows with ripple and with ray
The pleasant waters; and the gentle sky
Looks on the homestead like a quiet eye.
Their melancholy quaver, lone and low,
When day is done, the gray tree-toads repeat:
The whippoorwills, far in the afterglow,

As one, the secret lover of a queen,
Watches her move within the people's eye,
Hears their poor chatter as she passes by,
And smiles to think of what his eyes have seen;
The little room where love did 'shut them in,'
The fragrant couch whereon they twain did lie,
And rests his hand where on his heart doth die
A bruised daffodil of last night's sin:

So, Poet, as I read your rhyme once more
Here where a thousand eyes may read it too,
I smile your own sweet secret smile at those
Who deem the outer petals of the rose
The rose's heart - I, who through grace of you,
Have known it for my own so long before.

The patient Pan,
Drunken with nectar,
Sleeps or feigns slumber,
Drowsily humming
Music to the march of time.
This poor tooting, creaking cricket,
Pan, half asleep, rolling over
His great body in the grass,
Tooting, creaking,
Feigns to sleep, sleeping never;
'T is his manner,
Well he knows his own affair,
Piling mountain chains of phlegm
On the nervous brain of man,
As he holds down central fires
Under Alps and Andes cold;
Haply else we could not live,
Life would be too wild an ode.



Come search the wood for flowers,--
Wild tea and wild pea,
Grapevine and succory,
Coreopsis
And liatris,
Flaunting in their bowers;
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn...

        One idle day --
A mile or so of sunlit waves off shore --
        In a breezeless bay,
        We listless lay --
Our boat a "dream of rest" on the still sea --
        And -- we were four.

        The wind had died
That all day long sang songs unto the deep;
        It was eventide,
        And far and wide
Sweet silence crept thro' the rifts of sound
        With spells of sleep.

        Our gray sail cast
The only cloud that flecked the foamless sea;
        And weary at last
        Beside the mast
One fell to slumber with a dreamy face,
        And -- we were three.

        No ebb! no flow!
No sound! no stir in the wide, wondrous calm;
        In the sunset's glow
        The shore shelved low
And sn...

She's up and gone, the graceless girl,
And robb'd my failing years!
My blood before was thin and cold
But now 'tis turn'd to tears; -
My shadow falls upon my grave,
So near the brink I stand,
She might have stay'd a little yet,
And led me by the hand!

Aye, call her on the barren moor,
And call her on the hill:
'Tis nothing but the heron's cry,
And plover's answer shrill;
My child is flown on wilder wings
Than they have ever spread,
And I may even walk a waste
That widen'd when she fled.

Full many a thankless child has been,
But never one like mine;
Her meat was served on plates of gold,
Her drink was rosy wine;
But now she'll share the robin's food,
And sup the common rill,
Before her feet will turn again
To meet ...