Such guests as you, sir, were not in my mind
When I my homely dish with care designed;
'Twas certain humble souls I would have fed
Who do not turn from wholesome milk and bread:
You came, slow-trotting on the narrow way,
O'erturned the food, and trod it in the clay;
Then low with discoid nostrils sniffing curt,
Cried, "Sorry cook! why, what a mess of dirt!"

As indignation mastered grief, my tongue
Spake bitter words; words that did ill agree
With those rich stores of Nature's imagery,
And divine Art, that fast to memory clung
Thy gifts, magnificent Region, ever young
In the sun's eye, and in his sister's sight
How beautiful! how worthy to be sung
In strains of rapture, or subdued delight!
I feign not; witness that unwelcome shock
That followed the first sound of German speech,
Caught the far-winding barrier Alps among.
In that announcement, greeting seemed to mock
Parting; the casual word had power to reach
My heart, and filled that heart with conflict strong.

"O breathe not his name!" - Moore.



I.

    Thou Great Unknown!
I do not mean Eternity, nor Death,
    That vast incog!
For I suppose thou hast a living breath,
Howbeit we know not from whose lungs 'tis blown,
    Thou man of fog!
Parent of many children - child of none!
    Nobody's son!
Nobody's daughter - but a parent still!
Still but an ostrich parent of a batch
Of orphan eggs, - left to the world to hatch
    Superlative Nil!
A vox and nothing more, - yet not Vauxhall;
A head in papers, yet without a curl!
    Not the Invisible Girl!
No hand - but a handwriting on a wall -
    A popular nonentity,
Still call'd the same, - without identity!
    A lark, heard out of sight, -
A nothing shin'd upon, - invi...

Mia benigna fortuna e 'l viver lieto.

IN HIS MISERY HE DESIRES DEATH THE MORE HE REMEMBERS HIS PAST CONTENTMENT AND COMFORT.


    My favouring fortune and my life of joy,
My days so cloudless, and my tranquil nights,
The tender sigh, the pleasing power of song,
Which gently wont to sound in verse and rhyme,
Suddenly darken'd into grief and tears,
Make me hate life and inly pray for death!

O cruel, grim, inexorable Death!
How hast thou dried my every source of joy,
And left me to drag on a life of tears,
Through darkling days and melancholy nights.
My heavy sighs no longer meet in rhyme,
And my hard martyrdom exceeds all song!

Where now is vanish'd my once amorous song?
To talk of anger and to treat with death;
Where the fond...

I

I saw a dead man's finer part
Shining within each faithful heart
Of those bereft. Then said I: "This must be
His immortality."

II

I looked there as the seasons wore,
And still his soul continuously upbore
Its life in theirs. But less its shine excelled
Than when I first beheld.

III

His fellow-yearsmen passed, and then
In later hearts I looked for him again;
And found him - shrunk, alas! into a thin
And spectral mannikin.

IV

Lastly I ask - now old and chill -
If aught of him remain unperished still;
And find, in me alone, a feeble spark,
Dying amid the dark.

February 1899.

Quelle pietose rime, in ch' io m' accorsi.

TO ANTONIO OF FERRARA, WHO, IN A POEM, HAD LAMENTED PETRARCH'S SUPPOSED DEATH.


    Those pious lines wherein are finely met
Proofs of high genius and a spirit kind,
Had so much influence on my grateful mind
That instantly in hand my pen I set
To tell you that death's final blow--which yet
Shall me and every mortal surely find--
I have not felt, though I, too, nearly join'd
The confines of his realm without regret;
But I turn'd back again because I read
Writ o'er the threshold that the time to me
Of life predestinate not all was fled,
Though its last day and hour I could not see.
Then once more let your sad heart comfort know,
And love the living worth which dead it honour'd so.

MACGREGOR...

R. L. Stevenson - The Muse Among the Motors (1900-1930)


Now there is nothing wrong with me
Except, I think it's called T.B.
And that is why I have to lay
Out in the garden all the day.

Our garden is not very wide,
And cars go by on either side,
And make an angry-hooty noise
That rather startles little boys.

But worst of all is when they take
Me out in cars that growl and shake,
With charabancs so dreadful-near
I have to shut my eyes for fear.

But when I'm on my back again,
I watch the Croydon aeroplane
That flies across to France, and sings
Like hitting thick piano-strings.

When I am strong enough to do
The things I'm truly wishful to,
I'll never use a car or train
But always have an aeroplane;

        Only a simple rhyme of love and sorrow,
    Where "blisses" rhymed with "kisses," "heart," with "dart:"
        Yet, reading it, new strength I seemed to borrow,
    To live on bravely and to do my part.

        A little rhyme about a heart that's bleeding -
    Of lonely hours and sorrow's unrelief:
        I smiled at first; but there came with the reading
    A sense of sweet companionship in grief.

        The selfishness of my own woe forsaking,
    I thought about the singer of that song.
        Some other breast felt this same weary aching;
    Another found the summer days too long.

        The few sad lines, my sorrow so expressing,
    I read, and on the singer, all unknown,
        I breathed a fervent though a silent blessing,

Captain of the Western wood,
Thou that apest Robin Hood!
Green above thy scarlet hose,
How thy velvet mantle shows!
Never tree like thee arrayed,
O thou gallant of the glade!

When the fervid August sun
Scorches all it looks upon,
And the balsam of the pine
Drips from stem to needle fine,
Round thy compact shade arranged,
Not a leaf of thee is changed!

When the yellow autumn sun
Saddens all it looks upon,
Spreads its sackcloth on the hills,
Strews its ashes in the rills,
Thou thy scarlet hose dost doff,
And in limbs of purest buff
Challengest the sombre glade
For a sylvan masquerade.

Where, oh, where, shall he begin
Who would paint thee, Harlequin?
With thy waxen burnished leaf,
With thy branches’ red relief,...

That for seven lusters I did never come
To do the rites to thy religious tomb;
That neither hair was cut, or true tears shed
By me, o'er thee, as justments to the dead,
Forgive, forgive me; since I did not know
Whether thy bones had here their rest or no,
But now 'tis known, behold! behold, I bring
Unto thy ghost th' effused offering:
And look what smallage, night-shade, cypress, yew,
Unto the shades have been, or now are due,
Here I devote; and something more than so;
I come to pay a debt of birth I owe.
Thou gav'st me life, but mortal; for that one
Favour I'll make full satisfaction;
For my life mortal rise from out thy hearse.
And take a life immortal from my verse.

Where Hudson's wave o'er silvery sands
Winds through the hills afar,
Old Cronest like a monarch stands,
Crowned with a single star!
And there, amid the billowy swells
Of rock-ribbed, cloud-capped earth,
My fair and gentle Ida dwells,
A nymph of mountain-birth.

The snow-flake that the cliff receives,
The diamonds of the showers,
Spring's tender blossoms, buds, and leaves,
The sisterhood of flowers,
Morn's early beam, eve's balmy breeze,
Her purity define;
Yet Ida's dearer far than these
To this fond breast of mine.

My heart is on the hills.    The shades
Of night are on my brow;
Ye pleasant haunts and quiet glades,
My soul is with you now!
I bless the star-crowned highlands where
My Ida's footsteps roam:
O for a falcon'...

How often we forget all time, when lone
Admiring Nature's universal throne;
Her woods, her wilds, her mountains, the intense
Reply of Hers to Our intelligence! [BYRON, The Island.]

I

In youth have I known one with whom the Earth
In secret communing held, as he with it,
In daylight, and in beauty from his birth:
Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit
From the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth
A passionate light, such for his spirit was fit,
And yet that spirit knew not, in the hour
Of its own fervor what had o'er it power.


II

Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought
To a fever by the moonbeam that hangs o'er,
But I will half believe that wild light fraught
With more of sovereignty than ancient lore
Hath ev...

    Ye true "Loyal Natives," attend to my song,
    In uproar and riot rejoice the night long;
    From envy or hatred your corps is exempt,
    But where is your shield from the darts of contempt?

    To this generation I would say:
    Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.
    It may serve a turn in your life.
    My husband had nothing to do
    With the fall of the bank - he was only cashier.
    The wreck was due to the president, Thomas Rhodes,
    And his vain, unscrupulous son.
    Yet my husband was sent to prison,
    And I was left with the children,
    To feed and clothe and school them.
    And I did it, and sent them forth
    Into the world all clean and strong,
    And all through the wisdom of Pope, the poet:
    "Act well your part, there all the honor lies."

Cherries of the night are riper
Than the cherries pluckt at noon
Gather to your fairy piper
When he pipes his magic tune:
        Merry, merry,
        Take a cherry;
        Mine are sounder,
        Mine are rounder,
        Mine are sweeter
        For the eater
        Under the moon.
And you'll be fairies soon.

In the cherry pluckt at night,
With the dew of summer swelling,
There's a juice of pure delight,
Cool, dark, sweet, divinely smelling.
        Merry, merry,
        Take a cherry;
        Mine are sounder,
Mine are rounder
        Mine are sweeter
        For the eater
        In the moonlight.
And you'll be fairies quite.

When I sound the fairy call,
Gather here in silent meeting,
Chin ...

I love the warm bare earth and all
That works and dreams thereon:
I love the seasons yet to fall:
I love the ages gone,

The valleys with the sheeted grain,
The river's smiling might,
The merry wind, the rustling rain,
The vastness of the night.

I love the morning's flame, the steep
Where down the vapour clings:
I love the clouds that float and sleep,
And every bird that sings.

I love the purple shower that pours
On far-off fields at even:
I love the pine-wood dusk whose floors
Are like the courts of heaven.

I love the heaven's azure span,
The grass beneath my feet:
I love the face of every man
Whose thought is swift and sweet.

I let the wrangling world go by,
And like an idle breath
Its echoes and its...

I love the fitful gust that shakes
The casement all the day,
And from the glossy elm tree takes
The faded leaves away,
Twirling them by the window pane
With thousand others down the lane.

I love to see the shaking twig
Dance till the shut of eve,
The sparrow on the cottage rig,
Whose chirp would make believe
That Spring was just now flirting by,
In Summer's lap with flowers to lie.

I love to see the cottage smoke
Curl upwards through the trees,
The pigeons nestled round the cote
On November days like these;
The cock upon the dunghill crowing,
The mill sails on the heath a-going.

The feather from the raven's breast
Falls on the stubble lea,
The acorns near the old crow's nest
Drop pattering down the tree;
The grun...

The hills hang woods around, where green, below
Dark, breezy boughs of beech-trees, mats the moss,
Crisp with the brittle hulls of last year's nuts;
The water hums one bar there; and a glow
Of gold lies steady where the trailers toss
Red, bugled blossoms and a rock abuts;
In spots the wild-phlox and oxalis grow
Where beech-roots bulge the loam, protrude across
The grass-grown road and roll it into ruts.

And where the sumach brakes grow dusk and dense,
Among the rocks, great yellow violets,
Blue-bells and wind-flowers bloom; the agaric
In dampness crowds; a Fungus, thick, intense
With gold and crimson and wax-white, that sets
The May-apples along the terraced creek
At bold defiance. Where the old rail-fence
Divides the hollow, there the bee-bird whets