Works

FROM THE PERSIAN OF KERMANI

In Farsistan the violet spreads
Its leaves to the rival sky;
I ask how far is the Tigris flood,
And the vine that grows thereby?

Except the amber morning wind,...

The swallow with summer
Will wing o'er the seas,
The wind that I sigh to
Will visit thy trees.
The ship that it hastens
Thy ports will contain,
But me! - I must never
See England again!
...

Night waneth fast, the morning star
Saddens with light the glimmering sea,
Whose waves shall soon to realms afar
Waft me from hope, from love, and thee.
Coldly the beam from yonder sky...

The goodman sat beside his door
One sultry afternoon,
With his young wife singing at his side
An old and goodly tune.

A glimmer of heat was in the air,
The dark green woods were still;...

("Si je pouvais voir, O patrie!")

[Bk. III. xxxvii.]


Would I could see you, native land,
Where lilacs and the almond stand
Behind fields flowering to the strand -
But no!
...

Now the new year reviving old desires,
The restless soul to open sea aspires,
Where the Blue Peter flickers from the fore,
And the grimed stoker feeds the engine-fires....

Ye that have faced the billows and the spray
Of good St. Botolph's island-studded bay,
As from the gliding bark your eye has scanned
The beaconed rocks, the wave-girt hills of sand,...

As streams at morn, from seas that glide,
Rejoicing on their sparkling way,
Will turn again at eventide,
To mingle with their kindred spray--
Even so the currents of the soul,...

1. The Spanish noon is a blaze of azure fire, and the dusty pilgrims crawl like an endless serpent along treeless plains and bleached highroads, through rock-split ravines and castellated, cathedral-shadowed towns.
...

Youth that trafficked long with Death,
And to second life returns,
Squanders little time or breath
On his fellow man's concerns.
Earned peace is all he asks
To fulfill his broken tasks.
...

Love and Death once ceased their strife
At the Tavern of Man's Life.
Called for wine, and threw, alas!
Each his quiver on the grass.
When the bout was o'er they found
Mingled arrows strewed the ground....

I

Dearest, when I left your side,
I stood a moment, hesitating,
And plunged. The boiling tide
Of darkness took me, and down I went
Swift as a bird with folded wing,
And upward sent...

There's no sense in going further, it's the edge of cultivation,"
So they said, and I believed it, broke my land and sowed my crop,
Built my barns and strung my fences in the little border station...

You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
I the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,...

Make me a heaven, and make me there
Many a less and greater sphere:
Make me the straight and oblique lines,
The motions, lations and the signs.
Make me a chariot and a sun,...

[1]

A stag took refuge from the chase
Among the oxen of a stable,
Who counsel'd him, as saith the fable,
To seek at once some safer place.
'My brothers,' said the fugitive,...

'Tis a known principle in war,
The eyes be first that conquered are.

We credit most our sight; one eye doth please
Our trust far more than ten ear-witnesses.

You are a sky of autumn, pale and rose;
But all the sea of sadness in my blood
Surges, and ebbing, leaves my lips morose,
Salt with the memory of the bitter flood.
...

Don't you love the eyes that come from Ireland?
The grey-blue eyes so strangely grey and blue,
The fighting loving eyes,
The eyes that tell no lies -
Don't you love the eyes that come from Ireland?
...