Works

(With apologies to the singer of the "Song of the Banjo".)


I'm a homely little bit of tin and bone;
I'm beloved by the Legion of the Lost;
I haven't got a "vox humana" tone,...

There's a song of the olden time,
Falling sad o'er the ear,
Like the dream of some village chime,
Which in youth we loved to hear.
And even amidst the grand and gay,
When Music tries her gentlest art...

Know this, my brethren, Heaven is clear
And all the clouds are gone,
The Proper Sort shall flourish now,
Good times are coming on",
The evil that was threatened late
To all of our degree...

I Rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;...

What do they matter, our headlong hates, when we take the toll of our Dead?
Think ye our glory and gain will pay for the torrent of blood we have shed?...

(Halted around the fire by night, after moon-set, they sing this beneath the trees.)



What light of unremembered skies
Hast thou relumed within our eyes,...

Where is beauty?
Gone, gone:
The cold winds have taken it
With their faint moan;
The white stars have shaken it,
Trembling down,
Into the pathless deeps of the sea.
Gone, gone...

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread -
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,...

Oh, I am the siren, the siren of the sea,
The sea, the wondrous sea, that lies forevermore before;
I stand a fairy shape upon the shadow of a cliff
Where the water's drowsy ripple laps the phantom of a shore,...

[Manitoba, Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Athabasca, Alberta, and British Columbia.]

At a feast in the east of our central plains,
Girt with the sheaths of the wheaten grains,...

Give me the scorn of the stars and a peak defiant;
Wail of the pines and a wind with the shout of a giant;
Night and a trail unknown and a heart reliant.

Give me to live and love in the old, bold fashion;...

As I sat musing by the frozen dyke,
There was a man marching with a bright steel pike,
Marching in the dayshine like a ghost came he,
And behind me was the moaning and the murmur Of the sea.
...

One from the ends of the earth, gifts at an open door,
Treason has much, but we, Mother, thy sons have more!
From the whine of a dying man, from the snarl of a wolf-pack freed,...

Maiden most beautiful, mother most bountiful, lady of lands,
Queen and republican, crowned of the centuries whose years are thy sands,
See for thy sake what we bring to thee, Italy, here in our hands.
...

From the final reach of the upper night
To the nether darks where the comets die,
From the outmost bourn of the reigns of light
To the central gloom of the midmost sky,
In our mazeful gyres we fly....

I am arrayed in light and shade,
A free-born spirit of air;
A fanciful theme like a twilight dream,
Or a maiden young and fair.

And now I float like a phantom boat
With a vague and varying hue,...

White steeds of ocean, that leap with a hollow and wearisome roar
On the bar of ironstone steep, not a fathom's length from the shore,
Is there never a seer nor sophist can interpret your wild refrain,...

The Sword
Singing -
The voice of the Sword from the heart of the Sword
Clanging imperious
Forth from Time's battlements
His ancient and triumphing Song.

In the beginning,...

Stern eagle of the far north-west,
Thou that bearest in thy grasp the thunderbolt,
Thou whose rushing pinions stir ocean to madness,
Thou the destroyer of herds, thou the scatterer of navies,...

When the long, long day is over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay,
I hope that it won't be hell-fire, as some of the parsons say.
And I hope that it won't be heaven, with some of the parsons I've met -...