Works

O bard of fortune, you deem me nought
But a mark for your careless scorn.
For I am the echo-less grave of thought
That is strangled before it's born.
You think perchance that I am a doom...

How shall she know the worship we would do her?
The walls are high, and she is very far.
How shall the woman's message reach unto her
Above the tumult of the packed bazaar?...

All that I know of love I see
In eyes that never look at me;
All that I know of love I guess
But from another's happiness.

A beggar at the window I,
Who, famished, looks on revelry;...

The song of Tigilau the brave,
Sina's wild lover,
Who across the heaving wave
From Samoa came over:
Came over, Sina, at the setting moon!

The moon shines round and bright;...

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,...

I

But yesterday
I looked away
O'er happy lands, where sunshine lay
In golden blots
Inlaid with spots
Of shade and wild forget-me-nots.

My head was fair
With flaxen hair,...

Oh, sing once more those dear, familiar lays,
Whose gliding measure every bosom thrills,
And takes my heart back to the happy days
When first I sang them on my native hills!...

Being the Words of the Tune Hummed at Her Lathe by Mrs. L. Embsay, Widow



The fans and the beltings they roar round me.
The power is shaking the floor round me...

Fair little scout, that when the iron year
Changes, and the first fleecy clouds deploy,
Comest with such a sudden burst of joy,
Lifting on winter's doomed and broken rear...

Glimmers gray the leafless thicket
Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to picket
Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate;
Who, with meekly folded wing,
Comes to sun himself and sing.
...

Glimmers gray the leafless thicket
Close beside my garden gate,
Where, so light, from post to picket
Hops the sparrow, blithe, sedate;
Who, with meekly folded wing,
Comes to sun himself and sing.
...

Music, music with throb and swing,
Of a plaintive note, and long;
'Tis a note no human throat could sing,
No harp with its dulcet golden string, -
Nor lute, nor lyre with liquid ring,...

The songs that mother used to sing!
How tenderly those ditties roll,
And to the dirges in my soul
The happy notes of gladness bring!
Where'er my vagrant feet may roam...

Songs I sang of lordly matters,
Life and death, and stars and sea;
Nothing of them now remains
But the song I sang for thee.

Vain the learned elaborate metres,
Vain the deeply pondered line;...

("Ma Regina, cette noble figure.")

[LES BURGRAVES, Part II.]


Thy noble face, Regina, calls to mind
My poor lost little one, my latest born.
He was a gift from God - a sign of pardon -...

Alone it stands in Poesy's fair land,
A temple by the muses set apart;
A perfect structure of consummate art,
By artists builded and by genius planned,
Beyond the reach of the apprentice hand,...

Alone it stands in Poesy's fair land,
A temple by the muses set apart;
A perfect structure of consummate art,
By artists builded and by genius planned.
Beyond the reach of the apprentice hand,...

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room,
And hermits are contented with their cells,
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,...

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frown'd,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlock'd his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;...

O Petrarch! I am here. I bow to thee,
Great king of sonnets, thron'd long ago
And lover-like, as Love enjoineth me,
And miser-like, enamoured of my woe,
I reckon up my teardrops as they flow....