Works

The Texts of these two variations on the same theme are taken from T. Ravenscroft's Melismata, 1611, and Scott's Minstrelsy, 1803, respectively. There are several other versions of the Scots ballad, while Motherwell prints The ...

There is a town in Ireland,
A little town I know;
Its girls have tender Irish eyes
Beneath their brows of snow;
And in the field around it
The Fairy Hawthorns grow.

O, the Hawthorn is a Queen...

When the buds began to burst,
Long ago, with Rose the First
I was walking; joyous then
Far above all other men,
Till before us up there stood
Britonferry's oaken wood,...

TO JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

Three Silences there are: the first of speech,
The second of desire, the third of thought;
This is the lore a Spanish monk, distraught...

Far are those tranquil hills,
Dyed with fair evening's rose;
On urgent, secret errand bent,
A traveller goes.

Approach him strangers three,
Barefooted, cowled; their eyes...

I shall tell you in rhyme how, once on a time,
Three tailors tramped up to the inn Ingleheim,
On the Rhine, lovely Rhine;
They were broke, but the worst of it all, they were curst...

Love on the earth alit,
Come to be Lord of it;
Looked round and laughed with glee,
Noble my empery!
Straight ere that laugh was done
Sprang forth the royal sun,
Pouring out golden shine...

That Barret, the painter of pictures, what feeling for color he had!
And Fanning, the maker of music, such melodies mirthful and mad!
And Harley, the writer of stories, so whimsical, tender and glad!
...

Cast on sleep there came to me
Three Urgandas; and the sea
In lost lands of Briogne
Sounded moaning, moaning:
Cloudy clad in awful white;
And each face a lucid light...

There once was a man who asked for pie,
In a piping voice up high, up high;
And when he asked for a salmon roe,
He spoke in a voice down low, down low;
But when he said he had no choice,...

THE FIRST VOICE


He trilled a carol fresh and free,
He laughed aloud for very glee:
There came a breeze from off the sea:

It passed athwart the glooming flat,...

The waves have a story to tell me,
As I lie on the lonely beach;
Chanting aloft in the pine-tops,
The wind has a lesson to teach;
But the stars sing an anthem of glory
I cannot put into speech.
...

The tree of deepest root is bound
With most tenacity to earth;
'Twas therefore thought by ancient sages,
That with the ills of life's last stages
The love of life increased, with dearth...

The Three Wise Men Of Gotham.

Three wise men of Gotham
Went to sea in a bowl:



If the bowl had been stronger,
My song would have been longer.

Once upon a time, and be sure 't was a long time ago, there lived a poor woodman in a great forest, and every day of his life he went out to fell timber. So one day he started out, and the goodwife filled his wallet and...

All the moon-shed nights are over,
And the days of gray and dun;
There is neither may nor clover,
And the day and night are one.

Not an hamlet, not a city
Meets our strained and tearless eyes;...

In their deepest caverns of limestone
They pictured the Gods of Food,
The Horse, the Elk, and the Bison
That the hunting might be good;
With the Gods of Death and Terror,
The Mammoth, Tiger, and Bear....

'Summer is coming, summer is coming.
I know it, I know it, I know it.
Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,'
Yes, my wild little Poet.

Sing the new year in under the blue....

He was born far east of the Rockies
Of a pet in society's van;
A wine-soaked daughter of pleasure
Bred back and threw a man;
A man-child who grew up a stranger,
Who never could learn the way...

Across the land came a magic word
When the earth was bare and lonely,
And I sit and sing of the joyous spring,
For 'twas I who heard, I only!
Then dreams came by, of the gladsome days,...