Works

Vast and mysterious brother, ere was yet of me
So much as men may poise upon a needle's end,
Still shook with laughter all this monstrous might of thee,
And still with haughty crest it called the morning friend....

There stood a low and ivied roof,
As gazing rustics tell,
In times of chivalry and song
'Yclept the holy well.

Above the ivies' branchlets gray
In glistening clusters shone;...

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,
Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,
I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then
Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men...

I would imagine
the eyelids fail,
fall closed, shut,
as icicles sit
on porch doors
where old nails rust.

When Love and I drew softly nigh
And gazed in modest Chloe's eye
We saw reflected there in part
The lovely mansion of her heart,
A sight so fair that, quite bereft
Of sense and shame, we had but left...

I would watch him lifting
another drink from the fridge,
joke about the connection
with a triangular trade -
bedroom to kitchen fridge,
then to the bathroom -
only to repeat the cycle...

Oh, Villa Maria, thrice favored spot,
Unclouded sunshine is still thy lot
Since first, 'neath thy mortal old,
The spouses of Christ - working out God's will,
Meekly entered, their mission high to fill...

Lie here, without a record of thy worth,
Beneath a covering of the common earth!
It is not from unwillingness to praise,
Or want of love, that here no Stone we raise;...

("Laissez-moi pleurer sur cette race.")

[I. v.]


Oh! let me weep that race whose day is past,
By exile given, by exile claimed once more,
Thrice swept away upon that fatal blast....

Trickle, drops! my blue veins
O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
Candid, from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
From wounds made to free you whence you were prison'd,...

POPPIES, you try to tell me, glowing there in the wheat;
Poppies! Ah no! You mock me: It's blood, I tell you, it's blood.
It's gleaming wet in the grasses; it's glist'ning warm in the wheat;...

What shall I bring you, sweet?
A posy prankt with every April hue:
The cloud-white daisy, violet sky-blue,
Shot with the primrose sunshine through and through?

Or shall I bring you, sweet,...

Only a spar from a broken ship
Washed in by a careless wave;
But it brought back the smile of a vanished lip,
And his past peered out of the grave.

Only a leaf that an idle breeze...

THE EPIC HEXAMETER.

Giddily onward it bears thee with resistless impetuous billows;
Naught but the ocean and air seest thou before or behind.


THE DISTICH.
...

I. TO WERTHER.


Once more, then, much-wept shadow, thou dost dare

Boldly to face the day's clear light,
To meet me on fresh blooming meadows fair,

And dost not tremble at my sight....

When your father, long ago, tried to train you - and you know
He thought mornings meant for school, and not for swimming -
How your heart beat loud in dread as relentlessly he said,...

At morn I prayed, "I fain would see
How Three are One, and One is Three;
Read the dark riddle unto me."

I wandered forth, the sun and air
I saw bestowed with equal care...

My mind a buzz saw,
wood chips in decapitated thought
soil chilblained hands

II
Cleansing wood,
the keen smell of sawdust
- good, raw earth drenching
the nostril, clean odour...

So well she knew them both! yet as she came
Into the room, and heard their speech
Of tragic meshes knotted with her name,
And saw them, foes, but meeting each with each...

"I love you, my lord!"
Was all that she said,
What a dissonant chord,
"I love you, my lord!"
Ah! how I abhorred
That sarcastic maid!
"I love you? My Lord!"
Was all that she said.