Works

Lo, the gods of Vice and Mammon from their pinnacles are hurled
By the workers' new religion, which is oldest in the world;
And the earth will feel her children treading firmly on the sod,...

A tramp was trampin' on the road,
The afternoon was warm an' muggy,
And by-and-by he chanced to meet
A parsin ridin' in a buggy.
Said he: 'As follerers ov the Loard,
To do good offices we oughter!'...

Fight through ignorance, want, and care,
Through the griefs that crush the spirit;
Push your way to a fortune fair,
And the smiles of the world you'll merit.
Long, as a boy, for the chance to learn,...

The President to Kingdoms,
As in the Days of Old;
The King to the Republic,
As it had been foretold.
They could not read the spelling,
They would not hear the call;
They would not brook the telling...

White handkerchiefs wave from the short black pier
As we glide to the grand old sea,
But the song of my heart is for none to hear
If one of them waves for me.
A roving, roaming life is mine,...

While the crippled cruisers stagger where the blind horizon dips,
And the ocean ooze is rising round the sunken battle-ships,
While the battered wrecks, unnoticed, with their mangled crews drift past,...

'Did she care as much as I did
When our paths of Fate divided?
Was the love, then, all onesided,
Did she understand or care?'
Slowly fall the moments leaden,
And the silence seems to deaden,...

The other night I got the blues and tried to smile in vain.
I couldn't chuck a chuckle at the foolery of Twain;
When Ward and Billings failed to bring a twinkle to my eye,...

And they heard the tent-poles clatter,
And the fly in twain was torn,
'Tis the soiled rag of a tatter
Of the tent where I was born.
And what matters it, I wonder?
Brick or stone or calico?,...

It watched me in the cradle laid, and from my boyhood's home
It glared above my shoulder-blade when I wrote my first 'pome';
It's sidled by me ever since, with greeny eyes aslant,...

Night-Lights are falling;
Girl of the street,
Go to your calling
If you would eat.
Lamplight and starlight
And moonlight superb,
Bright hope is a farlight,
So watch on the kerb....

Let others make the songs of love
For our young struggling nation;
But I will sing while e'er I live
The Songs of Irrigation;
For while the white man shall beget
The white man's son and daughter,...

A lonely young wife
In her dreaming discerns
A lily-decked pool
With a border of ferns,
And a beautiful child,
With butterfly wings,
Trips down to the edge of the water and sings:...

I saw it in the days gone by,
When the dead girl lay at rest,
And the wattle and the native rose
We placed upon her breast.

I saw it in the long ago
(And I've seen strong men die),...

When fairer faces turn from me,
And gayer friends grow cold,
And I have lost through poverty
The friendship bought with gold;
When I have served the selfish turn
Of some all-worldly few,...

It is up from out the alleys, from the alleys dark and vile,
It is up from out the alleys I have struggled for a while,
Just to breathe the breath of Heaven ere my devil drags me down,...

The World is full of kindness,
And not the poor alone;
We Christians in our blindness
Bow down to hearts of stone;
The clever, bitter cynic,
Whose poisoned 'soul' is dead,...

Day of ending for beginnings!
Ocean hath another innings,
Ocean hath another score;
And the surges sing his winnings,
And the surges shout his winnings,
And the surges shriek his winnings,...

A writer wrote of the hearts of men, and he followed their tracks afar;
For his was a spirit that forced his pen to write of the things that are....

Old Ivan McIvanovitch, with knitted brow of care,
Has climbed up from the engine-room to get a breath of air;
He slowly wipes the grease and sweat from hairy face and neck....