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The sudden death of Eugene Carman
Put me in line to be promoted to fifty dollars a month,
And I told my wife and children that night.
But it didn't come, and so I thought
Old Rhodes suspected me of stealing...

Air--Viva la.


I.

When, on Ramillies' bloody field,
The baffled French were forced to yield,
The victor Saxon backward reeled
Before the charge of Clare's Dragoons....

Too cold, O my brother, too cold for my wife
Is the Beauty you showed me this morning:
Nor yet have I found the sweet dream of my life,
And good-bye to the sneering and scorning....

Where Claribel low-lieth
The breezes pause and die,
Letting the rose-leaves fall:
But the solemn oak-tree sigheth,
Thick-leaved, ambrosial,
With an ancient melody
Of an inward agony,...

And of me say the fools:
I entered the lodges of women
And never left.
And they call for my hanging,
Because about the matters of my beloved
I, poetry, compose.
I never traded
Like others...

After the event the rockslide
realized,
in a still diversity of completion,
grain and fissure,
declivity
&
force of upheaval,
whether rain slippage,
ice crawl, root
explosion or...

I named him Claude, 'twas a strange conceit,
'Twas a name that no relatives ever bore;
Yet there lingered around it a mem'ry sweet,
Of a face and a voice I miss evermore.
...

Farewell to Northmaven,
Grey Hillswicke, farewell!
The storms on thy haven,
The storms on thy fell,
To each breeze that can vary
The mood of thy main,
And to thee, bonny Mary!...

I sat beside the glowing grate, fresh heaped
With Newport coal, and as the flame grew bright
The many-coloured flame, and played and leaped,
I thought of rainbows and the northern light,...

Unfolding gazes
throw over
the little reality
surly door.
The dumb
clatter
of ripples
shudder the better life.

Wash the window; rub it dry;
Make the ray-door clean and bright:
He who lords it in the sky
Loves on cottage floors to light!

Looking over sea and beck,
Mountain-forest, orchard-bloom,...

When the horse has been unharnessed and we've flushed the old machine,
And the water o'er the sluice is running evenly and clean;
When there's thirty load before us, and the sun is high and bright,...

Help for a patriot distressed, a spotless spirit hurt,
Help for an honourable clan sore trampled in the dirt!
From Queenstown Bay to Donegal, oh, listen to my song,...

Clear eyes do dim at last,
And cheeks outlive their rose.
Time, heedless of the past,
No loving-kindness knows;
Chill unto mortal lip
Still Lethe flows.

Griefs, too, but brief while stay,...

Before the wind, with rain-drowned stocks,
The pleated crimson hollyhocks
Are bending;
And, smouldering in the breaking brown,
Above the hills that edge the town,
The day is ending.
...

Clear the way, my lords and lackeys! you have had your day.
Here you have your answer'England's yea against your nay:
Long enough your house has held you: up, and clear the way!...

May is abaat th' warst pairt o'th' year for a wed chap, for he connot walk aat, an' he cannot be comfortable at hooam, becoss it's th' cleeanin' daan time. Talk abaat weshin' days! they're fooils to cleeanin' days. Buckstun lim...

For punishment in war it will suffice
If the chief author of the faction dies;
Let but few smart, but strike a fear through all;
Where the fault springs there let the judgment fall.

Kings must not only cherish up the good,
But must be niggards of the meanest blood.

'As certain also of your own poets have said'
- (Acts 17.28)



Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea...