Works

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet,
Don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.
Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie.
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!...

The first time that Peter denied his Lord
He shrank from the cudgel, the scourge and the cord,
But followed far off to see what they would do,
Till the cock crew,till the cock crew,...

Be well assured that on our side
The abiding oceans fight,
Though headlong wind and heaping tide
Make us their sport to-night.
By force of weather, not of war,
In jeopardy we steer....

Friend, thou beholdest the lightning? Who has the charge of it,
To decree which rock-ridge shall receive, shall be chosen for targe of it?
Which crown among palms shall go down, by the thunderbolt broken;...

Have you no Bananas, simple townsmen all?
'Nay, but we have them certainly.
'We buy them off the barrows, with the vegetable-marrows
'And the cabbage of our own country,...

Now praise the Gods of Time and Chance
That bring a heart's desire,
And lay the joyous roads of France
Once more beneath the tyre,
So numbered by Napoleon,
The veriest ass can spy...

Oh, light was the world that he weighed in his hands!
Oh, heavy the tale of his fiefs and his lands!
He has gone from the guddee and put on the shroud,
And departed in guise of bairagi avowed!
...

Fair is our lot, O goodly is our heritage!
(Humble ye, my people, and be fearful in your mirth!)
For the Lord our God Most High
He hath made the deep as dry,...

Now, this is the cup the White Men drink
When they go to right a wrong,
And that is the cup of the old world's hate,
Cruel and strained and strong.
We have drunk that cup, and a bitter, bitter cup,...

Where's the lamp that Hero lit
Once to call Leander home?
Equal Time hath shovelled it
'Neath the wrack of Greece and Rome.
Neither wait we any more
That worn sail which Argo bore.
...

Mithras, God of the Morning, our trumpets waken the Wall!
'Rome is above the Nations, but Thou art over all!'
Now as the names are answered, and the guards are marched away,...

As I left the Halls at Lumley, rose the vision of a comely
Maid last season worshiped dumbly, watched with fervor from afar;
And I wondered idly, blindly, if the maid would greet me kindly....

"A Priest in Spite of Himself"



"How far is St. Helena from a little child at play!"
What makes you want to wander there with all the world between....

Where the sober-colored cultivator smiles
On his byles;
Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow
Come and go;
Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea,
Hides and ghi;...

"The Manner of Men" - St. Paul
"Limits and Renewals" (1932)

I am made all things to all men,
Hebrew, Roman, and Greek,
In each one's tongue I speal,
Suiting to each my word,...

I'm just in love with all these three,
The Weald and the Marsh and the Down country.
Nor I don't know which I love the most,
The Weald or the Marsh or the white Chalk coast!
...

There are whose study is of smells,
And to attentive schools rehearse
How something mixed with something else
Makes something worse.

Some cultivate in broths impure
The clients of our body, these,...

Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,
(All of a Midsummer morn!)...

THE BRICKLAYER:

I tell this tale, which is strictly true,
Just by way of convincing you
How very little, since things were made,
Things have altered in building trade.
...

From every quarter of your land
They give God thanks who turned away
Death and the needy madman's hand,
Death-fraught, which menaced you that day.

One school of many made to make...