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You'll love me yet! and I can tarry
Your love's protracted growing:
June reared that bunch of flowers you carry
From seeds of April's sowing.

I plant a heartful now: some seed...

You mustn't show weakness
and you've got to have a tan.
But sometimes I feel like the thin veils
of Jewish women who faint
at weddings and on Yom Kippur.

You mustn't show weakness...

You must n't swim till you're six weeks old,
Or your head will be sunk by your heels;
And summer gales and Killer Whales
Are bad for baby seals.


Are bad for baby seals, dear rat,...

"Where are you going, Young Fellow My Lad,
On this glittering morn of May?"
"I'm going to join the Colours, Dad;
They're looking for men, they say."
"But you're only a boy, Young Fellow My Lad;...

I make this rhyme of my lady and me
To give me ease of my misery,
Of my lady and me I make this rhyme
For lovers in the after-time.
And I weave its warp from day to day
In a golden loom deep hid away...

N.B. - This sequence of poems has appeared in former editions under the title of 'Love Platonic.'


I

1
Surely at last, O Lady, the sweet moon
That bringeth in the happy singing weather...

Why did she marry him? Ah, say why!
How was her fancy caught?
What was the dream that he drew her by,
Or was she only bought?
Gave she her gold for a girlish whim,
A freak of a foolish mood?...

O Lady, I have looked on thee once more,
Thou too hast looked on me, as thou hadst said,
And though the joy was pain, the pain was bliss,
Bliss that more happy lovers well may miss:...

So many days that keep us still apart?
Ah, canst thou live upon remembered smiles,
And ask no warmer comfort for thy heart?

I call thy name right up into the sky,...

Young men and women, strong and sound,
Adorn with beautiful excess
Of play and song and flower-dress
Our fatherland's ancestral ground.
They dream great deeds of ages older,...

raise me more love... raise me
my prettiest fits of madness
O' dagger's journey... in my flesh
and knife's plunge...
sink me further my lady...
the sea calls me
add to me more death ......

Sing of America, sing of our Country!
Land of two oceans, of palm-tree and pine!
Firm as the rock of her towering mountains,
Free as her rivers from Heaven-born fountains,...

Your heart has trembled to my tongue,
Your hands in mine have lain,
Your thought to me has leaned and clung,
Again and yet again,
My dear,
Again and yet again.
...

Methinks I see your mirror frame,
Ornate with photographs of them.
Place mine therein, for, all the same,
I'll have my little laughs at them.

For girls may come, and girls may go,...

Your riches taught me poverty.
Myself a millionnaire
In little wealths, -- as girls could boast, --
Till broad as Buenos Ayre,

You drifted your dominions
A different Peru;...

You were the sort that men forget;
Though I - not yet! -
Perhaps not ever. Your slighted weakness
Adds to the strength of my regret!

You'd not the art - you never had
For good or bad -...

You will forget me. The years are so tender,
They bind up the wounds which we think are so deep;
This dream of our youth will fade out as the splendor
Fades from the skies when the sun sinks to sleep;...

[From Arthur Selwyn's Note-book.]

Let me a moment indite
Scenes that I witnessed one night:


["You Will Tell Me Where Is Conrad?"]
...

You wrong me, Kate, you wrong me
In harbouring the thought
That he who loves so fondly
Would injure thee in aught.
The pang that I must feel, Kate,
When dark suspicion lurks...

At four o'clock in late October
I sat alone in the country school-house
Back from the road, mid stricken fields,
And an eddy of wind blew leaves on the pane,
And crooned in the flue of the cannon-stove,...