Works

Though beauty be the mark of praise,
And yours of whom I sing be such
As not the world can praise too much,
Yet 'tis your Virtue now I raise.

A virtue, like allay so gone...

Know all men by these presents, Death, the tamer,
By mortgage has secured the corpse of Demar;
Nor can four hundred thousand sterling pound
Redeem him from his prison underground....

Good people all, with one accord,
Lament for Madam BLAIZE,
Who never wanted a good word
'From those who spoke her praise'.

The needy seldom pass'd her door,
And always found her kind;...

Can we not force from widow'd poetry,
Now thou art dead (great Donne) one elegy
To crown thy hearse? Why yet dare we not trust,
Though with unkneaded dough-bak'd prose, thy dust,...

Beside a crib that holds a baby's stocking,
A tattered picture book, a broken toy,
A sleeping mother dreams that she is rocking
Her fair-haired cherub boy.
...

I find an old deserted nest,
Half-hidden in the underbrush:
A withered leaf, in phantom jest,
Has nestled in it like a thrush
With weary, palpitating breast.

I muse as one in sad surprise...

West of Dubbo the west begins
The land of leisure and hope and trust,
Where the black man stalks with his dogs and gins
And Nature visits the settlers' sins
With the Bogan shower, that is mostly dust.
...

Love, strong as Death, is dead.
Come, let us make his bed
Among the dying flowers:
A green turf at his head;
And a stone at his feet,
Whereon we may sit
In the quiet evening hours.
...

Let's be jocund while we may,
All things have an ending day;
And when once the work is done,
Fates revolve no flax they've spun.

Dulce est desipere in loco.

I

Some Folks are drunk, yet do not know it:
So might not Bacchus give You Law?
Was it a Muse, O lofty Poet,
Or Virgin of St. Cyr, You saw?...

A wonderful joy our eyes to bless,
In her magnificent comeliness,
Is an English girl of eleven stone two,
And five foot ten in her dancing shoe!
She follows the hounds, and on she pounds -...

The English soil! - 'tis hallowed ground:
Its restless children roam
The world, but they have never found
So dear a land as home;
Their passion for its hills and downs
Nor space nor time can spoil;...

"Seldom we find," says Solomon Don Dunce,
"Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
Through all the flimsy things we see at once
As easily as through a Naples bonnet,...

Once more, once more into the sunny fields
Oh, let me stray!
And drink the joy that young existence yields
In a bright, cloudless day.

Once more let me behold the summer sky,
With its blue eyes,...

The scriptures affirm (as I heard in my youth,
For indeed I ne'er read them, to speak for once truth)
That death is the wages of sin, but the just
Shall die not, although they be laid in the dust....

Worried with debts and past all hopes of bail,
His pen he prostitutes t' avoid a gaol.
ROSCOM.


Let not the 'hungry' Bavius' angry stroke
Awake resentment, or your rage provoke;...

In your indignation what mercy appears,
While Jonathan's threaten'd with loss of his ears;
For who would not think it a much better choice,
By your knife to be mangled than rack'd with your voice....

I. THE FLUKE

For two years you went
Through all the worst of it,
Men fell around you, but you did not fall.
On the Somme when the air was a sea
Of contesting flashes and clouds of smoke,...

I had seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
Ao I trust, too.

You saw our wife was chaste, yet thoroughly tried,
And, without doubt, ye are hugely edified;
For, like our hero, whom we show'd to-day,
You think no woman true, but in a play....