Works

I've tinkered at my bits of rhymes
In weary, woeful, waiting times;
In doleful hours of battle-din,
Ere yet they brought the wounded in;
Through vigils of the fateful night,...

Dear Parents: - Don't imagine, please,
It's in a boastful spirit
I fashion verses such as these;
That's not the truth or near it.

A hundred or a thousand, yes,
A million kids there may be...

And one, perchance, will read and sigh:
"What aimless songs! Why will he sing
Of nature that drags out her woe
Through wind and rain, and sun, and snow,
From miserable spring to spring?"
Then put me by....

In the first rare spring of song,
In my heart's young hours,
In my youth 't was thus I sang,
Choosing 'mid the flowers: -

"Fair the Dandelion is,
But for me too lowly;
And the winsome Violet...

Are you my songs, importunate of praise?
Be still, remember for your comforting
That sweeter birds have had less leave to sing
Before men piped them from their lonely ways.
...

We have graven the mountain of God with hands,
As our hands were graven of God, they say,
Where the seraphs burn in the sun like brands
And the devils carry the rains away;...

In the world's whitest morning
As hoary with hope,
The Builder of Bridges
Was priest and was pope:
And the mitre of mystery
And the canopy his,
Who darkened the chasms
And domed the abyss....

To every Man his Mystery,
A trade and only one:
The masons make the hives of men,
The domes of grey or dun,
But we have wrought in rose and gold
The houses of the sun.
...

The angels are singing like birds in a tree
In the organ of good St. Cecily:
And the parson reads with his hand upon
The graven eagle of great St. John:
But never the fluted pipes shall go...

All night under the moon
Plovers are flying
Over the dreaming meadows of silvery light,
Over the meadows of June,
Flying and crying -
Wandering voices of love in the hush of the night.
...

This now is the poem of praise and of lamentation that was made for Columcille, Speckled Salmon of the Boyne, High Saint of the Gael, by Forgaill that was afterwards called Blind Forgaill, Chief Poet of Ireland:
...

The poor man weeps, here Gavin sleeps,
Whom canting wretches blam'd:
But with such as he, where'er he be,
May I be sav'd or damn'd!

Forget not the field where they perished,
The truest, the last of the brave,
All gone--and the bright hope we cherished
Gone with them, and quenched in their grave!

Oh! could we from death but recover...

Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light
in the backyard so it stays lit all the next day

But then it is the light that makes you remember.

I'll tell you the sweetest thing, dear heart,
I'll tell you the sweetest thing -
'Tis saying to one that we love: "Forgive
The careless words and the sting;
Forgive and forget, and be friends once more,...

I might have met his anger with a smile
For so it was that I had set my heart
To mask deception with a wanton's guile,
And save the tears that now begin to start.
...

God gives his child upon his slate a sum--
To find eternity in hours and years;
With both sides covered, back the child doth come,
His dim eyes swollen with shed and unshed tears;...

At dusk the window panes grew grey;
The wet world vanished in the gloom;
The dim and silver end of day
Scarce glimmered through the little room.

And all my sins were told; I said...

My heart was heavy, for its trust had been
Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong;
So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,
One summer Sabbath day I strolled among...

There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man.
It hurls its barbed syllables,--
At once is mute again.
But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,...