Works

You are blue, you are blue like the sky,
Cruel and cold and blue,
And I turn from you, voiceless sea,
To a sky that is voiceless, too.

Upward the vast blue arch,
Downward the blue abyss,...

Here is the freedom men die for,--die for but never know;
Here is the peace they pray for shrined in eternal snow;
Down on the plain the city moans with a human cry,...

The poet painted a woman's soul,
Human, trusting and kind,
And then he drew the soul of a man,
Brutal and base and blind;

And the woman loved in the old, old way,
And the man in the way of men,...

I came your way in the years gone by,
In the summers that now are old,
And then there was light in your beaming eye,
And love was living and hopes were high
At the Sign of the Heart of Gold.
...

They were three old men with hoary hair
And beards of wintry gray,
And they digged a grave in the yellow soil,
And they crooned this song as they plied their toil,
In the fading light of day:
...

The Child.

I hear you weeping, mother, dear,--
I hear you wake and weep;
What brings the tears into your eyes
When you should be asleep?
I hear my name upon your lips;
What is it that you say...

The dial has pointed the hour and the hour has rounded the day,
The day has finished the year that dies with a century's birth;
Eastward the morning stars sing as they go their way:...

She comes not with the conscious grace
Of gentle, winsome womanhood,
Nor yet, withal, the flaunting face
Of men and women understood,
But rather as a thing apart,
A wind-blown petal of a rose,...

O king! what is the quest that evermore
Foredooms thy feet to roam, yet blinds thine eyes?
Why seek ye still for life's imperfect prize,
Or turn thy weary sail from shore to shore,...

Down at the end of the iron lane
I see the sunset's glare,
And the red bars lie across the sky
Like steps of a wondrous stair.

Below, the throng, with unlifted eye,...

(Written on the occasion of the bringing of the body of Admiral John Paul Jones to the United States for reburial.)


Brave ships are these that bear thee home again...

Life to her was a perfect flower,
And every petal a jeweled hour,
Till all at once--we know not why--
God sent a frost from His clear blue sky.

Life to her was a fairy rune;...

North and south with the fickle tides,
With the wind from east to west,
The death-ship follows her track of doom,
But finds no port or rest.

Day after day the far white sails...

He crouches, voiceless, in his tomb-like cell,
Forgot of all things save his jailer's hate
That turns the daylight from his iron grate
To make his prison more and more a hell;...

The eyrie clung to the shattered cliff
That the glacier's torrent thundered under;
And the unfledged eaglet's lifted eye
Looked out on the world of peak and sky
In silent wonder.
...

An Earthworm once loved a Star. In the hush of the summer night,
He lay quite close to the ground and gazed on its golden light;
He looked from his house of clay, and dreamed of wonderful things,...

It wouldn't be fair to Belshazzar
When speaking of madness and mirth,
To draw from his revel a moral
For conscienceless sin in the earth,
For 'tis certain the King of Chaldea...

(Battleships of the Coronation Naval Review, Spithead, England, June 24, 1911.)


Hail, sceptered Mars, great god of wars!
Hail, Carnage, queen of blood!
And hail those muffled armaments--...

I.

"He has eyes like the Christ,"
The mother said, and smiled;
"He will be wise and good,
My wondering little child.
God grant him strength to do
Whate'er his tasks may be,...

Here is a tale the North Wind sang to me:
Hell hath set Mammon o'er a frozen land,
Crowned him with gold, put gold into his hand,
And men forsake their God to bow the knee
Again unto this world-old deity...