Works

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,...

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will,--and would that night were here!
But ah!--to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!...

Doubt no more that Oberon--
Never doubt that Pan
Lived, and played a reed, and ran
After nymphs in a dark forest,
In the merry, credulous days,--
Lived, and led a fairy band...

Cut if you will, with Sleep's dull knife,
Each day to half its length, my friend,--
The years that Time takes off my life,
He'll take from off the other end!

Aye, but she?
Your other sister and my other soul
Grave Silence, lovelier
Than the three loveliest maidens, what of her?
Clio, not you,
Not you, Calliope,
Nor all your wanton line,...

Oh, Prue she has a patient man,
And Joan a gentle lover,
And Agatha's Arth' is a hug-the-hearth,--
But my true love's a rover!

Mig, her man's as good as cheese
And honest as a briar,...

April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
...

The first rose on my rose-tree
Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
Nothing mattered.

Grief of grief has drained me clean;
Still it seems a pity...

Let the little birds sing;
Let the little lambs play;
Spring is here; and so 'tis spring;--
But not in the old way!

I recall a place
Where a plum-tree grew;
There you lifted up your face,...

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree!
Ere spring was going--ah, spring is gone!
And there comes no summer to the like of you and me,--
Blossom time is early, but no fruit sets on.
...

When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,
And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind
Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned
Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,...

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old--
October--November--
How she disliked the cold!

She used to watch the swallows
Go down across the sky,
And turn from the window...