Works

'O mes cheres Mille et Une Nuits!' - Fantasio.

Once on a time
There was a little boy: a master-mage
By virtue of a Book
Of magic - O, so magical it filled
His life with visionary pomps...

With a ripple of leaves and a tinkle of streams
The full world rolls in a rhythm of praise,
And the winds are one with the clouds and beams -
Midsummer days! Midsummer days!...

The big teetotum twirls,
And epochs wax and wane
As chance subsides or swirls;
But of the loss and gain
The sum is always plain.
Read on the mighty pall,
The weed of funeral...

The greater masters of the commonplace,
REMBRANDT and good SIR WALTER - only these
Could paint her all to you: experienced ease
And antique liveliness and ponderous grace;...

Blue-eyed and bright of face but waning fast
Into the sere of virginal decay,
I view her as she enters, day by day,
As a sweet sunset almost overpast.
Kindly and calm, patrician to the last,...

At the barren heart of midnight,
When the shadow shuts and opens
As the loud flames pulse and flutter,
I can hear a cistern leaking.

Dripping, dropping, in a rhythm,...

Take any station, pavement, circus, corner,
Where men their styles of print may call or choose,
And there - ten times more on it than JACK HORNER -
There shall you find him swathed in sheets of news....

To A. C.



Not to the staring Day,
For all the importunate questionings he pursues
In his big, violent voice,
Shall those mild things of bulk and multitude,
The Trees - God's sentinels...

The nightingale has a lyre of gold,
The lark's is a clarion-call,
And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute,
But I love him best of all.

For his song is all of the joy of life,...

From the brake the Nightingale
Sings exulting to the Rose;
Though he sees her waxing pale
In her passionate repose,
While she triumphs waxing frail,
Fading even while she glows;
Though he knows...

Trees and the menace of night;
Then a long, lonely, leaden mere
Backed by a desolate fell,
As by a spectral battlement; and then,
Low-brooding, interpenetrating all,...

We'll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.
November glooms are barren beside the dusk of June.
The summer flowers are faded, the summer thoughts are sere....

What is to come we know not. But we know
That what has been was good, was good to show,
Better to hide, and best of all to bear.
We are the masters of the days that were:...