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'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...

Was I a Samurai renowned,
Two-sworded, fierce, immense of bow?
A histrion angular and profound?
A priest? a porter? - Child, although
I have forgotten clean, I know
That in the shade of Fujisan,...

Above the Crags that fade and gloom
Starts the bare knee of Arthur's Seat;
Ridged high against the evening bloom,
The Old Town rises, street on street;
With lamps bejewelled, straight ahead,...

The morning mists still haunt the stony street;
The northern summer air is shrill and cold;
And lo, the Hospital, grey, quiet, old,
Where Life and Death like friendly chafferers meet....

Some three, or five, or seven, and thirty years;
A Roman nose; a dimpling double-chin;
Dark eyes and shy that, ignorant of sin,
Are yet acquainted, it would seem, with tears;...

Here in this dim, dull, double-bedded room,
I play the father to a brace of boys,
Ailing but apt for every sort of noise,
Bedfast but brilliant yet with health and bloom....

It's the Spring.
Earth has conceived, and her bosom,
Teeming with summer, is glad.

Vistas of change and adventure,
Thro' the green land
The grey roads go beckoning and winding,...

In the placid summer midnight,
Under the drowsy sky,
I seem to hear in the stillness
The moths go glimmering by.

One by one from the windows
The lights have all been sped....

The day's high work is over and done,
And these no more will need the sun:
Blow, you bugles of ENGLAND, blow!
These are gone whither all must go,
Mightily gone from the field they won....

Army Reserve; a worshipper of BOBS,
With whom he stripped the smock from CANDAHAR;
Neat as his mount, that neatest among cobs;
Whenever pageants pass, or meetings are,
He moves conspicuous, vigilant, severe,...

Praise the generous gods for giving
In a world of wrath and strife
With a little time for living,
Unto all the joy of life.

At whatever source we drink it,
Art or love or faith or wine,...

These to the glory and praise of the green land
That bred my women, and that holds my dead,
ENGLAND, and with her the strong broods that stand
Wherever her fighting lines are thrust or spread!...

Something is dead . . .
The grace of sunset solitudes, the march
Of the solitary moon, the pomp and power
Of round on round of shining soldier-stars
Patrolling space, the bounties of the sun -...

The Past was goodly once, and yet, when all is said,
The best of it we know is that it's done and dead.

Dwindled and faded quite, perished beyond recall,
Nothing is left at last of what one time was all....

Madam Life's a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She's the tenant of the room,
He's the ruffian on the stair.

You shall see her as a friend,
You shall bilk him once and twice;...

While the west is paling
Starshine is begun.
While the dusk is failing
Glimmers up the sun.

So, till darkness cover
Life's retreating gleam,
Lover follows lover,
Dream succeeds to dream....

You played and sang a snatch of song,
A song that all-too well we knew;
But whither had flown the ancient wrong;
And was it really I and you?
O, since the end of life's to live...