When you've knocked about the country, been away from home for years; When the past, by distance softened, nearly fills your eyes with tears, You are haunted oft, wherever or however you may roam,...
'Tis no tale of heroism, 'tis no tale of storm and strife, But of ordinary boozing, and of dull domestic life, Of the everlasting friction that most husbands must endure,...
The Separated Women Go lying through the land, For they have plenty dresses, And money, too, in hand; They married brutes and drunkards And blackguards 'frightful low', But why are they so eager...
We hear a great commotion 'Bout the ship that comes to grief, That founders in mid-ocean, Or is driven on a reef; Because it's cheap and brittle A score of sinners drown....
O bard of fortune, you deem me nought But a mark for your careless scorn. For I am the echo-less grave of thought That is strangled before it's born. You think perchance that I am a doom...
The fields are fair in autumn yet, and the sun's still shining there, But we bow our heads and we brood and fret, because of the masks we wear; Or we nod and smile the social while, and we say we're doing well,...
And they heard the tent-poles clatter, And the fly in twain was torn, 'Tis the soiled rag of a tatter Of the tent where I was born. And what matters it, I wonder? Brick or stone or calico?,...
It watched me in the cradle laid, and from my boyhood's home It glared above my shoulder-blade when I wrote my first 'pome'; It's sidled by me ever since, with greeny eyes aslant,...
Night-Lights are falling; Girl of the street, Go to your calling If you would eat. Lamplight and starlight And moonlight superb, Bright hope is a farlight, So watch on the kerb....
Let others make the songs of love For our young struggling nation; But I will sing while e'er I live The Songs of Irrigation; For while the white man shall beget The white man's son and daughter,...
A lonely young wife In her dreaming discerns A lily-decked pool With a border of ferns, And a beautiful child, With butterfly wings, Trips down to the edge of the water and sings:...
When fairer faces turn from me, And gayer friends grow cold, And I have lost through poverty The friendship bought with gold; When I have served the selfish turn Of some all-worldly few,...
It is up from out the alleys, from the alleys dark and vile, It is up from out the alleys I have struggled for a while, Just to breathe the breath of Heaven ere my devil drags me down,...
The World is full of kindness, And not the poor alone; We Christians in our blindness Bow down to hearts of stone; The clever, bitter cynic, Whose poisoned 'soul' is dead,...
Day of ending for beginnings! Ocean hath another innings, Ocean hath another score; And the surges sing his winnings, And the surges shout his winnings, And the surges shriek his winnings,...