“ Frail azures fluttering from night's outer wing,
Strong silent greens serenely lingering,
Absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
This is the garden: pursed lips do blow
Upon cool flutes within wide glooms, and sing,
Of harps celestial to the quivering string,
Invisible faces hauntingly and slow.
This is the garden. Time shall surely reap,
And on Death's blade lie many a flower curled,
In other lands where other songs be sung;
Yet stand They here enraptured, as among
The slow deep trees perpetual of sleep
Some silver-fingered fountain steals the world. ”

“ I cannot turn away from thee forever,
For there are bonds that wisdom cannot sever
And slaves with souls far freer than the free.
Such strong desires the universal Giver
With unknown plan has buried deep in me
That the exquisite joy of watching thee
Has dominated all my life's endeavor.
Thou weariest of having me so near,
I feel the scorn thou hast within thy heart,
And yet thy face has never seemed so dear
As now, when I am minded to depart.
Though thou shouldst drive me hence, I love thee so
That I would watch thee when thou dost not know. ”

“ Are blown clear bands of color through the sky,
That swirl and sweep and meet, to break and foam
Like rainbow veils upon a bubble's dome.
Yours are the songs that burst about my ears,
Or blow away as many-colored spheres.
You are the star that made the skies all bright,
Yet tore itself away in flaming flight;
You are the tree that suddenly awoke ”

“ The dark. Down the worn out years a sob
Of broken loves; old pain
Of dead farewells; and one face
Fading into grey....
A silver web has the moon spun,
A silver web over all the sky.
In her flooding glory, one by one,
Like gnats in a web the stars die. ”

“ Slim wisp amid the swirl
Of crowded streets, take up the tune,
Monotonously importune.
Faces are wan in the arc-light's livid glare;
A wind gust carries the band's flare
Of song, in noisy eddies echoing,
Round lonely black street-corners,
[31]
Till, with distance dimming,
It fades away,
Among the silent, dark array
Of city houses where no soul stirs.
The crowd thins, the players are alone ”

“ A mountain of despair against the sky!
About its summit soaring seagulls fly,
Or rest them in its lofty cypress trees,
And greet the black barge bearing those who die
Upon our earth to everlasting ease
And pleasant lives that know not man's eternities. ”

“ After an interval of endless years,
There comes a voice that calls me from afar:
"Art thou not Helen, dowered of the gods
With all that man can covet? Wert thou not
Created the most beautiful of earth,
And is not beauty wisdom, wisdom power?
What hast thou done with their almighty gift?"
And then, ere I would answer, silence falls
Around me, and the dark divides, and I
See the blue twilight on the Spartan hills. ”

“ A silver web upon all the sky,
Where the frail stars quiver, every one
Like tangled gnats that hum and die.
The moon has tangled the dull night
In her silver skein and set alight
Each dew-damp branch with milky flame.
And huge the moon broods on the night. ”

“ And the red sky-glory fades.
[30]
SALVATION ARMY
A drum pounds out the hymn,
Loud with gaudy angels, tinsel cherubim,
To drown the fanfare of the street,
And with exultant lilting beat,
To mingle the endless rumble of carts,
The scrape of feet, the noise of marts
And dinning market stalls, where women shout
Their wares, and meat hangs out—
Grotesque, distorted by the gas flare's light—
Into one sacred rhythm for the Devil's spite. ”

“ Among them a constant banjo-twanging of frogs,
And shrilling of toads and of insects
Rises and falls in chorus rhythmic and stirring.
Dark, with crumbling railing and planks,
The bridge leads into the sunset.
Across it many lonely figures,
Their eyes a-flare with the sunset,
Their faces glowing with its colors,
Tramp past me through the evening.
I am tired of sitting quiet
Among the bushes of the shore,
While the dark bridge stretches onward,
And the long pools gleam with light ”

“ Thou, Froissart, for that thou didst love the pen
While others wrote in steel, accept all praise
Of after ages, and of hungering days
For whom the old glories move, the old trumpets cry;
Who gav'st as one of those immortal men
His life that his fair city might not die.
[4]
A CHORUS GIRL
When thou hast taken thy last applause, and when
The final curtain strikes the world away,
Leaving to shadowy silence and dismay
That stage which shall not know thy smile again,
Lingering a little while I see thee then
Ponder the tinsel part they let thee play ”

“ Is the summer all forgot?—
Now the ice is dark and strong
That has bound you to the spot—
Did you die of too much song?
Something in me is a harp
Played by every wanton breeze.
Moaning soft and piping sharp
Are its wondrous melodies.
Is the playing over-fast
Though the answer now is strong?
Like the sedges at the last
Will it die of too much song?
[82]
[WHEREVER MY DREAMS GO]
Wherever my dreams go, you are always there,
And you and I have gone to many a land,
Seeing high hills at dawn and desert sand,
Temples and mosques and people bowed in prayer. ”

“ We have not any wish to be
Sad pilgrims, torn by sad desires,
Wayfarers of mortality.
[104]
The husk of flesh we have put by;
The dark seeds planted in the earth
Have blossomed in the upper sky,
In airy gardens have new birth. ”

“ By day, by night;
Secure from envious time's deflowering breath
They know no death,
But silently, imperishably fair,
Grow lovelier there.
He who adores too much the impending hour,
The budding flower,
Who knows not with what dyes an hour that's dead
Is garmented,
[106]
Who walks with glimmering shapes companionless,
He cannot guess
With how great love and thankfulness I praise
The yesterdays. ”

“ Strange, that to this dark hill you came
To seek, unmindful of their loss,
A refuge underneath the cross.
There is some deeper secret lies
Hidden out of human sight
In keeping of those tranquil eyes
That shine with such immortal light,
And in their shadows gleam and glow
While still upon your pipes you blow. ”

“ On russet hills and by roadsides stiff with rime.
In nature, dead, the life gods stir,
From Rhadamanthus and the Isles,
Where Saturn rules the Age of Gold,
Come old, old ghosts of bygone gods;
While dim mists earth's outlines blur,
And drip all night from lichen-greened roof-tiles.
In men's hearts the mad gods rise
And fill the streets with revelling,
With torchlight that glances on frozen pools,
With tapers starring the thick-fogged night,
A-dance, like strayed fireflies,
'Mid dim mad throngs who Saturn's orisons sing. ”

“ Always the ships that move in mystery, on the dim horizon,
Shadow-filled sails of dreams, sliding over the blue-grey ocean,
Far from the rock-edged shore where willow-green waves are rushing,
And white foam-people leap, to stand erect for the moment.
Ho! ye sails that seem to wander in dream-filled meadows,
Say, is the shore where I stand the only field of struggle,
Or are ye hit and battered out there by waves and wind-gusts
As ye tack over a clashing sea of watery echoes?
[22]
PHONOGRAPH—TANGO
Old dances are simplified of their yearning, bleached by Time. ”

“ The young men, the grinning men, pass.
Last night they danced to that very tune;
Today they march away;
Tomorrow, perhaps no band at all,
Or the band beside the grave.
Above, in the long blue strip of sky,
The whirling pigeons, the thoughtless pigeons, pass.
Another band beats down the street ”

“ He blows a bubble to the breeze,
Which is borne upward in the night
And makes the heavens shine with light.
But soon it sinks to earth again,
And, hitting hills, it bursts! And then
With foam the skies are splashed and sprayed;
And that's how all the stars are made.
[25]
THRENODY
She is lain with high things and with low. ”

“ Bright as the shattered sun-rays, where the prow
Cut the still water,
The warm light caught and tangled there,
Red gold amid your hair.
You were very slim in your blue serge dress....
We talked of meaningless things, education,
Agreed that unless,
Something were changed disaster would come to the nation. ”

“ A beached king's galley, whose sails are furled,
Who is hung with tapestries rich and old.
Beautiful as a woman is she,
A woman whose autumn of life is here,
Proud and calm at the end of the year
With the grace that now is majesty. ”

“ Of life shall bear you from the strange worlds over
The waves, and back again to the old lover.
Yes, in some future far beyond surmise
You will dream here with half-remembering eyes,
And I shall write these words, content awhile
In the slow round of time to see you smile.
[57]
R. S. MITCHELL
[58]
[59]
POPPY SONG I
Footsteps soft as fall the rose's
Petals on a dewy lawn,
Shaken when the wind uncloses
Golden gateways for the dawn;
Laughter light as is the swallows'
Chatter in the evening sky,
Wafted upward from the hollows
Where the limpid waters lie ”

“ Leaps into sudden light along the shore.
Each little wave has caught a golden ray—
As if the dawn had never come before.
Beyond the cliffs brown fishing boats go by
Under the reach of the wide laughing sky.
[85]
QUI SUB LUNA ERRANT
In a strange land they dwell, too far away
From sunlight and the common mirth of men
Ever to come within our casual ken.
We see them not, but if by chance we stray
Down cypress aisles when the wan summer day
Draws to a thin and sickly close, we hear
Murmur of mad speech by some watery weir
Or languid laughter and faint sound of play. ”

“ Before the Infinite Sorrow of their Lord.
[56]
THE RECOMPENSE
When the last song is sung, and the last spark
Of light dies out forever, and the dark,
The voiceless dark eternal shrouds the earth ”

“ And thought on shrines all voiceless now and bare,
The holy genius of their boughs withdrawn,
Till with hoarse cry the train that you were on
Stabbed the indifference of the empty air ...
Then I awoke and knew that you were gone.
[110]
THE NEW PLATONIST Circa 1640
Our loves as flowers fall to dust ”