I view her as she enters, day by day,As a sweet sunset almost overpast.Kindly and calm, patrician to the last,Superbly falls her gown of sober gray,And on her chignon’s elegant arrayThe plainest cap is somehow touched with caste.She talks BEETHOVEN; frowns disapprobationAt BALZAC’S name, sighs it at ‘poor GEORGE SAND’S’;Knows that she has exceeding pretty…
Into the beautiful world.O, the wonder, the spell of the streets!The stature and strength of the horses,The rustle and echo of footfalls,The flat roar and rattle of wheels!A swift tram floats huge on us . . .It’s a dream?The smell of the mud in my nostrilsBlows brave-like a breath of the sea!As of old,Ambulant, undulant…
The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform,The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.The gods are good to me: I have no wife,No innocent child, to think of as I nearThe fateful minute; nothing all-too dearUnmans me for my bout of passive strife.Yet am I tremulous and a trifle sick,And, face to face with chance, I shrink a…
To wear it on her breast or at her ear,Her days to colour and make sweet her nights.Crocus and daffodil and violet,Pink, primrose, valley-lily, close-carnation,Red rose and white rose, wall-flower, mignonette,The daisies all-these be her recreation,Her gaudies these! And forth from Drury Lane,Trapesing in any of her whirl of weathers,Her flower-girls foot it, honest and…
Why does the great sea ebb and flow? –Why does the round world spin?Geraldine, Geraldine,Bid me my life renew:What is it worth unless I win,Love–love and you?Why, my heart, when we speak her name(Geraldine, Geraldine!)Throbs the word like a flinging flame? –Why does the Spring begin?Geraldine, Geraldine,Bid me indeed to be:Open your heart, and take…
Flowed radiant round your peacock feather,And glistered from your jewelled hand.Your tawny hair, turned strand on strandAnd bound with blue ribands together,Streaked the rough tartan, green like heather,That round your lissome shoulder spanned.Your grace was quick my sense to seize:The quaint looped hat, the twisted tresses,The close-drawn scarf, and under theseThe flowing, flapping draperies –My…
A thin moon drifts to westward,The night is hushed and cheerful.My thought is quick with you.Near windows gleam and laugh,And far away a trainClanks glowing through the stillness:A great content’s in all things,And life is not in vain.
Moralists may scourge and drill,Preachers prose, and fainthearts quail.Let them whine, or threat, or wail!Till the touch of CircumstanceDown to darkness sink the scale,Fate’s a fiddler, Life’s a dance.What if skies be wan and chill?What if winds be harsh and stale?Presently the east will thrill,And the sad and shrunken sailBellying with a kindly gale,Bear you…
His worn face glaring on the thoughtless throngThe stony peevishness of sightless men.He seemed scarce older than his clothes. Again,Grotesquing thinly many an old sweet song,So cracked his fiddle, his hand so frail and wrong,You hardly could distinguish one in ten.He stopped at last, and sat him on the sand,And, grasping wearily his bread-winner,Staring dim…
We would inform them all with bland blue weather.Delight alone would need to shed a tear,For dream and deed should war no more together.Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear;Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather;And love, sweet love, should never fall to sere,If I were king.But politics should find no harbour near;The…
