But, gazing once more on your winsome face,
To worship there Ideal Loveliness.
On that pure shrine that has too long ignored
The gifts that once I brought so frequently
I lay this votive offering, to record
How sweet your quiet beauty seemed to me.
Enchanting girl, my faith is not a thing
By futile prayers and vapid psalm-singing
To vent in crowded nave and public pew.
My creed is simple: that the world is fair,
And beauty the best thing to worship there,
And I confess it by adoring you.
To a slow river at whose silent vergeTall poplars tremble and deep grasses roll,Come thou no less and, kneeling in a shoalOf the freaked flag and meadow buttercup,Bend till thine image from the pool beam upArched with blue heaven like an aureole.See how adorable in fancy thenLives the fair face it mirrors even so,O thou…
Big with wrecked promise and abandoned hopes,Broke in a surf of blood along the Aisne.The charge her heroes left us, we assumed,What, dying, they reconquered, we preserved,In the chill trenches, harried, shelled, entombed,Winter came down on us, but no man swerved.Winter came down on us. The low clouds, tornIn the stark branches of the riven…
Ay, it is fitting on this holiday,Commemorative of our soldier dead,When — with sweet flowers of our New England MayHiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray —Their graves in every town are garlanded,That pious tribute should be given tooTo our intrepid fewObscurely fallen here beyond the seas.Those to preserve their country’s greatness died;But…
Odors endeared; down avenues in bloomThe chestnut-trees with phallic spires are gay.Over the terrace flows the thronged cafe;The boulevards are streams of hurrying sound;And through the streets, like veins when they abound,The lust for pleasure throbs itself away.Here let me live, here let me still pursuePhantoms of bliss that beckon and recede, —Thy strange allurements,…
The temple in times without prayer, without praise,The altar unset and the candle unlit.Let me survive not the lovable swayOf early desire, nor see when it goesThe courts of Life’s abbey in ivied decay,Whence sometime sweet anthems and incense arose.The delicate hues of its sevenfold ringsThe rainbow outlives not; their yellow and blueThe butterfly sees…
My heart was sick to see the wayHe suffered as he died.I dug about the place he fell,And found, no bigger than my thumb,A fragment of the splintered shellIn warm aluminum.I melted it, and made a mould,And poured it in the opening,And worked it, when the cast was cold,Into a shapely ring.And when my ring…
