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Transcriber's note

Minor punctuation errors have been corrected without notice. One printer's error was changed, and it is indicated with a [mouse-hover] and listed at the [end]. All other inconsistencies are as in the original.

SHIPS IN HARBOUR

BY

DAVID MORTON
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1921

Copyright, 1921
by
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Printed in the United States of America

To
T. B. M.
AND
M. W. M.
This Book is Affectionately Dedicated

For the privilege of reprinting some of the poems included in this book, the author's thanks are due to The Bookman, The Century, The New York Evening Post, Harper's Magazine, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Designer, The Nation, The New York Sun, Collier's Weekly, Good Housekeeping, The Bellman, Contemporary Verse, Everybody's Magazine, The Smart Set, Ainslee's, The Sonnet, McCall's Magazine, The Touchstone Magazine, The Forum, and The Lyric.

CONTENTS

SHIPS IN HARBOUR

WOODEN SHIPS

They are remembering forests where they grew,—
The midnight quiet, and the giant dance;
And all the murmuring summers that they knew
Are haunting still their altered circumstance.
Leaves they have lost, and robins in the nest,
Tug of the goodly earth denied to ships,
These, and the rooted certainties, and rest,—
To gain a watery girdle at the hips.

Only the wind that follows ever aft,
They greet not as a stranger on their ways;
But this old friend, with whom they drank and laughed,
Sits in the stern and talks of other days
When they had held high bacchanalias still,
Or dreamed among the stars on some tall hill.

OCTOBER DAY-MOON

Loosed from her secret moorings,
The thin and silver moon,
Floats wide above these oceans
Of yellow afternoon,—
Who slipped her fragile cables,
And blew to sea too soon.

She bears no bales—but wonder,
Not anything of note:
How should she, being merely
A slender petal-boat?...
But rated in the shipping:
The dearest tramp afloat.

A GARDEN WALL

The Roman wall was not more grave than this,
That has no league at all with great affairs,
That knows no ruder hands than clematis,
No louder blasts than blowing April airs.
Yet, with a grey solemnity it broods,
Above the walk where simple folk go past,
And in its crannies keeps their transient moods,
Holding their careless words unto the last.

The rains of summer, and the creeping vine
That season after season clings in trust,
And shivered poppies red as Roman wine,—
These things at last will haunt its crumbled dust—
Not dreams of empires shattered where they lie,
But children's laughter, birds, and bits of sky.

NAPOLEON IN HADES

They stirred uneasily, drew close their capes,
And whispered each to each in awed surprise,
Seeing this figure brood along the shapes,
World tragedies thick-crowding through his eyes.
On either side the ghostly groups drew back
In huddled knots, yielding him way and room,
Their foolish mouths agape and fallen slack,
Their bloodless fingers pointing through the gloom.

Still lonely and magnificent in guilt,
Splendid in scorn, rapt in a cloudy dream,
He paused at last upon the Stygian silt,
And raised calm eyes above the angry stream....
Hand in his breast, he stood till Charon came,
While Hades hummed with gossip of his name.

SYMBOLS

Beautiful words, like butterflies, blow by,
With what swift colours on their fragile wings!—
Some that are less articulate than a sigh,
Some that were names of ancient, lovely things.
What delicate careerings of escape,
When they would pass beyond the baffled reach,
To leave a haunting shadow and a shape,—
Eluding still the careful traps of speech.

And I who watch and listen, lie in wait,
Seeing the cloudy cavalcades blow past,—
Happy if some bright vagrant, soon or late,
May venture near the snares of sound, at last—
Most fortunate captor if, from time to time,
One may be taken, trembling, in a rhyme.

EXILED

Sensing these sweet renewals through the earth,
Where seed and soil most happily conspire
To furnish forth gay rituals of mirth,
Of shaken leaves and pointed blooms of fire,—
I wonder then that thoughtful man, alone,
Walks darkly and all puzzled with a doubt,
Bewildered, and in truth, half-fearful grown
Of wild, wild earth and April's joyous rout.

When we are dust again with soil and seed,
With happy earth through many a happy Spring,
We yet may learn that joy was all our need,—
That man's long thought is but a broken wing,
Of less account, as things may come to pass,
Than Spring's first robin breasting through the grass.

MARY SETS THE TABLE

She brings such gay and shining things to pass,
With delicate, deft fingers that are learned
In ways of silverware and cup and glass,
Arrayed in ordered patterns, trimly turned;—
And never guesses how this subtle ease
Is older than the oldest tale we tell,
This gift that guides her through such tricks as these,——
And my delight in watching her, as well.

She thinks not how this art with spoon and plate,
Is one with ancient women baking bread:
An epic heritance come down of late
To slender hands, and dear, delightful head,—
How Trojan housewives vie in serving me,
Where Mary sets the table things for tea.

AUTUMN TEA TIME

The late light falls across the floor,
Turned amber from a yellow tree,—
And there are yellow cups for four,
And lemon for the tea.

The maples, with a million flames,
Have lit the golden afternoon,
An ambient radiance that shames
The ineffective moon....

Till dull and smoky greys return,
Quenching the street with chills and damps—
Leaving these asters where they burn,
Mellow like evening lamps.

BATTLEFIELDS

Unto these fields of torn and rutted earth,
These hills that lift their many a naked scar,
There yet shall come the indomitable mirth
Of Springs that have remembered where they are.
The slow processions of sweet sun and rain
Will crown the changing seasons as they pass,
With healing and green fruit and swollen grain,
And banners of the gay and dauntless grass.

Here little paths will find their way again,
And here the patient cattle come to stand,
Until, grown half-incredulous, these men
Looking from doorways on the evening land,
Can scarcely think—so deep the quiet lies—
How all of this was ever otherwise.

ONE DAY IN AUTUMN

With all our going through this golden weather,
Where leaves have littered every forest way,
If there be lovers, they should be together:
For this is golden ... but the end is grey.
Beyond this shimmer where the bright leaves fall,
Behind this haze of silver shot with gold,
There is a greyness waiting for it all,—
A little longer ... and the world is old.

And never loneliness grew more and more,
As this that haunts these late October days,
With smoky twilights gathering at the door,
With grey mist clouding on familiar ways ...
And well for him who has another near,
When fires are lighted for the dying year.

AN OLD HOUSE AND GARDEN

After wet twilights, when the rain is done,
I think they walk these ways that knew their feet,
And tread these sunken pavements, one by one,
Keen for old Summers that were wild and sweet;
Where rainy lilacs blow against the dark,
And grasses bend beneath the weight they [bear],
The night grows troubled, and we still may mark
Their ghostly heart-break on the tender air.

Be still! We cannot know what trysts they keep,
What eager hands reach vainly for a door,
Remembered since they folded them in sleep,—
Frail hands that lift like lilacs, evermore,
And lean along the darkness, pale and still,
To touch a window or a crumbling sill.

IMMORTALIS

All loved and lovely women, dear to rhyme:
Thaïs, Cassandra, Helen and their fames,
Burn like tall candles through forgotten time,
Lighting the Past's dim arras with their names.
Around their faces wars the eager dark,
Wherein all other lights are sunken now;
Yet, casting back, the seeker still may mark
A flame of hair, a bright, immortal brow.

Surely, where they have passed, one after one,
Wearing their radiance to the darkened room,——
Surely, new-comers to Oblivion
May still descry, in that all-quenching gloom,
Rare faces, lovely, lifted and alight,
Like tapers burning through the windy night.

TOURING

God of Summer—I have seen
World on world of summer green—
Summer earth and summer sky,
Fields of summer turning by;
Hills beyond us fall away,
Tumbled slopes in disarray,
Fold and melt into a plain:
Fire and gold of summer grain.

Orchards curving on a hill,
Heavy-fruited, green and still,
Heave a shoulder to the sky,
Bend and bow and hurry by;
Fields of clover burn and pass,
Cattle knee-deep in the grass
Lift a lazy head and look
Pictures in a picture-book....
Corn in swift, revolving rows,
Dripping sunlight where it goes,
Wheels and glitters and returns:
Bladed beauty's lifted urns;
Woods all shadowed, cooling earth,
Murmuring of a quiet mirth,
Pour damp odours where they pass,
Breath of fern and earth and grass ...
Ramblers on a lichened wall,
Ramblers, ramblers pouring all
Colour that the world has known
Out upon an aging stone.—
Little towns of street and spire,
Dooryard roses, heart's desire,
Light a dream within the mind,
Light a dream ... and fall behind.

God of mercies—when I slept,
World on world of summer kept
Turning, turning softly by,—
Summer earth and summer sky:
Fields of summer that will be
Summer always unto me—
Never lost, not left behind:
Always summer for my mind.

SUMMER

From what lost centuries that were sweet before,
Comes this long wave of Summer, bursting white
In shivered apple-blossoms on the shore
That is our homeland for a day and night!
A wide, hushed spirit floats above the foam,
A sweetness that was ancient flower and face,
When wine-red poppies stained the walls of Rome,
And daisies starred those summer fields of Thrace.

Something survives and haunts the leafy shade,
Some fragrance that was petals, once, and lips,
And whispered, brief avowals that they made,—
Borne hither, now, in vague, invisible ships,
Whose weightless cargoes, poured upon the air,
Are flowers forgot, and faces that were fair.

OLD SHIPS

There is a memory stays upon old ships,
A weightless cargo in the musty hold,—
Of bright lagoons and prow-caressing lips,
Of stormy midnights,—and a tale untold.
They have remembered islands in the dawn,
And windy capes that tried their slender spars,
The tortuous channels where their keels have gone,
And calm, blue nights of stillness and the stars.

Ah, never think that ships forget a shore,
Or bitter seas, or winds that made them wise;
There is a dream upon them, evermore;—
And there be some who say that sunk ships rise
To seek familiar harbours in the night,
Blowing in mists, their spectral sails like light.

THE TOWN

(For Morristown, N. J.)

I

Men loved not Athens in her maiden days
More tenderly than these their tree-lined Town
Which, lacking Muses for a wider praise,
Lives in their hearts in still and sweet renown.
The market square, the wagons in the dawn,
The streets like music when their names are said,
The Sunday spire, the green, untrammelled lawn,—
These be the things on which their hearts are fed.

And one long street climbs slowly to a hill
That lifts her crosses for the Town to see
How sleep those quiet neighbours, townsmen still,
How there is peace for such as weary be ...
And as they come, each like a sleepy guest,
She takes them, one by one, and gives them rest.

II

SUNDAY MORNING

A thoughtful quiet lies upon the street,
There is a hushed suspension on the air,
And the slow bells summon unhurried feet
To dim reclosures kept for praise and prayer.
Drawn blinds have shut the merchant's wares away,
Where two by two the goodly folk go by,
Out of their toilsome days into this day
Of special airs beneath a special sky.

A little while, and all at last are gone;
The streets are stilled of passers up and down;
Only the pealing bells toll on and on,—
Till these, too, cease, and all the silent Town
In street, and roof, and spire, and grassy sod,
Lies steeped in sunlight, smiling back at God.

III

IN APRIL

The way of Spring with little steepled towns
Is such a shy, transforming sorcery
Of special lights and swift, incredible crowns,
That grave men wonder how such things may be.
No friendly spire, no daily-trodden way
But somehow alters in the April air,
Grown dearer still, on some enchanted day,
For shining garments they have come to wear.

The way the spring comes to our Town is such
That something quickens in the hearts of men,
Turning them lovers at its subtle touch,
Till they must lift their heads again—again—
As lovers do, with frank, adoring eyes,
Where the long street of lifted steeples lies.

IV

WATCHERS

I think those townsmen, sleeping on the hill,
Are never careless how the Town may fare,
But jealous of her quiet beauty still,
Her ways and worth are things for which they care:
For shuttered house, and gateways and the grass,
And how the streets, tree-bordered all and cool,
Are still a pleasant way for folks to pass:
Men at their work and children home from school.
I cannot doubt that they are pleased to see
Their planted elms grown dearer year by year:
Their living witness unto such as we ...
And they are less regretful when they hear
Some name we speak, some tale we tell again,
Of days when they were warm and living men.

V

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

These morning streets, the lawns of windy grass,
And spires that wear the sunlight like a crown,
The square where busy, happy people pass:
The living soul that lights the little Town,—
These have been shining beauty for my mind,
And joy, and friendship, and a tale to tell,
And these have been a presence that is kind,
A quiet music and a healing well.

Men who were lovers in the olden time,
Who praised the beauty of bright hair and brow,
And left a little monument of rhyme,—
Wrought not more tenderly than I would, now,
To turn some changing syllables of praise
For her whose quiet beauty fills my days.

VI

THE TOWNSMAN

Here would I leave some subtle part of me,
A moving presence through the friendly Town,
Abiding still, and happy still to be
Where thoughtful men pass daily up and down;—
An essence stirring on the ways they fare,
Haunting the drifted sunlight where they go,
Till one might mark a Something on the air,
Most near and kind—though why, he would not know.

Happy, if it may chance, where two shall meet,
Pausing to pass the friendly, idle word,
In the hushed twilight of the evening street,
I might stand by, a secret, silent Third,—
Most happy listener, if I hear them tell
How, with the Town—and them—it still is well.

AFTER SUMMER RAIN

All day the rain has filled the apple-trees,
And stilled the orchard grasses of their mirth,
Turning these acres green and silvered seas
That drowned the summer musics of the earth.
Now that this clearer twilight takes the hill,
This thin, belated radiance, moving by,
Bird-calls return, and odours, rainy still,
And colours glinting through the earth and sky.

Here where I watch the robins from the lane,
That pirouette and preen among the leaves,
These swift, wet-winged arrivals in the rain
Have spilled a wisdom from their dripping eaves,—
And beauty still is more than daily bread,
For fevered minds, and hearts discomforted.

THE KINGS ARE PASSING DEATHWARD

The Kings are passing deathward in the dark
Of days that had been splendid where they went;
Their crowns are captive and their courts are stark
Of purples that are ruinous, now, and rent.
For all that they have seen disastrous things:
The shattered pomp, the split and shaken throne,
They cannot quite forget the way of Kings:
Gravely they pass, majestic and alone.

With thunder on their brows, their faces set
Toward the eternal night of restless shapes,
They walk in awful splendour, regal yet,
Wearing their crimes like rich and kingly capes....
Curse them or taunt, they will not hear or see;
The Kings are passing deathward: let them be.

RENEWAL

Strange that this body in its lifted state
Of independent will and power and lust,
Should still attest that kinship, dimmed of late,
Its ancient, honoured brotherhood with dust;—
So that when Spring is quickening in the clay,
Stirring dumb particles the way she fares,
This foolish flesh is no less moved than they,
To sweet, unreasoned happiness, like theirs.

Not seed and soil alone, but heart and mind
Are somehow swayed, till sober, earnest men,
In quick renewal with their dusty kind,
Grow foolish-fond, like lads at play again....
So April, stirring blindly through the earth,
Can move us to a blind, unthinking mirth.

RESPONDIT

Apple-tree, apple-tree, what is it worth:
Beauty and passion and red-lipped mirth,
Fashioned of fire and the blossoming earth,—
Gone in a transient spring?

Spending and spilling your wealth through the grass,
Coiner of coins that must rust and pass,—
Knowing the end is—alas, and alas!
What may a poet sing?

"Sing of the dust that is blossomy boughs,
Dust that is more than your thought allows;
Sing you for ever impossible vows
Unto the springs to be.

"Dust in the dust is for fire and birth,
Beauty and passion and red-lipped mirth,
Fashioned of dust for the blossoming earth,—
Even of you and me."

JEWELS

The sea has worn her ships like precious stones,
That marked her bosom's tremulous unrest;
And for their loss no pendant moon atones
That rides eternally upon her breast.
For sunk armadas or a little boat
She still is wistful as a jewelled queen,
Who bears the burning memory at her throat,
Of barque and sloop and brilliant brigantine.

The epic chanted to each sounding cave
Is all of fleets gone down by lonely shores,—
The shining spars, the sails, the light they gave,
Now scattered darkly on her grievous floors;—
And all the sea's long moan is like a sigh
For ruined ships remembered where they lie.

CHORUS

Always it was the old songs moved us most,
For always there were other voices near,
A silver singing threading like a ghost,
A thinner music than our ears could hear;
So that we sang more softly than we might,
As leaving room for some expected tone;
Our singing was half listening in the night,
For other singing drowned along our own,

And always there was silence at the end,
For something that beguiled us with the thought
Of presences returning, friend to friend.
Seeking again the fellowship they sought,
Pleased that we sing old songs they still may know,
Who sang with us, or listened, long ago.

SYMBOL

My faith is all a doubtful thing,
Wove on a doubtful loom,—
Until there comes, each showery Spring,
A cherry-tree in bloom;

And Christ who died upon a tree
That death had stricken bare,
Comes beautifully back to me,
In blossoms, everywhere.

TO AN UNKNOWN ANCESTOR

Among the goodly folk whose name I bear,
Men of the plough, the priesthood, and the mill,
Whose whispered wisdom follows where I fare,
With ghostly promptings that must haunt me still,—
What place was there for you, whose different fame
Delighted, once, the Don Juans of the town?
The family annals have forgot your name,
And time at last has hushed your gay renown.

But often in the chamber of my mind,
The righteous rise and leave, their counsels done,
And there is counsel of another kind,—
The room turns tavern, and there enters one
I pledge as kinsman in a reeling toast,
Still unregenerate and delightful ghost.

INTIMATION

Here where the sunlight makes more strangely fair
Each shining street, each steeple where it stands,
Something like Spring is blowing down the air,
Touching the Town with light, transforming hands.
Half-shy and hesitant, a Something stays
One trembling instant where the sun is sweet,—
A quickening presence on these winter ways,
Haunting and swift—and gone on shining feet.

Yet, there was hint of coming daffodils,
And slender spears uprising on the lawn,
And apple-blossoms on the April hills ...
Only the timid prophetess was gone,
Leaving a faith as gallant as the grass,
How that these things would surely come to pass.

ON A DEAD MOTH

Who knows what trouble trembled in that throat,
What sweet distraction for the summer moon,
That lured you out, a frail, careering boat,
Across the midnight's purple, deep lagoon!
Some fire of madness lit that tiny brain,
Some soft propulsion clouded through your breast,
And lifted you, a white and moving stain
Against the dark of that disastrous quest.

The sadness of all brief and lovely things,
The fine and futile passions that we bear,
Haunt the bright wreck of your too fragile wings,
And win a pity for you, ended there,—
Like us, hurled backward to the final shade,
From mad adventures for a moon or maid.

MYSTIC

For Something glimpsed upon the topmost hill,
For Something glinting down a country lane,
Where apple-blossoms shimmer white and spill
A ghostly shower close along the rain,—
For Something guessed beyond the hedge or tree,
Hinted and hid behind the evening star,
I am made captive and am never free
Of Something that is neither near nor far.

A waking through the windy shapes of grass,
A trembling as of light along a bough,—
These are for footprints and a way to pass,
To follow after and to make a vow,—
To seek past glamours that are hourly spent,
And find but fainting lights down ways she went.

LEVIATHANS

You who have seen the foam upon bright wrecks
Of stately ships that never come to port,
Where sea-things crawl upon those sunken decks,
And fishes through those cabins take their sport,——
There where at last the gilded, gay saloon
Turns watery cavern for the spawn of seas,
And spars, once splendid, rot beneath the moon
That once was glad to sail with such as these,—

Let never word of pity pass your lips:
For these were proud in ways you cannot know,
And pride is slow to die in ruined ships
Who can but dream that some day they will go,
Their wounds all healed, their clean strength whole again,
Monarch of seas, marvel of moons and men.

INVIOLATE

I would be dumb before the evening star,
And no light word should stir upon my lips
For autumn dusks where dying embers are,
For evening seas and slow, returning ships.
I would be hushed before the face I love,
Rising in star-like quiet close to mine,
Lest all the beauty thought is dreaming of
Be rudely shaken and be spilled like wine.

For present loveliness there is no speech,
A word may wrong a flower or a face,
And stars that swim beyond our stuttering reach
Are safer in some golden, silent place....
Only when these are broken, or pass by,
Wonder and worship speak ... or sing ... or cry.

MANUSCRIPTS

As some monastic scrivener in his cell,
Sensing a chill along the stony crypt,
Might labour yet more gorgeously to spell
The final, splendid entries of his script,—
So with bright rubrics has the Autumn writ
A coloured chronicle of things that pass,
Thumbing a yellow parchment that is lit
With brief, illumined letters through the grass.

With what a prodigality of stains,
Is fashioned this last entry and design,
By one aware of cold, approaching rains,—
Who senses, through each iridescent line,
A presence at the shoulder—chills and blights,
Winds that will snuff his letters out like lights.

IN AN OLD BURIAL GROUND

I have imagined ... but I have not known
What swift, recaptured seasons, lost of late,
What long-regretted Aprils yet may wait
For each of these beyond his crypted stone.
Some Springtime that was all too quickly blown,
Some Summer that was roses in his heart,
May wake again in every sweetest part,
And show themselves familiarly his own.

It well may be there are eternal days
For every frailest thing, beyond this door,
Where roses are not ruined any more,
And April with her jonquils stays and stays,
Outlingering walls of granite where they blow ...
I have imagined ... but I do not know.

ENCORE

This old slow music will have never done
With dancers who were graceful long ago;
A sigh returns them, one by ghostly one,
To tunes and measures that they knew—and know.
These lifted faces, floating on a stream,
Are one with other faces that were fair,—
That once were light, and summertime and dream,
And drifted laughter over hall and stair.

The viols end, and two by two they pass
Out of this blaze into the leafy dark,
Too ghostly and too dim across the grass,
Too soon obscured and blotted, all,—till Hark!
This old, slow music that is like a sigh
For silver feet gone, ah, how lightly by.

REDEMPTION

The old gods wait where secret beauty stirs,
By green, untempled altars of the Spring,
If haply, still, there be some worshippers
Whose hearts are moved with long remembering.
The cloven feet of Pan are on the hill,
His reedy musics sadder than all rains,
Since none will seek—pipe ever as he will—
Those unanointed and neglected fanes.

Beauty and joy—the bread and wine and all—
We have foresworn; our noisy hearts forget;
We stray and on strange altars cry and call ...
Ah, patient gods, be patient with us yet,
And Pan, pipe on, pipe on, till we shall rise,
And follow, and be happy, and be wise.

THE HUNTED

There is no rest for them, even in Death:
As life had harried them from lair to lair,
Still with unquiet eyes and furtive breath,
They haunt the secret by-ways of the air.
They know Earth's outer regions like a street,
And on pale ships that make no port of call,
They pass in silence when they chance to meet,
Saying no names, telling no tales at all.

Yet, on November nights of wind and storm,
Shivered and driven from their ghostly shores,
They peer in lighted windows glowing warm,
And thrill again at dear, remembered doors—
But they are wary listeners in the night:
Speak but a name, and they are off in flight.

THE SCHOOL BOY READS HIS ILIAD

The sounding battles leave him nodding still:
The din of javelins at the distant wall
Is far too faint to wake that weary will
That all but sleeps for cities where they fall.
He cares not if this Helen's face were fair,
Nor if the thousand ships shall go or stay;
In vain the rumbling chariots throng the air
With sounds the centuries shall not hush away.

Beyond the window where the Spring is new,
Are marbles in a square, and tops again,
And floating voices tell him what they do,
Luring his thought from these long-warring men,——
And though the camp be visited with gods,
He dreams of marbles and of tops, and nods.

MOMENTS

Earth has been splendid in her changing moods,
Whose scattered glories mark the moment spent;
Reliques of mirth or thoughtful solitudes
Betoken what a Christ or Dante meant.
What smiling dream, what happy, happy hour
Yielded an Athens for the bride of Time!
What darker reverie wrought the Roman flower
Whose crimson petals stained the grass with crime!

Mood after mood, its subtle secret hid,
Plies in the earth and has its moody way,
Patient or swift—to build a pyramid,
Or strike a Phidias from the quickened clay ...
A reverie, that is cities on a hill,
Or laughter trembling in a daffodil.

CLEAR MORNING

The air is full of thin and blowing bells
Whose delicate, faint music breaks and swells

For every lightest wind, and dies unheard,—
Unless it be by some leaf-hidden bird,

Or some shy faun who listens in the reeds,
If haply there be tunes to suit his needs.

RENAISSANCE

This glittering sense of bright and bladed grass,
Of hedges topped with blossom, white like foam,
And moons that know a purple way to pass,—
This beauty that the mind has taken home—
Goes never wholly from us at the last,
But stays beyond each summer's slow decay,
Storing our thought with summers that are past:
Hedges and moons, white in their ancient way.

So, in some subtle instant, for their sake,
The winter world turns summer earth and sky:
Blossom and bird and musics in their wake ...
And one bright moment, ere it hurries by,
Throngs all the mind with colour, light and mirth,
Like summertimes returning through the earth.

AN OLD LOVER

Whenever he would talk to us of ships,
Old schooners lost, or tall ships under weigh,
The god of speech was neighbour to his lips,
A lover's grace on words he loved to say.
He called them by their names, and you could see
Spars in the sun, keels, and their curling foam;
And all his mind was like a morning quay
Of ships gone out, and ships come gladly home.

He filled the bay with sails we had not seen:
The Marguerita L., "a maid for shape,"
The slender Kay, the worthy Island Queen,—
That was his own, he lost her off the Cape,
"She was a ship"—and then he looked away,
And talked to us no more of ships that day.

ONE DAY IN SUMMER

This singing Summertime has never done
With afternoons all gold and dust and fire,
And windy trees blown silver in the sun,
The lights of earth, her musics and desire;—
But day by day, and hour by lighted hour,
Something beyond the summer earth and sky,
Burns through this passion of a world in flower,—
Some ghostly sense of lovers thronging by.

And I have thought, upon this windy hill,
Where bends and sways the long, dream-troubled grass,
That I may know the heart-beats, tender still,
Of gone, forgotten lovers where they pass,—
Their love, too long for one brief life to hold,
Beating and burning through this dust and gold.

VINES

No hint was told to these untutored seed:
Along the mould wherein their roots are curled,
No whisper runs of station, caste or creed,
To guide their tendrils through a jealous world.
From palace wall or cottage door, these blooms,
In careless disarray of white and red,
Will peer through open windows into rooms
Where princes sit, or women kneading bread.

Along these tender twilights where they lean,
They send no whispered gossip down at all,
Of cradle songs, or counsels of a queen,
To roots indifferent if that upper wall
Be loud with battles and the clash of Kings,
Or quiet, where a mother sits and sings.

AUDIENCE

I am aware of crowds behind the night,
Of eager faces just beyond our eyes,
Immured in silences and lost to light,
Piteous and pleading with a hurt surprise
That we who live will never turn a head
To speak them any answer, or to hark
The pregnant whispered wisdom of the Dead,
The futile finger pointed in the Dark.

THE DANCE

When we had gone from out the blazing room,
Into the cool and leafy dark, at last,
And found a sweetness in the summer gloom,
A holy quiet on the ways we passed,—
We turned, with only half-regretful glance
At silhouettes beyond that square of light,—
Content to leave the laughter and the dance,
For green, cool chambers of the summer night.

I think that we shall not be otherwise,
When we have quit all rooms where once we went,—
But gazing back with grave, untroubled eyes,
Shall find ourselves so quietly content,
We shall not wish to alter that estate,
Nor seek again the dance we left of late.

ON HEARING A BIRD SING AT NIGHT

Out of what ancient summer of soft airs
Was spun this song that stills each listening leaf—
This silver, moon-bright minstreling that fares
Through all old time, still laden with a grief?
Some hidden bird, by turrets and black bars,
Where one had languished for her face was fair,
Heard thus some troubadour beneath the stars,
And learned this song of vanished hands and hair.

Who knows what golden story first gave birth
To this old music that is heavy-sweet
With gardens long forgotten of the earth,
With passion that was silver wings and feet,
To cross the silent centuries and be heard,
Calling again in this dream-troubled bird!

DAWN

The thousand muffled noises of the dawn:
The drowsy stir of birds, surprised from sleep,
The faint applause of leaves above the lawn,
The bleat, far off, of closely-cabined sheep,—
Are like dim perfumes blowing down the stairs,
All sweetly prescient of the coming day,—
And less like sounds, than little tender airs
Gone softly shod and happily astray.

The later sleepers, where the garden lies,
Such heavy-lidded ladies as the rose,
Hear the soft tumult with a dim surprise,
There, where an early wind as roundsman goes,
To rouse each languid, over-sleepy head,
And shame them that they lie so long abed.

DAFFODILS OVER NIGHT

(A Short Tale for Children)

I think the ghost of Leerie
Came by with ghostly tread,
And little lighted tapers,
When we had gone to bed,—
Past gravel-walk and garden,
As he was wont to go,
And lit these yellow lanterns,
Burning where thy blow.

VALUES

It moves my heart but little to suppose
That planted men, like planted seed, shall rise,
That faulty dust re-blossoms as the rose,
In new perfections for more perfect skies;
Nor should I greatly care if one who knew
Should tell that out beyond the Grievous Gate,
The sleepy country that we travel to,
Has never any waking, soon or late.

But what if I should hear a prophet say:
Next year will bring no robins round the door,
And April will not have her ancient way,
The hedge will bear no blossoms any more,
The earth will not be green for living men,—
For Spring will not pass by this way again!...

A GHOST OUT OF STRATFORD

For all the crowd that packed the house to-night,
Marked you the vacant seat none came to claim,...
The fourth row from the front, and to the right?...
Vacant, I call it now.... But I could name
A thing that happened when the lights were off,
Of one who walked in buckles down the aisle,
Wearing a great hat that he scorned to doff,
And richly kerchiefed, wrist and neck in style.

Once in the play—I swear it—once I heard,
Along the tumult of our loud applause,
A sly and ghostly chuckle at a word
That Falstaff mouthed with those outrageous jaws ...
I think he liked the play ... and stayed, no doubt,
Long after us, and lingered going out.

WHO WALKS WITH BEAUTY

Who walks with Beauty has no need of fear:
The sun and moon and stars keep pace with him;
Invisible hands restore the ruined year,
And time itself grows beautifully dim.
One hill will keep the footprints of the moon
That came and went a hushed and secret hour;
One star at dusk will yield the lasting boon:
Remembered beauty's white, immortal flower.

Who takes of Beauty wine and daily bread,
Will know no lack when bitter years are lean;
The brimming cup is by, the feast is spread;
The sun and moon and stars his eyes have seen,
Are for his hunger and the thirst he slakes:
The wine of Beauty and the bread he breaks.

RACONTEUR

The Earth remembers many, many things,
Kept of her pride, a rich and ancient lore,—
The fading footprints of her transient Springs,
Her nameless cities, and the stones they wore.
Anointed shrines that men had perished for,
And women who were music for their times,
These, and the world's long iliads of war,
Will haunt her heart like dear, remembered rhymes.