English

I love thee, dear, and knowing mine own heart
With every beat I give God thanks for this;
I love thee only for the self thou art;
No wild embrace, no wisdom-shaking kiss,
No passionate pleading of a heart laid bare,
No urgent cry of love's extremity—
Strong traps to take the spirit unaware—
Not one of these I ever had of thee.
Neither of passion nor of pity wrought
Is this, the love to which at last I yield,
But shapen in the stillness of my thought
And by a birth of agony revealed.
Here is a thing to live while we do live

A woman poor and a peeress proud,
A dingy room and a crushing crowd,
The gloom of death and grave and shroud,
A stifled cry and a sob, aloud.

A heart has heard and an eye has read;
A soul has writhed, and a lowered head
Is bowed, and a trembling tongue has said:
“My God! My God! And he is dead!”

A wail, a sob, and a bitter cry;
An anguished tear in a woman's eye;
A peeress' face where agony
Is carved, and a mutely murmured “Why?”

A woman stares and a peeress starts.
Without, the din of traffic's marts

‘Under which king?’ you ask, my friend.
‘The Hermit of the Suffolk shore?—
The Tent-maker of Naishápúr?—
Omar , Fitz Gerald —which?’ Perpend.

The great Corneille , when pressed of yore,
To judge two sonnets, answered thus:—
‘One, in its way, is marvellous;
And yet—I like the other more.’

This is my case betwixt your twain.
But if you further question why
I sit in this brave company,
I will—with your good leave—explain.

Life is a toilsome thing at best:
We all too-heavy burdens bear,

Youth gave you to me, but I'll not believe
That Youth will, taking his quick self, take you.
Youth's all our Truth: he cannot so deceive.
He has our graces, not our ownselves too.
He still compares with time when he'll be spent,
By human doom enhancing what we are;
Enriches us with rare experiment,
Lends arms to leagured Age in Time's rough war.

Look! This Youth in us is an Old Man taking
A Boy to make him wiser than his days.
So is our old Youth our young Age's making:
So rich in time our final debt he pays.

Why do you speak of “hypocritic days”?
Are days dissembling then, prone to deceit,
And given o'er to falsely cunning ways
That threaten mischief when they seem most sweet?

For once, my best loved Poet, do you seem
To me to stumble in your path of light—
The days indulge no hypocritic dream
To lure mankind from peace to depths of night.

'Tis we, not they, who make them what they are.
They come to us of guile and pretence free:
Clean, clear, and spotless on the calendar,
God's Messengers of Opportunity!

In all humility sacrifices are made to the east
Banana leaves filled with good food to atone for our sins
Are offered to the grieved souls making their way upstream
Hearkening to the endless sadness and prayers
The wooden mortar carved and polished out of ancient wood
shakes and rolls
Sonorous exhortations shake the mountains and the sea
The dark night, like a giant python, devours
Love and hate, kindness and enmity, increase and destruction
The sacrificial song, weeping and plaintive,
penetrates the cracks of time and space

The way was black,
The night was mad with lightning; I bestrode
My wild young colt, upon a mountain road.
And, crunching onward, like a monster's jaws,
His ringing hoof-beats their glad rhythm kept,
Breaking the glassy surface of the pools,
Where hidden waters slept.
A million buzzing insects in the air
On droning wing made sullen discord there.

But suddenly, afar, beyond the wood,
Beyond the dark pall of my brooding thought,
I saw lights cluster like a swarm of wasps
Among the branches caught.

Henry Schwartz was an expert watch-repairer.
You could see him in the window of the Sixth Avenue shop any day;
And day and every day.
He'd been hard at it since 1899.
This spring his daughter, who lives in Arizona, induced him to visit her for a week.
Among the week's excursions was a trip to the Grand Canyon.
Schwartz thought it was all right but nothing to rave about—
When you saw one piece of scenery you saw them all.
The day he got back to the shop a man brought in a watch to be repaired.

Pure at heart we wander now:
Comrade on the quest divine,
Turn not from the stars your brow
That your eyes may rest on mine.

Pure at heart we wander now:
We have hopes beyond to-day;
And our quest does not allow
Rest or dreams along the way.

We are, in our distant hope,
One with all the great and wise:
Comrade, do not turn or grope
For some lesser light that dies.

We must rise or we must fall:
Love can know no middle way:
If the great life do not call,
Then is sadness and decay.

The street is deserted, the night is cold,
The moon glides veiled amid cloud-banks dun;
The lattice above is tightly closed,
And the notes ring clearly one by one
Under his fingers light and strong,
While the voice that sings tells tender things,
As the player strikes on his sweet guitar
The fragile strings.

The street is deserted, the night is cold,
A cloud has covered the moon from sight.
The lattice above is tightly closed,
And the notes are growing more soft and light.
Perhaps the sound of the serenade