English

In the corner she's left the mechanical toy,
On the chair is her Teddy Bear fine;
The things that I thought she would really enjoy
Don't seem to be quite in her line.
There's the flaxen-haired doll that is lovely to see
And really expensively dressed,
Left alone, all uncared for, and strange though it be,
She likes her rag dolly the best.

Oh, the money we spent and the plans that we laid
And the wonderful things that we bought!
There are toys that are cunningly, skillfully made,
But she seems not to give them a thought.

Courage isn't a brilliant dash,
A daring deed in a moment's flash;
It isn't an instantaneous thing
Born of despair with a sudden spring
It isn't a creature of flickered hope
Or the final tug at a slipping rope;
But it's something deep in the soul of man
That is working always to serve some plan.

Courage isn't the last resort
In the work of life or the game of sport;
It isn't a thing that a man can call
At some future time when he's apt to fall;
If he hasn't it now, he will have it not

Once only by the garden gate
Our lips we joined and parted.
I must fulfil an empty fate
And travel the uncharted.

Hail and farewell! I must arise,
Leave here the fatted cattle,
And paint on foreign lands and skies
My Odyssey of battle.

The untented Kosmos my abode,
I pass, a wilful stranger:
My mistress still the open road
And the bright eyes of danger.

Come ill or well, the cross, the crown,
The rainbow or the thunder,
I fling my soul and body down
For God to plough them under.

Lo I, the man who from the Muse did ask
Her deepest notes to swell the Patriot's meeds,
Am now enforced, a far unfitter task,
For cap and gown to leave my minstrel weeds;
For yon dull tone, that tinkles on the air,
Bids me lay by the lyre and go to morning prayer.

O how I hate the sound! it is the knell
That still a requiem tolls to Comfort's hour;
And loath am I, at Superstition's bell,
To quit or Morpheus' or the Muse's bower:
Better to lie and doze, than gape amain,

He only glanced in passing,
The lad with amber eyes
Who met us high on Hareshaw
Just as we topped the rise.

We climbed the hill together,
We two, so newly one:
But down into the valley
We travelled, each alone.

The buzzer awakes me, and shortly I hear
The three-o'clock shift down the road come clattering;
The noise of their tackety boots ringing clear
On the frozen metal, and young lads chattering,
And whistling and singing, as they go by,
To the undimmed stars of the icy sky.

They pass the house; and I turn in my bed
To slumber again; but the tacketies clattering
Still rings in my brain, and still in my head,
The singing of youth and the whistling and chattering—
Of youth that whistles and sings for a bit

Never must my bones be laid
Under the mimosa's shade.
He to whom I gave my all
Swept away her guardian wall,
And her green and level plot
Green or level now is not.

Sharp crocus wakes the froward year;
In their old haunts birds reappear;
From yonder elm, yet black with rain,
The cushat looks deep down for grain
Thrown on the gravel-walk; here comes
The redbreast to the sill for crumbs.
Fly off! fly off! I can not wait
To welcome ye, as she of late
The earliest of my friends is gone.
Alas! almost my only one!
The few as dear, long wafted o'er,
Await me on a sunnier shore.

He who sits thoughtful in a twilight grot
Sees what in sunshine other men see not.
I walk away from what they run to see,
I know the world, but the world knows not me.

Taking us by and large, we're a queer lot
We women who write poetry. And when you think
How few of us there've been, it's queerer still.
I wonder what it is that makes us do it,
Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise,
The fragments of ourselves. Why are we
Already mother-creatures, double-bearing,
With matrices in body and in brain?
I rather think that there is just the reason
We are so sparse a kind of human being;
The strength of forty thousand Atlases
Is needed for our every-day concerns.