With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.
How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!
Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!

To the tune of "Rinsing Silk Stream"

Let not the deep cup be filled
with rich, amber-colored wine;
My mind was eased of sorrow
even before I was drunk.
Distant bells have already echoed
in the evening breeze.

My dream is broken
as the scent of incense vanishes.
Too small, the hairpin of the gold
of warding-off-cold
loosens its hold of my tresses.

I awake to find myself blankly facing
the red flickering glow
of the candle.

To the tune of "Like a Dream"

I always remember the sunset
over the pavilion by the river,
so tipsy we could not find our way home.

Our interest exhausted, the evening late,
we tried to turn the boat homeward.
By mistake, we entered deep within the lotus bed.

Row! Row the boat!

A flock of herons, frightened,
suddenly flew skyward.

To the tune of "Like a Dream"

Last night a sprinkling of rain,
a violent wind.

After a deep sleep, still not recovered
from the lingering effect of wine,
I inquired of the one rolling up the screen;
But the answer came: "The cherry-apple blossoms
are still the same."

"Oh, don't you know, don't you know?
The red must be getting thin,
while the green is becoming plump."

To the tune "As in a Dream"

I have long remembered
the pavilion
on the stream
the falling sun
so deep in wine
we did not know
the way home
how pleasure spent
late returning
the skiff
thoughtless
entered
a lotus deep place
and struggling through
struggling through
we scared up
from the sand
gulls and herons.

To the tune of "Rinsing Silk Stream"

Thousands of light flakes of crushed gold
for its blossoms,
Trimmed jade for its layers of leaves.
This flower has the air of scholar Yen Fu.
How brilliant!

Plum flowers are too common;
Lilacs too coarse when compared.
Yet, its penetrating fragrance
drives away my fond dreams
of far away places.
How merciless!

The woman he loved, while he dreamed of her,
Danced on till the stars grew dim,
But alone with her heart, from the world apart
Sat the woman who loved him.

The woman he worshipped only smiled
When he poured out his passionate love.
But the other somewhere, kissed her treasure most rare,
A book he had touched with his glove.

The woman he loved betrayed his trust,
And he wore the scars for life;
And he cared not, nor knew, that the other was true;
But no man called her his wife.

For years we've had a little dog,
Last year we acquired a big dog;
He wasn't big when we got him,
He was littler than the dog we had.
We thought our little dog would love him,
Would help him to become a trig dog,
But the new little dog got bigger,
And the old little dog got mad.

Now the big dog loves the little dog,
But the little dog hates the big dog,
The little dog is eleven years old,
And the big dog only one;
The little dog calls him Schweinhund,
The little dog calls him Pig-dog,
She grumbles broken curses

When she came out, that white little Russian dancer,
With her bright hair, and her eyes, so young, so young,
He suddenly lost his leader, and all the players,
And only heard an immortal music sung,--

Of dryads flashing in the green woods of April,
On cobwebs trembing over the deep, wet grass:
Fleeing their shadows with laughter, with hands uplifted,
Through the whirled sinister sun he saw them pass,--

Lovely immortals gone, yet existing somewhere,
Still somewhere laughing in woods of immortal green,

An age being mathematical, these flowers
Of linear stalks and spheroid blooms were prized
By men with wakened, speculative minds,
And when with mathematics they explored
The Macrocosm, and came at last to
The Vital Spirit of the World, and named it
Invisible Pure Fire, or, say, the Light,
The Tulips were the Light's receptacles.
The gold, the bronze, the red, the bright-swart Tulips!
No emblems they for us who no more dream
Of mathematics burgeoning to light
With Newton's prism and Spinoza's lens,