The Lovely Husband

Oh a lovely husband he was known, He loved his wife and
her alone; She reaped the harvest he had sown; She ate the meat; he
picked the bone. With mixed admirers ev'ry size, She smiled on each with
out disguise; This lovely husband closed his eyes Lest he might take her

CHORUS.

by surprise. Trot! Run! Wasn't he a handy hubby?
What Fun She could plot and plan! Not One
Other such a dandy hubby As this lovely man!

II

He answered at her least command:

War Poet

I know that honour is
Because I follow it.
I know that love is
My heart does cry for it.

The sun? I dare not watch.
The stars? I was night-walker:
My friends in the high arch —
By Cranham or high Crickley.

They hurt like unsought kisses
From a love one dare
Not love — they are the water-hisses
From a cooled iron, red-bare.

Greatness? I have sailed
A boat in March daring . . .
And made a music, called
All March to my caring

Whether I made well
Or no — and Vermand knows

When I Am Covered

When I am covered with the dust of peace
And but the rain to moist my senseless clay,
Will there be one regret left in that ill ease

One sentimental fib of light and day —
A grief for hillside and the beaten trees?
Better to leave them, utterly to go away.

When every tiny pang of love is counterpiece
To shadowed woe of huge weight and the stay
For yet another torment ere release

Better to lie and be forgotten aye.
In death his rose-leaves never is a crease.
Rest squares reckonings love set awry.

The Last Question

New love, new love, where are you to lead me?
All along a narrow way that marks a crooked line.
How are you to slake me, and how are you to feed me?
With bitter yellow berries, and a sharp new wine.

New love, new love, shall I be forsaken?
One shall go a-wandering, and one of us must sigh.
Sweet it is to slumber, but how shall we awaken —
Whose will be the broken heart, when dawn comes by?

Pictures in the Smoke

Oh, gallant was the first love, and glittering and fine;
The second love was water, in a clear white cup;
The third love was his, and the fourth was mine;
And after that, I always get them all mixed up.

When Love Becomes Words

The yet undone, become the unwritten
By the activity of others
And the immobile pen of ourselves
Lifted, in postponed readiness,
Over the yet unsmooth paper of time—
Themes of the writing-table now,
All those implicit projects
By our minds rescued from enactment,
That lost literature which only death reads.

And we expect works of one another
Of exceeding not so much loveliness
Or fame among our physical sighs
As quietness, eventful
Not beyond thought, which moves unstrangely,

The Need to Confide

The need to confide
Which Christ had
And every bird to bird
Though secretless their frantic code —

Shall I like meteor speed?
Flared martyr to companionhood
Streaking towards some Siberia of love,
There to fall stony, for the books to say:
" These homeless stars upon arrival turn
Instantly cool, are earth.
The danger to ourselves is less than theirs
Of fierce extinguishment
Before precipitant despair
Gains grave among us.
Seldom in daily midst the fevered bolt
Seeks catastrophic bosoming.

Meanwhile

Equally dismal rain and sunshine—
If the hours are hours of waiting
To say for certain: you, and I.
Happily there is this sure we,
Happily there is this love,
This chosen ambiguity,
Until the weather knows its mind.

Meanwhile this to-day,
To succeed never beyond the weather—
Until it climates death,
That double clarity
Of difference.

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