Short Poems

No friends, oh! let me meet no friends
When I am gazing at the flowers!

With joy Britannia sees her fav'rite goose
Fast bound and pinioned in the nuptial noose;
Presaging fondly from so fair a mate
A brood of goslings, cackling in debate.

Did you have a yesterday—
Do you look for a tomorrow?
Curious, you exist for me
Only in the infectious sorrow
Of your passing. Unyesterdayed,
Untomorrowed, you pass by,
And in the lingering tragedy
Of a moment, live and die.

Some thirty miles from Megalopolis,
Miles also from the shrieking griding rail,
On a high road where once the four-horse mail
Flashed gaily past—so placed my cottage is:
Roars merrily now the wind tall limes between,
Which guard my quiet lawn, a triangle scalene.

Rome's brilliant rascal-epigrammatist
Preferred his Spanish gardens. Likewise I,
Having found my Princess 'neath a grayer sky,
Think England's sunshine, windy rain, white mist,
Turf like the emerald, touched with crocus-fire,
Lovelier than that Greek dream, whose calm would surely tire.

Delicious dream! What if Nausikaa came—
The white-armed delicate-ankled Princess who
To the river led her maiden retinue
And found the Hero—saying, with virgin shame
On royal cheek, ‘O stranger from the sea,
Rest from thy wandering! Take these: take also me.’

Immortal gardens of the island King,
Set in bright æther of the Odyssey,
With bloom and fruitage on the self-same tree,
Scaturient fountains always murmuring
Through odorous cyclamen and hyacinth,
While roses flush around the marble palace-plinth.

Dew on the lawns, and fragrance of fresh flowers,
And magical song of mellow-throated birds—
A beauty untransmutable to words:
Such is the vision of the morning hours;
When fade the urns of night in saffron skies,
And light and love return to young dream-haunted eyes,

O the precipitous cliffs, the amber sand,
The drowsy valleys musical with brooks,
Asphodel glimmering in shadowy nooks,
Far slopes of virgin turf where oak trees stand
Which in forgotten cycles Rhaicos knew
Ere her maimed messenger to the Hamadryad flew.

Master, amid the turmoil and the strife,
How shall my spirit calm and trustful be?
Thus only, if the fountains of my life
Are hidden in Humanity with thee.