Short Poems

To such extremes were I and Bet
Perpetually driven,
We quarrell'd every time we met,
To kiss, and be forgiven.

How fairly Fortune all her gifts imparts;
We win your money, Ann, and you our hearts.

I look'd the fragrant garden round
For what I thought would picture best
Thy beauty and thy modesty;
A lily and a rose I found,—
With kisses on their leaves imprest,
I send the beauteous pair to thee.

Make us, O God! in whom we breathe, and move,
Worthy to love Thee, and to win thy love!
Thy word informs us how thy love is won,
By grateful trust in thy beloved Son!
Through every season may such trust encrease!
We know it duty, and we feel it peace.

If I should lay
My soul right bare,
You would shrink away,
And shudder and stare,
And cry, “in the whole
Wide world naught cures
Such a putrid soul”—
How about yours?

A blight, a gloom, I know not what, has crept upon my gladness—
Some vague, remote ancestral touch of sorrow, or of madness;
A fear that is not fear, a pain that has not pain's insistence;
A sense of longing, or of loss, in some foregone existence;
A subtle hurt that never pen has writ nor tongue has spoken—
Such hurt perchance as Nature feels when a blossomed bough is broken.

Stay the April winds from calling
And the Autumn leaves from falling.
Stay the angry billow's roll—
Or the yearnings of the soul.
When thou'st made these things to be,
I will cease from loving thee.

Though we may seem importunate,
While your compassion we implore;
They whom you make too fortunate,
May with presumption vex you more.

Green thoughts are
Ice block on a barrow
Gleaming in July.
A little boy with bare feet
And jewels at his nose stands by.

While she pretends to make the graces known
Of matchless Mira, she reveals her own;
And when she would another's praise indite,
Is by her glass instructed how to write.