world

There's a brave little berry-brown man
At the opposite side of the earth;
Of the White, and the Black, and the Tan,
He's the smallest in compass and girth.
O! he's little, and lively, and Tan,
And he's showing the world what he's worth.
For his nation is born, and its birth
Is for hardihood, courage, and sand,
So you take off your cap
To the brave little Jap
Who fights for Chrysanthemum Land.

Near the house that the little man keeps,
There's a Bug-a-boo building its lair;

I SUPPOSE it just depends on where you’re raised,
Once I met a cove as swore by green belar!
Couldn’t sight the good old mallee-stump I praised;
Well!—I couldn’t sight belar, and there you are!
But the faces in the fire where the mallee stump’s a-blinking
Are the friendliest I ever seen, to my way o’ thinking!

In the city where the fires is mostly coal—
There! I can’t a-bear to go and warm my feet!
Spitting, fizzing things as hasn’t got no soul!

Of sentences that stir my bile,
Of phrases I detest,
There's one beyond all others vile;
"He did it for the best."

Of course he did: I don't suppose,
Nor can you think I should,
The man's among my deadliest foes,
Or is not fairly good.

Of course he did it for the best:
What should he do it for?
But did he do it? that's the test:
I ask to know no more.

Alas! he did: and here am I,
Quite ruined, half disgraced;
And you can really ask me why
My wrath is not effaced:

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view

The clouds fast gather,
The forest-oaks roar--
A maiden is sitting
Beside the green shore,--
The billows are breaking with might, with might,
And she sighs aloud in the darkling night,
Her eyelid heavy with weeping.

"My heart's dead within me,
The world is a void;
To the wish it gives nothing,
Each hope is destroyed.
I have tasted the fulness of bliss below
I have lived, I have loved,--Thy child, oh take now,

Humanity's bright image to impair.
Scorn laid thee prostrate in the deepest dust;
Wit wages ceaseless war on all that's fair,--
In angel and in God it puts no trust;
The bosom's treasures it would make its prey,--
Besieges fancy,--dims e'en faith's pure ray.

Yet issuing like thyself from humble line,
Like thee a gentle shepherdess is she--
Sweet poesy affords her rights divine,
And to the stars eternal soars with thee.
Around thy brow a glory she hath thrown;
The heart 'twas formed thee,--ever thou'lt live on!

O yonge fresshe folkes, he or she,
In which that love up groweth with your age,
Repeyreth hoom from worldly vanitee,
And of your herte up-casteth the visage
To thilke god that after his image
Yow made, and thinketh al nis but a fayre
This world, that passeth sone as floures fayre.

And loveth him, the which that right for love
Upon a cros, our soules for to beye,
First starf, and roos, and sit in hevene a-bove;
For he nil falsen no wight, dar I seye,
That wol his herte al hoolly on him leye.

It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.

I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.

But the knock came again
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.

Back over the sill
I bade a "Come in"
To whoever the knock
At the door may have been.

So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.

Doleful was the land,
Dull on, every side,
Neither soft n'or grand,
Barren, bleak, and wide;
Nothing look'd with love;
All was dingy brown;
The very skies above
Seem'd to sulk and frown.

Plodding sick and sad,
Weary day on day;
Searching, never glad,
Many a miry way;
Poor existence lagg'd
In this barren place;
While the seasons dragg'd
Slowly o'er its face.

Spring, to sky and ground,
Came before I guess'd;
Then one day I found

He wakes, who never thought to wake again,
Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes
Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain
Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens.
He lies;
And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise
Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,
Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,
Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;
An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck
Of moveless horror; an Immortal One
Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly