Complete Poems and Plays (104 page)

If space and time, as sages say,

Are things that cannot be,

The fly that lives a single day

Has lived as long as we.

But let us live while yet we may,

While love and life are free,

For time is time, and runs away,

Though sages disagree.

The flowers I sent thee when the dew

Was trembling on the vine

Were withered ere the wild bee flew

To suck the eglantine.

But let us haste to pluck anew

Nor mourn to see them pine,

And though the flowers of life be few

Yet let them be divine.

Standing upon the shore of all we know

We linger for a moment doubtfully,

Then with a song upon our lips, sail we

Across the harbor bar — no chart to show

No light to warn of rocks which lie below,

But let us yet put forth courageously.

As colonists embarking from the strand

To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore

Well know they lose what time shall not restore,

And when they leave they fully understand

That though again they see their fatherland

They there shall be as citizens no more.

We go; as lightning-winged clouds that fly

After a summer tempest, when some haste

North, South, and Eastward o’er the water’s waste‚

Some to the western limits of the sky

Which the sun stains with many a splendid dye,

Until their passing may no more be traced.

Although the path be tortuous and slow,

Although it bristle with a thousand fears,

To hopeful eye of youth it still appears

A lane by which the rose and hawthorn grow.

We hope it may be; would that we might know!

Would we might look into the future years.

Great duties call — the twentieth century

More grandly dowered than those which came before,

Summons — who knows what time may hold in store‚

Or what great deeds the distant years may see,

What conquest over pain and misery‚

What heroes greater than were e’er of yore!

But if this century is to be more great

Than those before, her sons must make her so,

And we are of her sons, and we must go

With eager hearts to help mold well her fate,

And see that she shall gain such proud estate

As shall on future centuries bestow

A legacy of benefits — may we

In future years be found with those who try

To labor for the good until they die,

And ask no other guerdon than to know

That they have helpt the cause to victory,

That with their aid the flag is raised on high.

Sometime in distant years when we are grown

Gray-haired and old, whatever be our lot‚

We shall desire to see again the spot

Which, whatsoever we have been or done

Or to what distant lands we may have gone,

Through all the years will ne’er have been forgot.

For in the sanctuaries of the soul

Incense of altar-smoke shall rise to thee

From spotless fanes of lucid purity,

O school of ours! The passing years that roll

Between, as we press onward to the goal,

Shall not have power to quench the memory.

We shall return; and it will be to find

A different school from that which now we know;

But only in appearance t’will be so.

That which has made it great, not left behind,

The same school in the future shall we find

As this from which as pupils now we go.

We go; like flitting faces in a dream;

Out of thy care and tutelage we pass

Into the unknown world — class after class,

O queen of schools — a momentary gleam,

A bubble on the surface of the stream,

A drop of dew upon the morning grass;

Thou dost not die — for each succeeding year

Thy honor and thy fame shall but increase

Forever, and may stronger words than these

Proclaim the glory so that all may hear;

May worthier sons be thine, from far and near

To spread thy name o’er distant lands and seas!

As thou to thy departing sons hast been

To those that follow may’st thou be no less;

A guide to warn them, and a friend to bless

Before they leave thy care for lands unseen;

And let thy motto be, proud and serene‚

Still as the years pass by, the word ‘Progress!’

So we are done; we may no more delay;

Thus is the end of every tale: ‘Farewell’,

A word that echoes like a funeral bell

And one that we are ever loth to say.

But ’tis a call we cannot disobey,

Exeunt
omnes
‚
with a last ‘farewell’.

When we came home across the hill

No leaves were fallen from the trees;

The gentle fingers of the breeze

Had torn no quivering cobweb down.

The hedgerow bloomed with flowers still,

No withered petals lay beneath;

But the wild roses in your wreath

Were faded, and the leaves were brown.

While all the East was weaving red with gray,

The flowers at the window turned toward dawn,

Petal on petal, waiting for the day,

Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn.

This morning’s flowers and flowers of yesterday

Their fragrance drifts across the room at dawn,

Fragrance of bloom and fragrance of decay,

Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn.

Around her fountain which flows

With the voice of men in pain‚

Are flowers that no man knows.

Their petals are fanged and red

With hideous streak and stain;

They sprang from the limbs of the dead. —

We shall not come here again.

Panthers rise from their lairs

In the forest which thickens below,

Along the garden stairs

The sluggish python lies;

The peacocks walk, stately and slow,

And they look at us with the eyes

Of men whom we knew long ago.

Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown

To us of restless brain and weary feet,

Forever hurrying, up and down the street,

She stands at evening in the room alone.

Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone

But evanescent, as if one should meet

A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat,

An immaterial fancy of one’s own.

No meditations glad or ominous

Disturb her lips, or move the slender hands;

Her dark eyes keep their secrets hid from us,

Beyond the circle of our thought she stands.

The parrot on his bar, a silent spy,

Regards her with a patient curious eye.

The moonflower opens to the moth,

The mist crawls in from sea;

A great white bird, a snowy owl,

Slips from the alder tree.

Whiter the flowers, Love, you hold,

Than the white mist on the sea;

Have you no brighter tropic flowers

With scarlet life, for me?

Romeo,
grand
sérieux,
to importune

Guitar and hat in hand, beside the gate

With Juliet, in the usual debate

Of love, beneath a bored but courteous moon;

The conversation failing, strikes some tune

Banal, and out of pity for their fate

Behind the wall I have some servant wait,

Stab, and the lady sinks into a swoon.

Blood looks effective on the moonlit ground —

The hero smiles; in my best mode oblique

Rolls toward the moon a frenzied eye profound,

(No need of ‘Love forever?’ — ‘Love next week?’)

While female readers all in tears are drowned: —

‘The perfect climax all true lovers seek!’

One of my marionettes is dead,

Though not yet tired of the game —

But weak in body as in head,

(A jumping-jack has such a frame).

But this deceasèd marionette

I rather liked: a common face,

(The kind of face that we forget)

Pinched in a comic, dull grimace;

Half bullying, half imploring air,

Mouth twisted to the latest tune;

His who-the-devil-are-you stare;

Translated, maybe, to the moon.

With Limbo’s other useless things

Haranguing spectres, set him there;

‘The snappiest fashion since last spring’s,

‘The newest style, on Earth, I swear.

‘Why don’t you people get some class?

(Feebly contemptuous of nose),

‘Your damned thin moonlight, worse than gas —

‘Now in New York’ — and so it goes.

Logic a marionette’s, all wrong

Of premises; yet in some star

A hero! — Where would he belong?

But, even at that, what mask
bizarre!