Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

705

[blocks in formation]

FROM "TALIESIN: A MASQUE"

Voices of Unseen Spirits

HERE falls no light of sun nor stars;
No stir nor striving here intrudes;
No moan nor merry-making mars
The quiet of these solitudes.

Submerged in sleep, the passive soul
Is one with all the things that seem;
Night blurs in one confused whole
Alike the dreamer and the dream.

O dwellers in the busy town!

For dreams you smile, for dreams you

weep.

Come out, and lay your burdens down!
Come out; there is no God but Sleep.

Sleep, and renounce the vital day;
For evil is the child of life.
Let be the will to live, and pray
To find forgetfulness of strife.

Beneath the thicket of these leaves

No light discriminates each from each. No Self that wrongs, no Self that grieves, Hath longer deed nor creed nor speech.

Sleep on the mighty Mother's breast !
Sleep, and no more be separate !
Then, one with Nature's ageless rest,
There shall be no more sin to hate.

Taliesin

Spirits of Sleep,

That swell and sink

In the sea of Being Like waves on the deep, Forming, crumbling, Fumbling, and tumbling Forever, unseeing, From brink to brink!

Perishing voices,

That call and call

From the coves of dream

With hollow noises!
I hear the sweep
Of the tides of sleep,
The ocean stream
Where the ages fall.

[blocks in formation]
[blocks in formation]

Mark A. De Wolfe Howe

THE TRAVELLERS

Whate'er the heavens unfold of knowledge

And follow through the stranger's secret

infinite."

THEY made them ready and we saw them Each after each then shall we rise,

[blocks in formation]

sight.

'T were idle waiting for his own return

gate,

And we shall ask and hear, beyond sur
mise,

What glorious life is his, since desolate
We stood about the bed

Where our blind eyes looked down on him

as dead.

[blocks in formation]

"WHOM THE GODS LOVE"

"WHOM the gods love die young;"-if
gods ye be,
Then generously might ye have spared

to us

That ne'er shall be; face the perpetual light, One from your vast unnumbered overplus, One youth we loved as tenderly as ye.

And with him learn

Madison Cawein

PROEM

THERE is no rhyme that is half so sweet
As the song of the wind in the rippling

wheat;

There is no metre that's half so fine

As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;
And the loveliest lyric I ever heard
Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird. -

If the wind and the brook and the bird

would teach

My heart their beautiful parts of speech,

[blocks in formation]

And the natural art that they say these In her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound,

[blocks in formation]

O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed
To thee? when no plumed weed, no fes-

ther'd seed

Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond,

That gleams like flint between its rim of grasses,

Through which the dragonfly forever passes

Like splintered diamond.

[blocks in formation]

Limp with the heat - a league of rutty

way

Is lost in dust; and sultry scents of hay

Breathe from the panting meadows heaped with sheaves.

Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of
rain,

In thirsty heaven or on burning plain,
That thy keen eye perceives ?

But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true.
For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecast-
ing,

When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue,

Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring

Brimming with freshness. How their
dippers ring

And flash and rumble ! lavishing dark dew
On corn and forestland, that, streaming

wet,

Their hilly backs against the downpour

set,

Like giants vague in view.

The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower,
Has found a roof, knowing how true thou

art;

The bumble-bee, within the last half-hour, Has ceased to While in hug the honey to its heart; cart, Brood-hens have housed. scorned thy power,

the barnyard, under shed and

there,

But I, who

Barometer of the birds, - like August Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair,

Like some drenched truant, cower.

[blocks in formation]

So may I rise to some fair eminence, Though less than thine, O cousin of the skies.

Teach me these things, through whose high knowledge, I,

When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins,

And brought me home, as all are brought,
to lie

In that vast house, common to serfs and
Thanes,

I shall not die, I shall not utterly die,
For beauty born of beauty-that remains.

DEATH

THROUGH some strange sense of sight or
I find what all have found before,
touch
The unknown's immaterial door.
The presence I have feared so much,

I seek not and it comes to me;
I do not know the thing I find:
The fillet of fatality

Drops from my brows that made me
blind.

Point forward now or backward, light!
The way I take I may not choose:
Out of the night into the night,
And in the night no certain clews.

But on the future, dim and vast,

And dark with dust and sacrifice,
Death's towering ruin from the past
Makes black the land that round
lies.

me

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »