FROM "TALIESIN: A MASQUE" Voices of Unseen Spirits HERE falls no light of sun nor stars; Submerged in sleep, the passive soul O dwellers in the busy town! For dreams you smile, for dreams you weep. Come out, and lay your burdens down! Sleep, and renounce the vital day; 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 ! 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! 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, sight. 'T were idle waiting for his own return gate, And we shall ask and hear, beyond sur What glorious life is his, since desolate Where our blind eyes looked down on him as dead. "WHOM THE GODS LOVE" "WHOM the gods love die young;"-if 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 wheat; There is no metre that's half so fine As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine; If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach My heart their beautiful parts of speech, And the natural art that they say these In her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound, O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed 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. 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 In thirsty heaven or on burning plain, But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true. When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue, Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring Brimming with freshness. How their And flash and rumble ! lavishing dark dew wet, Their hilly backs against the downpour set, Like giants vague in view. The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower, 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. 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, In that vast house, common to serfs and I shall not die, I shall not utterly die, DEATH THROUGH some strange sense of sight or I seek not and it comes to me; Drops from my brows that made me Point forward now or backward, light! But on the future, dim and vast, And dark with dust and sacrifice, me |