Happy Ending: The Collected Lyrics of Louise Imogen Guiney

G.F. Watts, pinx. Hollyer, Photo.
The Collected Lyrics of Louise Imogen Guiney
TOUT BIEN OU RIEN
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON AND NEW YORK: 1909
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published December 1909
TO ANNE WHITNEY
This volume has been garnered from the author's earlier books. Two poems have been chosen from The White Sail (1887); nine Oxford Sonnets from a privately printed booklet (1895), since added to, and much altered; and many lyrics, under a revised form, from A Roadside Harp (1893), and The Martyrs' Idyl (1899), plus some twenty newer titles transferred, with grateful acknowledgments, from McClure's Magazine , The Atlantic , Harper's , Scribner's , and The Century . The principle of exclusion goes far enough to cover all poems in narrative form, or of any appreciable length, or translated; also, any which seemed out of keeping with the character of the present collection. Such as that is, it comprises the less faulty half of all the author's published verse.
L.I.G.
Boston, October 21, 1909.


A man said unto his Angel: My spirits are fallen low, And I cannot carry this battle: O brother! where might I go? The terrible Kings are on me With spears that are deadly bright; Against me so from the cradle Do fate and my fathers fight. Then said to the man his Angel: Thou wavering witless soul, Back to the ranks! What matter To win or to lose the whole, As judged by the little judges Who hearken not well, nor see? Not thus, by the outer issue, The Wise shall interpret thee. Thy will is the sovereign measure And only event of things: The puniest heart, defying, Were stronger than all these Kings. Though out of the past they gather, Mind's Doubt, and Bodily Pain, And pallid Thirst of the Spirit That is kin to the other twain, And Grief, in a cloud of banners, And ringletted Vain Desires, And Vice, with the spoils upon him Of thee and thy beaten sires,— While Kings of eternal evil Yet darken the hills about, Thy part is with broken sabre To rise on the last redoubt; To fear not sensible failure, Nor covet the game at all, But fighting, fighting, fighting, Die, driven against the wall.