III.
Our songs should be of faith without stain,
Of haughty honour and deaths that sow
The seeds of life on the battle-plain,
Of loves unsullied and eyes that show
The fair white soul in the deeps below.
Where are they, these that our songs await,
To wake to joyance? Doth any know?
Songs and singers are out of date.
IV.
What have we done with meadow and lane?
Where are the flowers and the hawthorn snow?
Acres of brick in the pitiless rain,——
These are our gardens for thorpe and stow!
Summer has left us long ago,
Gone to the lands where the turtles mate
And the crickets chirp in the wild rose row;
Songs and singers are out of date.
V.
We sit and sing to a world in pain,
Our heartstrings quiver sadly and slow;
But, aye and anon, the murmurous strain
Swells up to a clangour of strife and throe,
And the folks that hearken, or friend or foe,
Are ware that the stress of the time is great
And say to themselves, as they come and go,
Songs and singers are out of date.
VI.
Winter holds us, body and brain:
Ice is over our being's flow;
Song is a flower that will droop and wane,
If it have no heaven toward which to grow.
Faith and beauty are dead, I trow
Nothing is left but fear and fate:
Men are weary of hope; and so
Songs and singers are out of date.
John Payne.