For migrants to be moving on,
By lost indenture
You flock and gather and are gone:
The old adventure!
I too have my unwritten date,
My gypsy presage;
And on the brink of fall I wait
The darkling message.
The sign, from prying eyes concealed,
Is yet how flagrant!
Here's ragged-robin in the field,
A simple vagrant.
THE MOTHER OF POETS. To H. F. H.
The typewriter ticketh no more in the twilight;
The mother of poets is sitting alone;
Only the katydid teases the noonday;
Where are the good-for-naught wanderbirds flown?
Tom's in the North with his purple impressions;
Dickon's in London a-building his fame;
Fred's in the mountains a-minding his cattle;
Kavanagh's teaching and preaching and game.
Over in Kingscroft a toiler is writing,
The boyish Old Man whom no fate ever floored;
Karl's in New York with his briefs and his logic,
That subtile mind like a velvet-sheathed sword.
Blomidon welcomes his brother in silence;
Grand Pré is luring him back to her breast;
Faint and far off are the cries of the city,
There in the country of infinite rest.
All of them turn in their wide vagabondage,
Halt and remember a place they have known,
Where the typewriter ticketh no more in the twilight,
And the mother of poets is sitting alone.