Let never word of pity pass your lips:
For these were proud in ways you cannot know,
And pride is slow to die in ruined ships
Who can but dream that some day they will go,
Their wounds all healed, their clean strength whole again,
Monarch of seas, marvel of moons and men.
INVIOLATE
I would be dumb before the evening star,
And no light word should stir upon my lips
For autumn dusks where dying embers are,
For evening seas and slow, returning ships.
I would be hushed before the face I love,
Rising in star-like quiet close to mine,
Lest all the beauty thought is dreaming of
Be rudely shaken and be spilled like wine.
For present loveliness there is no speech,
A word may wrong a flower or a face,
And stars that swim beyond our stuttering reach
Are safer in some golden, silent place....
Only when these are broken, or pass by,
Wonder and worship speak ... or sing ... or cry.
MANUSCRIPTS
As some monastic scrivener in his cell,
Sensing a chill along the stony crypt,
Might labour yet more gorgeously to spell
The final, splendid entries of his script,—
So with bright rubrics has the Autumn writ
A coloured chronicle of things that pass,
Thumbing a yellow parchment that is lit
With brief, illumined letters through the grass.