BEFORE SPRING
Who knows what endless practices are held,
Before bright pencils mark the April earth——
Where grasses learn how gaiety is spelled,
And jonquils trace the golden writs of mirth;
Some slow, imperfect patterns must be wrought
Some, cast aside in dark, abandoned crypts,
Before the swift, impulsive hands are taught
To shape the Spring's illuminated scripts.
What gifted fingers are so quick to mould
And form aright the thin Aprilian line,
The frail, fair lettering in green and gold!—
What art has taught that intricate design,
From which those later scriveners compose
Such final, crowning rubrics as the rose!
MOONS KNOW NO TIME
Moonlight is memory ... though the sun forget,
And moonlight lingers by a crumbling wall,
And grass-grown walks where flagging-stones are set
For feet that pass that way no more at all.
Summers gone by, and laughter that is still,
And hair whose gold is hidden from the sun,—
Moonlight remembering on a lonesome hill
Might half return them, one by ghostly one.
Suns mark the days ... but moonlight knows no time,
Finding old springs in every lighted face,
Old musics in a whisper hushed like rhyme:
And Summers that have gone and left no trace,
Are one with each new Summer come to flower,
Moving in moonlight through a haunted hour.