SURVIVAL
Men building ships, and women cooking meals,
The mothering girl-child with her doll in arms,
The ploughman trudging at his horse's heels,
The fires we lay, our chill at war's alarms:—
These epic, ancient gestures of the race
Have still the greatness of those great who wrought
In other days than ours, who keep their place
Along our shadowy borderlands of thought.
A word evokes them,—aye, a lifted hand
Stirs slumbrous queens whose sceptres were upraised
For life or death in what forgotten land!—
Where cowherds pass, old Grecian kine are grazed,
And many a rocking-horse and laughing boy
Lead back the tragic chariots of Troy.
NOMENCLATURE
There is a magic in the shining name,
A legacy that beauty yields to speech,
Something more quick and subtle than her fame,—
Who else had blown beyond our stunted reach.
By what occult divining does the will
Fashion the cryptic word whose sound and sense
Evoke the trembling image, lovely still,
Of something lost but for this recompense?
There have been ships whose names were music's own;
But speak them—and the lifted prows go by!
Women who stir as from the sculptor's stone,
For syllables still tender as a sigh ...
And banished Aprils that we saw and heard,
Return their lights and colours ... in a word.