IMMORTALIS
All loved and lovely women, dear to rhyme:
Thaïs, Cassandra, Helen and their fames,
Burn like tall candles through forgotten time,
Lighting the Past's dim arras with their names.
Around their faces wars the eager dark,
Wherein all other lights are sunken now;
Yet, casting back, the seeker still may mark
A flame of hair, a bright, immortal brow.
Surely, where they have passed, one after one,
Wearing their radiance to the darkened room,——
Surely, new-comers to Oblivion
May still descry, in that all-quenching gloom,
Rare faces, lovely, lifted and alight,
Like tapers burning through the windy night.
TOURING
God of Summer—I have seen
World on world of summer green—
Summer earth and summer sky,
Fields of summer turning by;
Hills beyond us fall away,
Tumbled slopes in disarray,
Fold and melt into a plain:
Fire and gold of summer grain.
Orchards curving on a hill,
Heavy-fruited, green and still,
Heave a shoulder to the sky,
Bend and bow and hurry by;
Fields of clover burn and pass,
Cattle knee-deep in the grass
Lift a lazy head and look
Pictures in a picture-book....
Corn in swift, revolving rows,
Dripping sunlight where it goes,
Wheels and glitters and returns:
Bladed beauty's lifted urns;
Woods all shadowed, cooling earth,
Murmuring of a quiet mirth,
Pour damp odours where they pass,
Breath of fern and earth and grass ...
Ramblers on a lichened wall,
Ramblers, ramblers pouring all
Colour that the world has known
Out upon an aging stone.—
Little towns of street and spire,
Dooryard roses, heart's desire,
Light a dream within the mind,
Light a dream ... and fall behind.