Owlet sat, so quiet and good,
At the edge of Yarner Wood,
While a mother owl hard by
Sought his supper silently.
Sudden came two hideous screams,
Wakened owlet from his dreams;
Down the road, on unseen wing,
Swept a vast and awful thing.
Twice he heard the monster shriek,
Saw its head and shining beak
Twixt huge eyes, that burned the night,
Brighter than the moon was bright.
Hooting horribly it fled--
Where the water-meadows spread.
"He will catch," thought owlet now,
"That red thing they call the cow."
Came his parent presently:
Heard him squeak with fearful glee,
"Mother dear, I've seen and heard
Such a devil of a bird!"
THE SEA SCOUTS
While all alone I wandered
At even by the sea,
Where winds and water pondered
Of how they came to be;
Where kittiwakes were crying
And salty spindrift flying
Through daylight slowly dying
A Shape confronted me.
She faced the broad Atlantic--
That maid of stately mien,
Purer than foam, gigantic
As Amazonian Queen.
Her billowy robe, unknowing,
How wild the wind was blowing,
Showed not a throb or flowing,
Hung steady and serene.
It was no fellow being
For she stood ten feet high,
And seaward gazed, unseeing
The human passer-by;
But only billows roaming,
And wide-winged sea-fowl homing
Through crepuscule and gloaming
Beneath an ashen sky.
The spectre rose before me
Most woeful, wan and white
Upon that foreshore stormy
Between the day and night;
And such an apparition
In this unique position,
Despite her sad condition
Awoke my wild delight.
Then came three youthful creatures,
And them I bade with awe
Behold the mournful features
Of phantom on the shore.
They laughed and said she'd drifted
To land with bosom rifted--
A figure-head uplifted
From wreck of "Margery Dawe."
They dared, those sea-scout shavers
Who watched this lonely coast,
Assert in treble quavers
We stood before a post;
They treated as a fiction
My gratified conviction
That, in her pale affliction,
We'd met a salt-sea ghost!
Thus hard-eyed youth advances
By shadowless, stark way
Our middle-aged romances
To slight and scorn and slay;
Our make-believe to tatter;
Our gallant dreams to scatter;
To flout our faiths and shatter
Our twilight in their day.
SONG FOR THE SPHERES
A drop of fire from a flying sun--
Sing, old stars, the World's begun.
An ocean warm where electrons strive--
Sing, old stars, the World's alive.
Age upon age and link upon link--
Shout, old stars, the World can think.
War's red knife hisses home to the haft--
Mourn, old stars, the World runs daft.
Reason and Love shall conquer and reign--
Sing, old stars, the World grows sane.
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty!
Shout, old stars, the World is free.
THE CIRCLE
When shepherd darkness folds the fading day
And faints the West beneath the world's wide brim,
There stands a brotherhood, remote and dim,
Of cowled and hooded wights rolled up in granite grey.
Spirits of dusk from out a far-off prime
Beyond the shadowy pale of bygone eld,
Immutable and constant and unquelled,
They hold their everlasting state and tryst with Time.
These stones have seen the red-eyed wolf pack throng
To slay the fleeting elk upon the waste,
And they have marked the cave bear's clumsy haste,
Shuffling great golden furse and ragged rocks among.
O cirque, what meanest thou? Sepulchral lore,
Or ritual of the quick? Did thirsty god
Drink blood of sacrifice upon this sod?
Art thou a temple wrought for deities of yore?
What dread, what joy, what Neolithic rule,
What shouts of agony or pæans of praise
Awoke, ye stones, the morning of your days?
They answer not, but seek the shadowy crepuscule.
The Stone Man lifted them; his hairy hand
They felt and knew, when Night's eternal brow
Gleamed with another diadem than now
Ere Egypt's mountain graves pressed on the desert sand.
Bowed but enduring, Time hath failed to break
That emblem of eternity they trace
Upon the bosom of this desolate place;
And holy shall it be for their most ancient sake.
They have withdrawn upon the unseen light
Of immemorial time; the vanished past
Receives them once again to haunt her vast--
A sanctity beyond wild Chaos and old Night.
TO ANTHEA'S BOSOM
When that I went, a little lad, to school--
One half a cherub and one half a fool--
The weary pedant dinned upon my ears
That all the world is but two hemispheres.
Maybe I doubted then, for I was born
To laugh the wisdom of the wise to scorn;
But now, indeed, most surely it appears
That all the world is but two hemispheres.
DUST