Blue sky is part, blue sea is part;
Flax, wheat, and poppies fill the strain;
Her wide eyes deepen with her art
Like gentian flowers after rain.
’Tis World-Dream in her simple lay—
Adventure, Faith, and Love and Play.
No wonder wooden shoes keep time
To magic of her lilting rhythm.
(Gay little Bretons hold their ring,
Shouting the Stranger-Lady, “Sing!”)
That was one summer. Now a dirge
Breaks on that coast in bitter wail,
And news told by the ocean surge
Makes Breton-maids and mothers quail.
O holy Fires of fisher-lights.
Gleam out no more on Pardon nights!
The great red sails hang listless, torn
The empty blue nets trail forlorn.
And yet I think that little feet
Sometimes on Penmarch beaches meet,
And Penmarch children cease their play
To talk of how She sang that day,
And that once more a happy ring
Is formed to hear a Lady sing!
TO AN AMERICAN SOLDIER GOING INTO ACTION
France, August, 1918.
TODAY’S your turn to take the road of fire;
Your turn to rally at the gates of hell;
Your turn for steel and gas and blood and mire,
In shell-holes and through mazes of barbed wire,
Where men before you fought and bled and fell.
And we go with you, we, who know your face—
Its dear and merry shining, and intent;
Follow you blindly to this testing place.
Breathless, with you at this, the ultimate pace
Your fleet strong spirit takes for its ascent.
Whatever agony is yours is ours,
Whatever thing the soul of you endures;
We are the witness of your manhood’s powers;
Not one of us who has your measure cowers—
What we know of you all our thought insures.
Go you, then, to the Front! May God be good!
Whatever face you raise to Him will be
The face of one, who for our Hope has stood,
Manly and resolute, whose spirit would
Be at the Front, and elsewhere could not be!
RESURGENCE
To C. L. B.
DOWN the glad morning lane a lucent veil
Of dogwood wavers like a windblown screen
Revealing vistas lit by golden trail
Of netted water-brooks that intervene
Where ferns their dewy plumage spread and preen;
Soft, myriad breaths of budding boughs exhale
On the spring world; a buoyant path of green
Makes sign by leaf and foliate flower-grail
Of exquisite re-capture of the frail
Fresh renascence of all that fair has been.
Nature survives. Lift then the haggard eyes
That watch Life on its dark death-shuttled loom!
Are ours the only forms that may not rise
Out of the Dark to unfrustrated bloom?
Nay—burst we forth out of the moment’s doom,
Instinct toward suns of flowering destinies,
Lifting glad lips to deep full-breasted skies,
Branching like stars where radiant dreams resume.