“If called to adorn her warm, white bosom,
What have you to offer for such a place,
Beside my fragrant and splendid blossom,
Ripe with colour and rich with grace?”
Said the sweet wild-rose, “Despite your dower
Of finer breeding and deeper hue,
Despite your beauty, fair, high-bred flower,
It is I who should lie on her breast, not you.
“For small account is your hot-house glory
Beside the knowledge that came to me
When I heard by the wayside love’s old story
And felt the kiss of the amorous bee.”
SATIETY
To yearn for what we have not had, to sit
With hungry eyes glued on the Future’s gate,
Why, that is heaven compared to having it
With all the power gone to appreciate.
Better to wait and yearn, and still to wait,
And die at last with unappeased desire,
Than live to be the jest of such a fate,
For that is my conception of hell-fire.
A SOLAR ECLIPSE
In that great journey of the stars through space
About the mighty, all-directing Sun,
The pallid, faithful Moon has been the one
Companion of the Earth. Her tender face,
Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race
Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun,
Shines ever on her lover as they run
And lights his orbit with her silvery smile.
Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise,
Down from her beaten path she softly slips,
And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes,
Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips.
While far and near the men our world call wise
See only that the Sun is in eclipse.