HOW WILL IT BE?
How will it be when one of us alone
Goes on that strange last journey of the soul?
That certain search for an uncertain goal,
That voyage on which no comradeship is known?
Will our dear sea sing with the old sweet tone,
Though one sits stricken where its billows roll?
Will space be dumb, or from the mystic pole
Will spirit-messages be backward blown?
When our united lives are wrenched apart,
And day no more means fond companionship,
When fervent night, and lovely languorous dawn,
Are only memories to one sad heart,
And but in dreams love-kisses burn the lip,—
Dear God, how can this same fair world move on?
MEMORY’S RIVER
In Nature’s bright blossoms not always reposes
That strange subtle essence more rare than their bloom,
Which lies in the hearts of carnations and roses,
That unexplained something by men called perfume.
Though modest the flower, yet great is its power
And pregnant with meaning each pistil and leaf,
If only it hides there, if only abides there,
The fragrance suggestive of love, joy, and grief.
Not always the air that a master composes
Can stir human heart-strings with pleasure or pain.
But strange, subtle chords, like the scent of the roses,
Breathe out of some measures, though simple the strain.
And lo! when you hear them, you love them and fear them,
You tremble with anguish, you thrill with delight,
For back of them slumber old dreams without number,
And faces long vanished peer out into sight.
Those dear foolish days when the earth seemed all beauty,
Before you had knowledge enough to be sad;
When youth held no higher ideal of duty
Than just to lilt on through the world and be glad.
On harmony’s river they seemed to afloat hither
With all the sweet fancies that hung round that time—
Life’s burdens and troubles turn into air-bubbles
And break on the music’s swift current of rhyme.
Fair Folly comes back with her spell while you listen
And points to the paths where she led you of old.
You gaze on past sunsets, you see dead stars glisten,
You bathe in life’s glory, you swoon in death’s cold.
All pains and all pleasures surge up through those measures,
Your heart is wrenched open with earthquakes of sound;
From ashes and embers rise Junes and Decembers,
Lost islands in fathoms of feeling refound.
Some airs are like outlets of memory’s oceans,
They rise in the past and flow into the heart;
And down them float shipwrecks of mighty emotions,
All sea-soaked and storm-tossed and drifting apart:
Their fair timbers battered, their lordly sails tattered,
Their skeleton crew of dead days on their decks;
Then a crash of chords blending, a crisis, an ending—
The music is over, and vanished the wrecks.
LOVE’S WAY
Love gives us copious potions of delight,
Of pain and ecstasy, and peace and care;
Love leads us upward, to the mountain height,
And, like an angel, stands beside us there;
Then thrusts us, demon-like, in some abyss:
Where, in the darkness of despair, we grope,
Till, suddenly, Love greets us with a kiss
And guides us back to flowery fields of hope.