Who draws Love’s curtains closely everywhere,
As God folds down the banners of the sun.
Warm is my place about me, and above,
Where was the raven, I behold the dove.
Parker’s lyrical verse, like his sonnet-sequence, is the poetry of a young man who still possesses the enthusiasms of youth for all the lovelier and happier things in existence, and who rejoices in living. From the text of Parker’s lyrics it is plain that he had the gifts of a lyrist in the original Greek meaning, of one who wrote poems to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. He was gifted to turn a sentiment either seriously or playfully with simplicity and directness of diction and with winning musical lilt.
In truth, if he had turned to song composition, he was more ideally equipped to write the texts of poems for songs than was the greatest of American song composers, the late Edward MacDowell, who, for lack of singable lyrical texts, was compelled to compose his own poems as well as their musical settings.
There is a spontaneity of lyrical lilt, lyrical verve, in Parker’s lighter poems, which he composed both in literary English and in ‘Irishy.’ As an example of the musical and colorful qualities of his lyrics in literary English, the following poem from Embers will aptly serve:—
I heard the desert calling, and my heart stood still—
There was winter in my world and in my heart;
A breath came from the mesa, and a message stirred my will,