TREES IN WINTER

Gaunt and spare,
The silly trees
Strip them bare
To winter's breeze;
Yet when July
Sweltered red,
Dressed unduly
Heel to head!
Who will whisper
Unto me,
Why is this
Perversity?
Bent his head
A stately beech:
Slowly said
In gentle speech:
"Why, O man! not
Find a moral
(Though you cannot
In the laurel,)
"In our vigour
And our pelf,
Type and figure
Of yourself?
"Sun-kissed amity
Conceals
What calamity
Reveals:
"Summer glozes
Stain and scar;
Winter shows us
As we are.
"Well if thou,
In trying hour,
Stand, or bow,
In naked power,
"Like the spare
But sinewy trees
Standing bare
To winter's breeze!"

A SPRING CAPRICE BY A ROBIN

Rubato

Who, on such a day of spring,
Would be careful how he sing?
Let the overflowing heart
Get a start,
Who shall care if no one knows
How to find a perfect close
To his strain,
When the brain—
Drunk with sun and hyacinth,
Primroses and bursting oak,
And the sower's puffs of smoke
Over fields of brown—
Stumbling down
A melodious labyrinth,
Somehow, nohow, finds a way out,
Has his say out—
And begins it all again,
Caring nothing how he sing
When the brain,
Wild with Spring,
Gives a start
To his mad, melodious, overflowing heart?
Kilcarberry, Wexford.