If words were wingèd arrows tipped with flame,
Far-flying thro' the vast of time and space,
If Erato should lend me some rare grace,
Then might I dare to breathe in song your name.
Ah, Player-king, unmoved by all renown,
Acclaim and praise that wait upon your name,
You pluck a laurel from the wreath of fame,
Then, careless of the guerdon, cast it down.
Love and Death
Ever athwart Life's sunlit, upland ways
Falleth the shadow of impending Death,
And still Life's flowers beneath his blighting breath
To ashes wither, and to dust, her bays.
What were the worth of hard-won power or praise?
Awaits us all the grave-cell dark and deep,
The greedy grave-worm's maw, the awful sleep
When Death his cold hand on our pulses lays.
What then the end of action or of strife?
The sphinxèd riddle of the Universe,
Nature's unsolved enigma, who may prove?
Life's Passion Play all blindly men rehearse....
But yet our recompense for birth, for life,
For death itself, meseems, is deathless Love!
A Winter Landscape
A mystic world mantled in white simarre
Arachne-spun with argent woof; her wede
Starred with strange crystals wrought from frozen spar,
Sprent with pearl frost-flowers; girt with diamond brede,
Rubied with berries red as drops of blood,
Befringed with gelid, many-irised gems;
Broidered with lace weft of an elfin brood—
Hoar filagree to deck her garment hems.
Sheer slanting down the sky an opal light
Pierces the snow-blur's veil of wannish gray,
In iridescent sheen, tingeing the dazzling white
With amethystine, gold or beryl ray.
Along the West the transient sunset gleam—
An ardor brief! Crimson on crimson grows
Till all the waning sky, incarnadine,
Glows like blown petals of a shattered rose.