I serve two queens, in crimson guise
The other flaunts the sullen hours,
A splendid scorn in sinning eyes,
On lips like passion-tainted flowers;
Crowned with dull gold, an Eastern queen,
Her sceptred arm a world enfolds,
And I, the maddest worldling seen,
Within the strange mad court she holds.
I serve two queens, in white and red,
Pale icicle and lambent flame,
One’s kingdom holy as the dead,
One wielding empery of shame.
Ah, what a peasant slave am I!
For ever doomed, in woeful plight,
To mark divided years go by,
The fretted serf of red and white.
MY LADY OF THE VIOLETS
MY Lady of the Violets
Is pearl-and-ivory white;
She walks across the fields of day
As stars that tread the night;
Her wistful lips are tremulous
As leaves in autumn plight.
My Lady of the Violets
Has sorrowful cold eyes,
And ever in their shadow rests
A fathomless surprise,
As they would ask from Time and Death
The secret of the skies.
My Lady of the Violets
Has aureoled gold hair,
So like unto the pictured saints
The dim cathedrals wear;
But, oh, that she were woman-sweet,
Though she were not so fair!
OLD FRIENDS, OLD BOOKS, OLD WINES
IN the Halls of Silence
Faintly falls the tread
Of the ghostly footsteps
Of the dear remembered dead,
Comrades of a golden prime,
Years and years ago,
Friends, of Yule and summer-time
Ere the world swung slow,
And ever in my ear
A dying voice repines
For the broken trinity,
Old friends, old books, old wines.
There were aye romances
In the Kingdom of the Dead,
Knights who rode from out the sunset,
Lance in hand and helm on head,
Dames as beauteous as the morn-stars,
To the world they gazed upon
Scattering night’s silvern lilies,
Flaming roses of the dawn.—
Scott and Stevenson and Dumas
Filled the world with livelier spooks,
In the brave days, the gay days,
Old friends, old wines, old books.
When did e’er Hellenic nectar
Such Olympian thirst assuage
As the draughts in which our Helens
Of a modern Pagan age
Toasted we both late and early,
Beauties exquisite and rare,
Was it bubbling Hock or Hiedsieck,
Or discreet vin ordinaire?
Ah, I know not, and I care not
For one sadly drinks and dines,
Musing on the vanished memories,
Old friends, old books, old wines.