IV - A LETTER
Dear boy, what can this stranger mean to you,
Blown to your country by unbridled chance?
That he should drink the morn's first cup of dew
Fresh from the spring, and quicken that grave glance
Wherein as rising tides on hazy shores
Rise the new flames and colours of romance?
Ah, wise and young, the world shall use your youth
And fling you shorn of beauty to despair,
The sum of all that fascinating truth
That you have gleaned, hands tangled in brown hair,
Eyes straining into contemplative fires,—
This truth shall not seem truth when trees are bare.
The hunger of the soul, the watcher left
To brood the nearness of his own decay,
Dully remarking the slow shameless theft
Of the old holiness from day to day,
How youth grows tarnished, wisdom changes false,—
Till one bends near to steal your life away.
Yet who am I to turn aside the hand
Outstretched so friendly and so humbly proud,
Heaped up with beauty from the sunrise land
Of hearts adventurous and heads unbowed?
Only, look not at me with changing eyes
When we must separate amid the crowd.
TOURS, 1918
V - ESTHER DANCING
Speak not nor stir. Here music is alive,
Woven from those swift fingers, strong and light,
Marching across those singing hands, or shed
Slowly, like echoes down the muffled night,
Or beautifully translated, note by note,
Some fainter voice, rhapsodic and remote,
Or shaken out in melodies that dive
Clear into fathoms of profounder things,
Then suddenly again on rising wings,
Burst into sun and hover overhead.
Incarnate music flashing into form
Fled from the vineyards of melodious Greece,
Feet that have flown before the gathering storm
Or glanced in gardens of the Golden Fleece,
Face atune to all the songs that mass
Their gusts of passion on the sunlit grass,
Image of lyric hope and veiled despair,
Like them, thou shalt unutterably pass
Into the silence and the shadowed air.