“I WORKED NO WILE TO MEET YOU”
(SONG)
I worked no wile to meet you,
My sight was set elsewhere,
I sheered about to shun you,
And lent your life no care.
I was unprimed to greet you
At such a date and place,
Constraint alone had won you
Vision of my strange face!
You did not seek to see me
Then or at all, you said,
—Meant passing when you neared me,
But stumblingblocks forbade.
You even had thought to flee me,
By other mindings moved;
No influent star endeared me,
Unknown, unrecked, unproved!
What, then, was there to tell us
The flux of flustering hours
Of their own tide would bring us
By no device of ours
To where the daysprings well us
Heart-hydromels that cheer,
Till Time enearth and swing us
Round with the turning sphere.
AT THE RAILWAY STATION, UPWAY
“There is not much that I can do,
For I’ve no money that’s quite my own!”
Spoke up the pitying child—
A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in,—
“But I can play my fiddle to you,
And a nice one ’tis, and good in tone!”
The man in the handcuffs smiled;
The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
As the fiddle began to twang;
And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang
Uproariously:
“This life so free
Is the thing for me!”
And the constable smiled, and said no word,
As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in—
The convict, and boy with the violin.
SIDE BY SIDE
So there sat they,
The estranged two,
Thrust in one pew
By chance that day;
Placed so, breath-nigh,
Each comer unwitting
Who was to be sitting
In touch close by.
Thus side by side
Blindly alighted,
They seemed united
As groom and bride,
Who’d not communed
For many years—
Lives from twain spheres
With hearts distuned.