ENNUI
I saw the loath moon rise,
The sun go sweatily down;
There was famine of sleep in his eyes;
She was a floating frown.
They nodded heavily
Over an ancient roof,
With a pout o' the shoulders, she,
He with a grind o' the hoof.
And the moon said to the sun:
"Another day to irk us!"
The sun to the touzled moon,
"Imagine it a circus."
BALLAD AUTUMNAL
(In which Any Old Fool of an idealistic turn, explains--probably without the palest colour of truth--to Any Other, infected with the same disease, the failure of their lives, labours, and dreams, and the triumph of the wise of this world.)
Hair greying, ashen eyes, uncomely ridges,
Autumn of things ill-done, and things undone:
How all that water, slipped beneath the bridges,
Chills the adieux of our defeated sun!
What paltry, unresisted jettison
Of dear hopes held, and there the graveyard West,
With mud, miasma, mastless hulks, and midges!--
We have not lived as wisely as the rest.
That wasteful trick of yours, that gust prodigious
Of dreams too great for their comparison,
Blew stars ablaze, but drowned us in the ditches.
Sad, generous, valiant, tired ephemeron!
Had we but coined the vision when it shone
We, too, had ruled, and mocked the dispossessed.
Well! we have rags, the prudent have the riches--
We have not lived as wisely as the rest.
They squeezed us, and forgot: your Je m'en fiche's
Struck in too bloodily to pass for fun.
Our bread was nibbled by the water-witches,
All that we have is given, and is gone.
Some penny, wheedled for a currant bun,
Some shirtless, soapless starveling, uncaressed,
Still thanks us for, but not our fed ambitious--
We have not lived as wisely as the rest.
ENVOI
Prince, lift your heart up out of Acheron,
Death bows us gravely to that cleaner test.
Yea! when all books are closed, all races run,
We may have lived as wisely as the rest.
THE LOST BALL
(A golfing rhapsody suggested by "The Lost Chord.")
Playing one day at the seaside, I was topping my balls on the tees,
And the sand and the bent were littered with fragments of double D's;
Piffle supreme I was playing, and varying "slice" with "pull,"
But I hit one ball a wallop like a kick of a Spanish bull.
It whistled its way towards Heaven in a rocket's magic flight;
It cancelled the crimson sunset like the shroud of a moonless night;
It knocked the paint off a rainbow and scattered the stars like bees;
And sped thro' the stellar spaces as tho' it would never cease.
It looped the loop like Pégoud in parabolic curves;
It was salve to my wounded feelings and balm to my ruffled nerves;
It clove my opponent's gizzard like the stab of a Lascar's knife;
And produced the hardest swearing I have ever heard in my life.
I have sought in the bent and the bushes that one magnificent ball;
It may be Antartic crystals were broken by its fall;
It may be that Death as Caddy may light on the spot it fell;
I may have holed out in Heaven or find myself trapped in Hell.
POLITICAL
PARNELL