Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, with Other Poems

by Unknown

To a young English lady in the Hospital of the Wounded at Carlsruhe. Sept. 1870.

What does the dim gaze of the dying find
To waken dream or memory, seeing you?
In your sweet eyes what other eyes are blue,
And in your hair what gold hair on the wind
Floats of the days gone almost out of mind?
In deep green valleys of the Fatherland
He may remember girls with locks like thine;
May dream how, where the waiting angels stand,
Some lost love’s eyes are dim before they shine
With welcome:—so past homes, or homes to be,
He sees a moment, ere, a moment blind,
He crosses Death’s inhospitable sea,
And with brief passage of those barren lands
Comes to the home that is not made with hands.

SUMMER’S ENDING.

The flags below the shadowy fern
Shine like spears between sun and sea,
The tide and the summer begin to turn,
And ah, for hearts, for hearts that yearn,
For fires of autumn that catch and burn,
For love gone out between thee and me.

The wind is up, and the weather broken,
Blue seas, blue eyes, are grieved and grey,
Listen, the word that the wind has spoken,
Listen, the sound of the sea,—a token
That summer’s over, and troths are broken,—
That loves depart as the hours decay.

A love has passed to the loves passed over,
A month has fled to the months gone by;
And none may follow, and none recover
July and June, and never a lover
May stay the wings of the Loves that hover,
As fleet as the light in a sunset sky.

NIGHTINGALE WEATHER.

‘Serai-je nonnette, oui ou non?
Serai-je nonnette? je crois que non.
Derrière chez mon père
Il est un bois taillis,
Le rossignol y chante
Et le jour et le nuit.
Il chaste pour les filles
Qui n’ont pas d’ami;
Il ne chante pas pour moi,
J’en ai un, Dieu merci.’—Old French.

I’ll never be a nun, I trow,
While apple bloom is white as snow,
But far more fair to see;
I’ll never wear nun’s black and white
While nightingales make sweet the night
Within the apple tree.

Ah, listen! ’tis the nightingale,
And in the wood he makes his wail,
Within the apple tree;
He singeth of the sore distress
Of many ladies loverless;
Thank God, no song for me.