No heart-whole songs of the Golden West
Come ever at night to me,
Who suckled not at her broad, brown breast
Nor played at her giant knee,
Nor laughed or cried
By her ingle-side,
As a kid in his ain countree.
I find no warmth in the gleam of gold,
No soul in the West’s expanse;
And actors, cast in a heavy mould,
All people the day’s romance;
And pipe I still
With a right good will,
Yet the fays of the stage won’t dance!
I know full well that the fault is mine—
That the skies are just as blue,
That life is fair, and the lights that shine
In your sweetheart’s eyes are true;
And twilights gray
And the break of day
Have a message to tell to you.
But I hear it not, or only hear
As a dull and prosy theme—
Then drift away to a day somewhere
In the wake of Fancy’s team,
That travels straight
For an old swing gate,
By the side of an oak-girt stream.
’Twas not the lure of a gate that led,
Nor yet of an oak-fringed creek,
But the memory of a gold-thatched head
And a tear-besprinkled cheek—
A stifled sigh,
And a last good-bye
In the language that love can speak!
I pictured Kate at the cottage door,
Like a home-bird by her nest,
With the self-same summer dress she wore
On the day I moved out West—
The self-same shoes
And the same heart-bruise
And the same pink rose at her breast.
I urged my team with a supple wrist,
And they scampered over the grass ...
With Katie Clare I must keep the tryst
Of a lover with a lass ...
Oh, I minded well
Of her eyes’ soft spell;
But forgot how the years may pass!
I drew a rein ... ’Neath the trysting tree
Were a matron and her brood;
And I said, “My sweetheart waits for me
In this half-enchanted wood:
And the fairest fair
Is my Katie Clare,
Of the whole world’s sisterhood!”
Then the matron stared with a puzzled stare
That changed to a gloomy frown
(I marked her looks were the worse for wear,
And her heels were somewhat down),
And she snapped, “Ah! Kate?
She went out of date
When I married old Pigweed Brown.”
Then I thanked my stars, and left the team,
As I gripped the paw of Fate
And air-planed over the oak-girt stream,
And over the old swing gate—
And cried not crack
Till I landed back
In this hub of the Western State.