Like the fallen leaves gone one by one.
And the scenes that we loved in the long ago
Faint shadows still in the setting sun.
They have gone - we go - for the wild winds rave -
“The path that ye tread in silent dread
Leads on to an open grave!”
But those voices hushed, they linger yet
Like the haunting chords of a lost refrain.
And those scenes we can see with a sweet regret
Though their outlines are blurred they still remain
Shall they live - those things - in our groping brain,
Like the ocean’s surge in an empty shell
Nor live elsewhere again?
TO AN AGED WILLOW
Ancient willow, drooping low
Gnarled old trunk and withered bough.
Though they say you’re dying now
I can never have it so.
Massive limbs against the sky
Wrestling with the winds of heaven,
E’en the thunder crashing levin
Like old Ajax you defy.
Where your mournful branches bend
Countless birds their nests have made
Woodland songsters unafraid.
You, old willow, were their friend.
And you sheltered me as well,
Often in the summer’s heat
Idly musing at your feet
I have felt your soothing spell.
Rustling softly through the leaves
Pendulous to every air,
Peace and solace everywhere
Dripped like raindrops from the eaves.
And the white clouds floating by
Bore me to the shores of dreams -
Blissful yet the memory seems -
Loved companion, must you die?
No cathedral’s gloomy nave
Or cold monument for me,
Rather let me have a tree
As a marker for my grave.
And the Land of Yet-to-Be
Where sun risen glories play,
May it see you clothed some day
In immortal greenery.
[Illustration]
THE OLD WOODS ROAD
It blunders off through ways obscure
The old woods road I used to tread,
Until its columned walls immure
The sunbeams dripping overhead.
Through scented gloom it seems to wind
O’er fallen branches mossy green,
And leaving all the world behind
Gropes blindly toward a world unseen.
The ancient wheel ruts disappear
With pine and scrub oak overgrown,
No creaking wain for many a year
Has trailed its coverts wild and lone.
“I wonder where that old road goes?”
I hear some blithe young voices say
And I might tell them if I chose
“Back to the land of yesterday.”
THE POVERTY WEED
O the poverty weed is so shabby and poor
That she seems to disfigure the land,
The russet clad waif of the desolate moor
She buries her face in the sand.
Her threadbare old mantle all faded and frayed
What beauty can ever adorn?
As she cowers in the background this shy desert maid
So lowly, despised and forlorn.
But over that moorland in splashes of gold
Like sunbeams enriching the gloom,
What visions of loveliness seem to unfold
When the poverty weed is in bloom!
Aglow are those hillsides once barren and lone
And golden those patches of green,
When this poor floral outcast comes into her own
And the blossoms all bow to their queen.
THE SWEEP OF THE TIDES
Out of the fathomless ocean
Shaking the earth with their strides,
Chaos resurgent in motion,
Battle the foam bearded tides.
Titans stupendous, upheaving,
Flouting the roaring Monsoon,
Hoarse with the joy of achieving
Freedom to reach for the moon.
Titans whose dungeons are riven
Sped on their turbulent path,
Not by Poseidon driven
Nor by grim Eolus’ wrath,
Clamorous, never delaying,
Scouring the outermost dune,
Sullen but ever obeying
That mocking enchantress - the moon.
Fundy is choked with their foaming,
Fiercely they snarl ’round the Horn,
Glinting like steel in the gloaming,
Patined with gold at morn;
White with the ice of the Behring,
Green with sargassum strewn
Wolves of the deep, never nearing,
But ever pursuing the moon.
Round and around and forever
Dizzily circling the globe;
Torn by impassioned endeavor
Clutching, to touch but her robe;
Wraithlike that robe, but enduring,
Trailing her silvery lune,
Woven of moonbeams alluring,
Tracing the path to the moon.
Formless, uncouth, terrifying,
Goading the indolent seas;
Breathing out clouds with their sighing,
Draining the deep of its lees,
Mountainous troughing and cresting,
Then calm as a coral lagoon,
Limitless yearning and questing
Madness bewitched by the moon.
Monstrous caress of the ocean
Fondling the obdurate land,
Urged by abyssmal emotion
Granite may hardly withstand,
Beats of a world olden measure
Savage but roughly in tune,
Floodtime and ebb at the pleasure
Of that horned enchantress - the moon.
Alternate plunge and upheaval
Strong as earth giants who strove
Grandly in aeons primeval
Braving omnipotent Jove;
Forces terrific, whose rages
Drown out the shrieking Typhoon
Storming through infinite ages
After a phantom - the moon!
LOST BILLINGSGATE
From Billingsgate the beacons’s flash
No longer stabs the quivering dark,
But fang like breakers foam and gnash
Above its sand bars ribbed and stark.
Where whispering grasses used to grow
And nesting terns their shelter made,
Now snarls the rasping undertow
And breezes mutter - half afraid!
For it has gone like Lyonnesse
Of Arthur’s reign - enchanted realm
Of dreamy eyed forgetfulness
That saw the ocean overwhelm
Her shores, till e’en the towers were drowned
Where Merlin spun his evil spells,
And fishers startle - when the sound
Wells upward as from sunken bells!
Yes, Billingsgate is lost to view
Beneath the all engulfing sea,
The lonely Isle the Pilgrims knew -
But still it lives in memory.
And sometimes in the dead of night
We hear the shoal bemoan its fate
Clothed in a shroud of breakers white -
The ghost of vanished Billingsgate!
TRANSFORMED
A battered thing it seems
That salt encrusted drift wood, but the skies
Showed never rainbow with more gorgeous dyes
Than gild that firelight’s beams.
The cloud banks dull and grey
Far in the west, are but a canvas spread
For supernatural scenes in gold and red
When ends the dying day.
The icy Frost King lays
His finger on the leaves and lo, the fires
Of fairy land on autumn’s funeral pyres
Seem everywhere ablaze.
And so each inner trace
Of life’s deep grief and cankered bitterness
Is graven in those lines of kindliness
Upon an aged face.
HAUNTING ECHOES
The music dies upon the strings
But lingers on
Like other sweetly treasured things
Here once - and gone.
The breeze that blurs the mirror pool
Cannot erase
The outline of the forest cool
Upon its face.
The haunting fragrance of the flowers
Of yesterday
Not all the intervening hours
Can steal away.
And loving friends we used to know
Nor e’er forget
Although they left us long ago
Seem with us yet.
LOST AT SEA
Through bushes half obscured, a marble slab
Peers out like a pale face. Inscribed upon
Its weathered surface that the lichen growth
And winter’s storms have blurred, a few brief words
The curious eye may spell with labored care.
To “H” and “M” - perhaps - and the terse phrase
So haunting in its stark simplicity
And pathos, - “Lost at sea.” The changeless gulfs
Of ocean knew the dead man mentioned here
Where bushes riot o’er an empty grave,
But what old friend remembers him today?
Ofttimes, no doubt, upon the wet sea sand
He traced his name in childhood, while the waves
Erased the halting script. Another hand
Has etched that name in form more durable;
But year by year, the ceaseless ebb and flow
Of time’s remorseless tides obliterate
The letters shrunken to initials faint,
And that last solemn statement - “Lost at sea”.
Much has been written on the vanity
Of human life, but never penned more tense
With meaning than this lonely epitaph
Set in a thicket on a crumbling stone.
THE ASPEN
Lonely aspen rising high
Straight and true you greet the eye.
Bent by every passing breeze
Weakest, slenderest of trees;
Yet what grace, what stateliness
Every leaf and twig express!
Brittle limbs of little worth,
How from out thy meager girth
May we fashion wood for use?
What may be the frail excuse
For thy lovely shaft of green
On the verge of my ravine?
But the aspen, wise and shy
Never deigned to make reply.
Swayed to every wandering air
Shed its beauty everywhere,
Till its friendly dignity
Made its message clear to me.
God designed thee, aspen slim
Who am I to question Him?
In the mighty scheme of things
You and I play minor strings
Yet your part has been well done
Mine is only half begun!
[Illustration]
THE SONG OF THE SEA GULLS
Hark how the sea gulls are screaming with glee
Piercing as Pipes of Pan!
Keening their songs to the beach and the sea
Sung since the world began;
O’er breakers combing in jubilant strife,
Flecked with their foaming and throbbing with life,
Here they come homing - O shrill as a fife
List to their wild elan!
They are the spirits exultant and free,
Up in the clouds they belong.
Ever aspiring in skyland to be,
Theirs is the verve of the strong.
Here they go steering through canyons of air,
Onward careering, and eager to dare,
Scornful of fearing with never a care
List to the lilt of their song!
BROKEN FRAGMENTS
Only a bit of broken glass
Half concealed in the tangled grass,
But the sunbeam found a pathway through
On its arrow flight from the vault of blue
And straight through the weed grown thicket came
To touch that glass with its kindling flame.
Only a sunbeam’s glinting gold
On a splintered bit that we now behold
Rich with crimson and purple sheen
Autumn yellow and vernal green
Until, transfigured, it glows arrayed
In the rainbow aura the sunbeam made.
Only an old man bent and gray
Gazing into the far-away.
Human wreckage forlorn and lone
But his face with a sudden glory shone.
Was it the sunbeam’s magic wand
Or hidden splendors he glimpsed beyond?
Only a bit of shattered glass,
And a poor old man that we idly pass,
But the shard like a diamond, glittered bright
And the time worn face suffused with light,
When the gates in the jasper walls swung wide
And those broken fragments were glorified.
WORKERS OF MAGIC
Immured in the downy cocoon
A marvelous artisan spins
With threads like the beams of the moon
So gossamer fine. Have the Djinns
Who dream in the mulberry trees,
O weaver beyond compare,
Bewitched with the shimmer of orient seas
Your fabric so lustrous and fair?
Toiler imprisoned who weaves and weaves
A silken glory from naught but leaves.
To the mollusc, tormented, which holds
The irritant sand in his shell,
What radiant vision unfolds
Invoked by the mermaiden’s spell?
As he fashions that shape, and imbues
It with colors he never has seen,
With opalescent and rainbow hues,
A pearl with the fairylike sheen
Of the sea. O artist whom fate condemns
To gild with beauty this queen of gems.
In his desolate attic alone
In the gloom of the midnight hour,
The poet, despondent, unknown
Is thrilled by that wizardly power
That the silk worm and pearl oyster feel
The urge to create! And his brain
Like the anvil resounding to steel
In a minstrelsy vibrant with pain,
Sends sparkles blazing through singing lines
As the verse with his burning thought combines.
MY GOLDEN FLEECE
When but a child my eyes would oft forsake
The blurring page, and through the window seek
Like an escaping bird, the wonderland
Of dreams, till my instructor, grave, enquired
“Wool gathering again?” So mid the halls
Of classic learning out into the world
Of bruise and bitterness but softening all
As summer haze dissolves the jagged peaks
And makes the deserts bloom - my fancy blithe,
Drinking the waters of eternal youth,
Has ventured many a lordly enterprise
Wool gathering down the years.
Now older grown
Calm in the tranqil gloaming of my life
I dwell apart, the while my mellow lamp
With tapestry of shadow drapes the wall
And e’en the crickets shrilling greets my ear
Like pipes of Arcady. There friends long gone
Cluster about with gladsomeness, and scenes
From recollection gleaned or fancy limned
Expand my chamber to horizons vast
Till pensively I muse “Wool gathering still?”
Bless all kind fairies of fond Memory’s brood,
Or those which grace Imaginations court,
For treasures such as these. Jason of old,
Who led his argonauts through seas of blood
Seeking the golden fleece, has set the course
For dreamers through all ages yet to come.
O Hero legended, thine be the goal
My yearning eyes would glimpse. What cloudland slopes
Feed those immortal sheep whose fleeces bright
Are woven into dreams are ever hid
Beyond my ken. But the great quest is mine
To glorify the drabness of the years
Life’s sterile day by day.
One need not gain
The fabled hoard that marks the rainbow’s end
To feel, beholding that resplendent arch
A link with faery land. Wool gathering - yes
But rather say the guerdon wisdom brings,
The magic touch that gilds the commonplace
With beauty and delight, the lustrous threads
In life’s rough fabric drawn from fleece of gold.
THE LONE LILAC
Only a cellar broken
Down to a dimpled mound,
Of the olden time a token
In the brier entangled ground.
And a lonely lilac vagrant
As a sunbeam lost in gloom,
Close by like a garland fragrant
At the door of a crumbling tomb.
Full many a tree appearing
Has ploughed through the sodden loam
Where once was a fertile clearing
Protecting a friendly home.
And sweet as the perfume welling
From the lilac over the way,
Was life in that quaint old dwelling
In that long forgotten day.
Under the eaves, enfolded
It mothered its little brood;
But the sills long since have molded
To dust in that solitude.
Now through the locusts treading
(A grove from a single one)
Like the virile banyan spreading
Neath the burning Indian sun.
We can vision those fields in culture;
And the beds once bright with flowers,
Where a crow now sits like a vulture,
And broods through the sunlit hours.
While stark through the verdure risen
Like the tides in the distant bay,
Through a cleft in its leafy prison
Peers the lilac over the way.
Anon as the breezes bluster,
Then die and are strangely mute,
The echoing memories cluster
Like strains from a far off lute.
We can almost hear the fingers
Strumming an elfin lay -
For the soul of that home still lingers
In the lilac over the way.
FRIENDLY LIGHTS
Welcome greetings through the dark
From the lamp light burning clear
In some lonely home, a spark
Radiating warmth and cheer.
Lighthouse darting from the lea
Flaming lances o’er the foam,
Wandering mariners at sea
You are guiding safely home.
Glow worm on a summer night
Torch within an elfin hand,
Marking by your zig zag flight
Ways obscure to fairy land.
Starry twinkle in the blue
To illumine worlds on high
Far off orb we share with you
Friendliness of earth and sky.
TO MY CHERRY BLOSSOM
From old Japan beyond the sea
A fairy vision beckons me,
A vale where cool the shadows rest
From Fujiyama’s towering crest,
A ruined temple’s crumbling wall
Lulled by a drowsy waterfall,
A shrine in whose corroding bell
Faint murmurs, long forgotten, dwell,
And Buddha, brooding day by day
Dreams the slow centuries away
In old Japan.
There might the careworn find release
In calm Nirvana’s perfect peace.
There might the traveler inhale
The haunting sweetness of that vale,
An incense from the flowery gloom
Where clustering cherry blossoms bloom
In petaled purity that glows
Like Fujiyama’s drifting snows;
The fragrance of a far off clime
From some remote, forgotten time
In old Japan.
There might I roam in fancy free
That Orient vale beyond the sea,
By Nippon’s shores an Eden seek
Neath Fujiyama’s storied peak.
But here, - where happier far, I’d be
A CHERRY BLOSSOM blooms for me.
I glimpse within her starry eyes
A nearer view of Paradise,
My Shrine and Eden is our home,
Nor need my wandering fancy roam
To old Japan.
GRAINS OF SAND
Fine gleanings of the ledges, golden grains
That ponderous glaciers reaped long, long ago
From battlemented crags and furrowed plains
Grinding and crushing with resistless flow,
To mingle with the melting seas, and heap
Their flinty harvestings in windrows; strew
The granite kernels for the thunderous deep
To winnow endlessly and grind anew.
Where are those lordly peaks that once defied
The fury of the gales, nor deigned to bow
To heaven’s own lightning? How the scornful tide
Washes about and putters with them now;
Yes, even my weak fingers have the power
To fashion as I will or idly thrust
Into a glass to mark the fleeting hour,
These grains of sand - some crumbled mountain’s dust
THE FUNERAL WREATH
There is a cottage trim and neat,
Who dwelt within I cannot say,
It seemed so homey a retreat,
My steps have often led that way.
But now a wreath is hung before
Its silent door.
A funeral wreath of sombre tone
Where Death has shed a ray of gloom;
And someone mourns for someone gone
Within a vacant darkened room.
So eloquent of human grief
Is every leaf!
Such is the laurel crown that waits
Our journey’s end through toil and tears;
The emblem grim that decorates
Your door and mine, e’er many years
So that some idle passer by
May wonder why!
MEMORY
She crouches in the caves of thought
Enchantress, brooding o’er the fire,
And those her mystic charms have sought
Shall sometime gain their heart’s desire.
With mumblings and averted gaze
She weaves her spells, while to and fro
Like shadows from the mounting blaze,
Upon the walls there come and go
The scenes of far off happier days
Faint visions of the long ago.
The eastern tyrant steals in dead of night
Down rock hewn stairs and through an iron door;
And feasts his eyes by flaring torch’s light
Upon the wealth heaped on his treasury floor;
On bursting sacks of coin, caskets of gems
Scepters of ruby, diamond diadems,
A kingdom’s plunder. We, like him, have stored
Our hidden wealth, and memory keeps the key,
No jewels lustreless, are in our hoard
But trophies of a richer dynasty,
The sweet experiences that time endears
Sifted and winnowed gleanings of the years.
With halting steps and labored breath we climb
The attic stairs and rummage sadly through
The toys and trifling things our childhood knew,
Until our brooding thoughts are lost to time,
And like the dust motes dancing in the beams
Come thronging memories through a mist of dreams.
Forth from an aged tome there falls a flower
Faded and crumbling, yet its petals glow,
Once more in the sweet memory of that hour
When loving fingers gave it long ago.
As through the spectral city of the dead
With downcast eyes and reverential tread
We note the broken columns and the urns
In marble draped, and e’er our gaze returns
To our own name graved on the granite bare
The death date blank - yet it will soon be there!
Then Memory leads us with a sad, sweet smile
Among those grass grown mounds. On many a stone
Are names of those we loved - A little while
And we shall be with them among our own.
We seem to hear their welcoming voices ring;
A whisper comes - “O death where is thy sting?”
Alone we came into this world - alone
We venture forth. And recollections fond
Are all that we may bear to the beyond
To lay, some day, before a great white throne!
Our life has been a path forlorn that winds
Forever on through gnarled and twisted years
Of forest gloom. A path that memory finds
And helps us trace it backward through our tears.
Upon a beechen trunk, deep in the bark
Two carven hearts by single arrow cleft:
How many years since youth, with ardent hand
Inscribed them there. Two hearts and one bereft!
In the long autumn afternoons we go
By russet moors and watch the slanting rays
Bathe all the landscape with a golden haze
That melts its harsher outlines. Thus the flow
Of years has smoothed away each grief and pain
Of childhood and life’s later bitterness,
While Memory, with a witching tenderness,
Has glorified the things that still remain.
In pensive revery our fancy turns
Out to the west where the red sunset burns,
Fain would we ponder when our sun may set
And yield to the sad sweetness of regret,
But Memory thrills with wild ecstasies
Before that miracle of blazing skies.
In awe we gaze as lengthening shadows loom
And night peers forth. But Memory hovers near
We clutch her fingers in the deepening gloom
And trembling hang upon her words of cheer,
Till with a hopeful glance she points afar
Where, like a gem on velvet, gleams a star!
We stand aghast beneath the vaulted dome
Aglitter with creation’s rhapsodies
The countless stars. And let our fancy roam
Through space unfathomed, past the Pleiades
Out to the deeps beyond. Until the veil
That shuts us from the past seems strangely stirred
And recollections vague - beyond the pale -
Flit through our brain, half thoughts confused and blurred.
A former life upon some sunnier sphere!
Things long forgot and dimly sensed again
Far off, for one rapt moment hover near.
We strive to clutch them, but we strive in vain.
Does Memory mock us, or in fear perchance
Shield us from some grim Terror’s Gorgon glance
That glares unseen, from out the dark! Farflung
A wisp of cloud darts like a dragon’s tongue
And laps Orion’s belt. At glowing dawn
The constellations fade - the veil is drawn!
The blood stained trail of history winds away
Through ruined cities and past crumbling walls
Half buried, where the tottering columns sway
To winds that blunder through the vacant halls.
Beyond lie relics of remoter time
Dolmens and cromlechs, monoliths of stone
Inscriptions weird and uncouth monsters carved
On cavern walls, and bits of splintered bone
Traced when the hairy mammoth ranged among
Wild fens and woodlands when the world was young.
For all the runes inscribed on History’s page
As Time’s slow finger etched them age by age
For our dim eyes to see,
Are but the priceless, deathless heritage
Of Memory.
The traveler venturing into deserts grim
That shimmer on the hot horizon’s rim,
Does battle with the demons of the heat
While sands like burning fingers, claw his feet
But other wayfarers have braved the wrath
Of scorching wastes - their bones still mark the path!
Our counsellor and guide, calm Memory holds
The golden balances whose scale unfolds
The wisdom of the tried - experience true.
The balance trembles, what ought we to do?
It dips, it falls, the standard points the way
Today’s decisions rest on yesterday.
Upon the shores of Time’s vast sea we stand
And peer into the gathering mists that rise
Dark and portentious before our eyes,
While through our fingers slip the grains of sand.
We know the waves advancing, will not stay
But wash our stumbling footprints all away.
Into that sea have sailed the winged hours
Like argosies by youthful fancy sent
On joyous quest to some far Orient
Created in our dreams, pagoda’d towers
To bold adventure beckoning gaily on,
While tropic skies lent their romantic lure.
But those exotic hours, alas, have gone
And broken memories alone endure.
O time may rob us of our dearest friends.
But not our memories! The present blends
Into the vanished vistas of the past.
Riches have taken wings but at the last
A pittance left us. Old, we yet may drink
From youth’s eternal fount. A golden link
Still binds us with the loved we see no more.
The lamp lit circle on our chamber floor
Our little kingdom bounds. Within its space
Our eyes, through Memory’s magic, see a face
That shed, long years ago, a reliance there,
A form adorned that graced a vacant chair.
How rich and full was life, how barren now!
Forsaken in our poverty we bow
To Fate’s decree. But in despairing mood
Kind Memory, pitying, shares our solitude.
Are memories but the vain desire
For happier hours that once were mine?
The embers of a dying fire.
The dwindled lees of life’s rich wine?
Or echoes from a seraph’s lyre
But lightly touched by hands divine?
THE STOKER
_While a student at college, I voyaged to Naples in the steerage
of an Italian liner. That was long before the days of the modern
oil burner and the engine room was a fair reproduction of Dante’s
Inferno. One afternoon a young stoker, begrimed and perspiring,
crept up the iron ladder from the stoke hold and sat for a few
minutes gazing out of an open port. His wistful face remains a
vivid memory and occasioned the following lines._
Framed in the iron port there looms a face
That Rembrandt’s stilus or the sombre muse
Of Dante might have etched. Pale cheeks and eyes
That gaze unseeing, out - a forehead damp
With sweat and smeared with grime - a haunting face
Through which there peers in wistful apathy
A parched and withered soul. Some stoker crept,
Gasping for air up from that hell below,
Of lurid fires and gloom, where engines groan
Like blinded Titans, and with giant strength
Shoulder the huge hulk forward through the brine.