’Tis royal and authentic June
Over this poor soil blossoming;
Here lies, beneath an upright noon,
Thin nation for so wild a king.
Far off, the noble Summer rules,
Violent in the ardent rose,
His sun alight in mirroring pools,
Braggart on Alps of vanquished snows;
Away, aloft, true to his hour,
Announced, his colour, his fire, his jest.
But here, in negligible flower,
Summer is not proclaimed:—confessed.
A woman I marked; for her no state,
Small joy, no song. She had her boon,
Her only youth, true to its date,
Faintly perceptible, her June.
SURMISE
THE TRACK OF A HUMAN MOOD
Not wish, nor fear, nor quite expectancy
Is that vague spirit Surmise,
That wanderer, that wonderer whom we see
Within each other’s eyes;
And yet not often. For she flits away,
Fitful as infant thought,
Visitant at a venture, hope at play,
Unversed in facts, untaught.
In “the wide fields of possibility”
Surmise, conjecturing,
Makes little trials, incredulous, that flee
Abroad on random wing.
One day this inarticulate shall find speech,
This hoverer seize our breath.
Surmise shall close with man—with all, with each—
In her own sovereign hour, the moments of our death.
TO ANTIQUITY
“... REVERENCE FOR OUR FATHERS, WITH THEIR STORES OF EXPERIENCES”
_An author whose name I did not note_
O our young ancestor,
Our boy in Letters, how we trudge oppressed
With our “experiences,” and you of yore
Flew light, and blessed!
Youngling, in your new town,
Tight, like a box of toys—the town that is
Our shattered, open ruin, with its crown
Of histories;
You with your morning words
Fresh from the night, your yet un-sonneted moon,
Your passion undismayed, cool as a bird’s
Ignorant tune;
O youngling! how is this?
Your poems are not wearied yet, not dead.
Must I bow low? or, with an envious kiss,
Put you to bed?
CHRISTMAS NIGHT
“IF I CANNOT SEE THEE PRESENT I WILL MOURN THEE ABSENT, FOR THIS ALSO IS
A PROOF OF LOVE”
_Thomas à Kempis_
We do not find Him on the difficult earth,
In surging human-kind,
In wayside death or accidental birth,
Or in the “march of mind.”
Nature, her nests, her prey, the fed, the caught,
Hide Him so well, so well,
His steadfast secret there seems to our thought
Life’s saddest miracle.
He’s but conjectured in man’s happiness,
Suspected in man’s tears,
Or lurks beyond the long, discouraged guess,
Grown fainter through the years.
· · · · ·
But absent, absent now? Ah, what is this,
Near as in child-birth bed,
Laid on our sorrowful hearts, close to a kiss?
A homeless childish head.