Poems, 1908-1919

For happy is the amorous eye,
And indignation clears the sky.

TRIAL

Beauty of old and beauty yet to be,
Stripped of occasion, have security;
This hour it is searches the judgment through,
When masks of beauty walk with beauty too.

CHARGE TO THE PLAYERS

THE TROJAN WOMEN, BIRMINGHAM REPERTORYTHEATRE, APRIL 1918

Shades, that our town-fellows have come
To hear rewake for Christendom
This cleansing of a Pagan wrong
In flowing tides of tragic song, —
You shadows that the living call
To walk again the Trojan wall, —
You lips and countenance renewed
Of an immortal fortitude, —
Know that, among the silent rows
Of these our daily town-fellows,
Watching the shades with these who bring
But mortal ears to this you sing,
There somewhere sits the Greek who made
This gift of song, himself a shade.

CHARACTER

If one should tell you that in such a spring
The hawthorn boughs into the blackbird’s nest
Poured poison, or that once at harvesting
The ears were stony, from so manifest
Slander of proven faith in tree and corn
You would turn unheeding, knowing him forsworn.

Yet now, when one whose life has never known
Corruption, as you know: whose days have been
As daily tidings in your heart of lone
And gentle courage, suffers the word unclean
Of envious tongues, doubting you dare not cry —
“I have been this man’s familiar, and you lie.”

REALITY

It is strange how we travel the wide world over,
And see great churches and foreign streets,
And armies afoot and kings of wonder,
And deeds a-doing to fill the sheets
That grave historians will pen
To ferment the brains of simple men.

And all the time the heart remembers
The quiet habit of one far place,
The drawings and books, the turn of a passage,
The glance of a dear familiar face,
And there is the true cosmopolis,
While the thronging world a phantom is.

EPILOGUE

Come tell us, you that travel far
With brave or shabby merchandise,
Have you saluted any star
That goes uncourtiered in the skies?

Do you remember leaf or wing
Or brook the willows leant along,
Or any small familiar thing
That passed you as you went along?

Or does the trade that is your lust
Drive you as yoke-beasts driven apace,
Making the world a road of dust
From market-place to market-place?

Your traffic in the grain, the wine,
In purple and in cloth of gold,
In treasure of the field and mine,
In fables of the poets told, —

But have you laughed the wine-cups dry
And on the loaves of plenty fed,
And walked, with all your banners high,
In gold and purple garmented?

And do you know the songs you sell
And cry them out along the way?
And is the profit that you tell
After your travel day by day

Sinew and sap of life, or husk —
Dead coffer-ware or kindled brain?
And do you gather in the dusk
To make your heroes live again?

If the grey dust is over all,
And stars and leaves and wings forgot,