The Seraph-song of morning's prime
That hail'd Messiah's birth,
The charter of a coming time
When Love shall rule the earth,
Rings from yon far Judaean hill —
Let it not your wonder move,
Less your laughter, that I love.
Though I now write fifty years,
I have had, and have, my peers;
Poets, though divine, are men,
Some have lov'd as old again.
And it is not always face,
Clothes, or fortune, gives the grace;
Or the feature, or the youth.
But the language and the truth,
With the ardour and the passion,
Gives the lover weight and fashion.
If you then will read the story,
First prepare you to be sorry
O Month when they who love must love and wed!
Were one to go to worlds where May is naught,
And seek to tell the memories he had brought
From earth of thee, what were most fitly said?
I know not if the rosy showers shed
From apple-boughs, or if the soft green wrought
In fields, or if the robin's call be fraught
The most with thy delight. Perhaps they read
Thee best who in the ancient time did say
Thou wert the sacred month unto the old:
No blossom blooms upon thy brightest day
You say we bushmen cannot love—
Our lives are too prosaic: hence
We lose or lack that finer sense
That raises some few men above
Their fellows, setting them apart
As vessels of a finer make—
The acme of the potter’s art—
Are placed apart upon the shelf.
So he is more than common delf,
And, more than brute in human guise,
Who, seeking, finds his nobler self
Twin-mirrored in a woman’s eyes!
Yet these things bring their penalty:
For oft the merest touch will break
These vessels of a finer make;
You like the trifling triolet:
Well, here are three or four.
Unless your likings I forget,
You like the trifling triolet.
Against my conscience I abet
A taste which I deplore;
You like the trifling triolet:
Well, here are three or four.
Have you ever met with a pretty girl
Walking along the street,
With a nice new dress and her hair in curl?
Have you ever met with a pretty girl,
When her hat blew off and the wind with a whirl
Wafted it right to your feet?
Have you ever met with a pretty girl
My darling, I have much to say
Where o precious one shall I begin ?
All that is in you is princely
O you who makes of my words through their meaning
Cocoons of silk
These are my songs and this is me
This short book contains us
Tomorrow when I return its pages
A lamp will lament
A bed will sing
Its letters from longing will turn green
Its commas be on the verge of flight
Do not say: why did this youth
Speak of me to the winding road and the stream
The almond tree and the tulip
Love that art enlargéd
As the sun!
Shine upon the bride-life
Here begun,
And upon his, too, that stirs
Now within the breath of hers —
No more two, but one.
Touch her beauty, quickening
With the spell
Of her girlhood passing:
Favor well
All his ways with her, that she
May deem this day's mystery
Was thy miracle.
Pass now, Love! upon them
In this light,
Till the magic of them,
Touch and sight,
Fades as either's lone life-story
Into all the grace and glory
My brightest hopes are mix'd with tears,
Like hues of light and gloom;
As when mid sun-shine rain appears,
Love rises with a thousand fears,
To pine and still to bloom.
When I have told my last fond tale
In lines of song to thee,
And for departure spread my sail,
Say, lovely princess, wilt thou fail
To drop a tear for me?
O, princess, should my votive strain
Salute thy ear no more,
Like one deserted on the main,
I still shall gaze, alas! but vain,
Lay yourself down, when you wish to be born lay yourself down
in a grassy field meadow pasture lay yourself down and say Ma Baba Ma Baba
Soon your body will become this tiny in the morning
Office-goers will see on the grass drops of dew
Your one drop will vanish with the warmth of the sun, go,
Go if you wish to be born say to the clouds Ma Baba Ma Baba
The clouds will hurl you from their womb such rain such rain such rain
Down below a beautiful maiden enters her bath in a roofless rented bathroom
LET others prate of Greece and Rome,
And towns where they may never be,
The muse should wander nearer home.
My country is enough for me;
Her wooded hills that watch the sea,
Her inland miles of springing corn,
At Macedon or Barrakee—
I love the land where I was born.
On Juliet smile the autumn stars
And windswept plains by Winchelsea,
In summer on their sandy bars
Her rivers loiter languidly.
Where singing waters fall and flee
The gullied ranges dip to Lorne
