Short Poems

Because I am idolotrous and have besought
With grievous supplication and consuming prayer,
The admirable image that my love has wrought
Out of her swan's neck and her dark, abundant hair:
The jealous gods who brook no worship save their own,
Turned my live idol marble and her heart to stone.

Beautiful city

Beautiful city, the centre and crater of European confusion,
O you with your passionate shriek for the rights of an equal
humanity,
How often your Re-volution has proven but E-volution
Roll’d again back on itself in the tides of a civic insanity!

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

I wist not that I had the pow'r to sing,
But here of late they say my songs are sweet.
Is it because my timid numbers ring
With love's warm music that doth ever beat
Its melody within my throbbing heart?
If so, what else can roguish Cupid do?
I know him master of the archer's art;
Is he a trained musician too?

All the while they were talking the new morality
Her eyes explored me.
And when I rose to go
Her fingers were like the tissue
Of a Japanese paper napkin.

Love thou thy dream
All base love scorning,
Love thou the wind
And here take warning
That dreams alone can truly be,
For 'tis in dream I come to thee.

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.