Short Poems

R HONA , as yet a tiny mite
Not three years old, looked up to-night
At the resplendent heavens, and said:
" What are 'ose 'tars for? "

Little maid,
I cannot tell, I ne'er have known —
Not being God upon His throne.

Year after year, it grows more hard
For the Poet to capture the world's regard,
And the world asks lightly, What ails the bard?

But it never asks if some deep ill
Be making its soul more hard to thrill —
Some malady there , past leech's skill.

When a sigh as of abdication is wrung from lordly things
By the rumour of crumbling pride that the eve of autumn brings;

When the troubled splendours come, and the green perfections go,
Amid flitting of vagabond tempest irresolute to and fro;

" Ask, ask thou a boon, " say the Heavens to the wistful Earth; but in vain
She asks for the bliss of the Rose, and the pomp of the Nightingale's pain.

Yon field is white with daisies
As we stand together here;
Sad good-byes fondly breathing
Sweetheart mine and sweetheart dear!
Striving hard (in soft appeal)
Love's emotions to conceal;
But when daisies bloom again,
We will meet, my sweetheart, then.

That which was thou, and, being thou, was fair,
Perhaps still lives, but where?
From wave and star and flower
Some effluence rare
Was lent thee, a divine but transient dower!
'Tis yielded back, from eyes and lips and hair,
To wave and star and flower.

The Day is young, the Day is sweet,
And light is her heart as the tread of her feet.

The Day is weary, the Day is old:
She has sunk into sleep through a tempest of gold.

Sleep, tired Day! Thou shalt rise made new,
All splendour and wonder and odour and dew.

Disturb not — thou wilt find him unforgiving —
The mighty and famed in his sepulchral bed.
Thou may'st out-tire the malice of the living,
But not the vengeance of the implacable dead.

The children romp within the graveyard's pale;
The lark sings o'er the madhouse and the jail.
Such deft antitheses of perfect poise
The master rhetorician, Chance, employs.

Never o'er the lowliest towering,
Never 'neath the mightiest cowering —
Thus let me live, and ev'n in dreams
Save me from Life's accurst extremes.

Art is not Nature! Shakespeare's women and men,
Still quick and warm 'mid all the sparkless dead,
Say their fine things at just those moments when
Such things are never said.