The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened with decorative iron grilles.
The lamps are lighted; the shades drawn; the nurses are watching a little.
It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles; of the games of anagrams and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask.

The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well.
Some of them will stay almost well always: the blunt-faced woman whose thinking dissolved

Free are the Muses, and where freedom is
They follow, as the thrushes follow spring,
Leaving the old lands songless there behind;
Parnassus disenchanted suns its woods,
Empty of every nymph; wide have they flown;
And now on new sierras think to set
Their wandering court, and thrill the world anew,
Where the Republic babbling waits its speech;
For but the prelude of its mighty song.
As yet has sounded. Therefore, would I woo
Apollo to the land I love, 'tis vain;
Unknown he spies on us; and if my verse
Ring not the empyrean round and round,

Fraught with stars the dark nights come and go
and come and go the dazzling coral days
and the grey of the rains and the fleeting clouds
. . . and thou, expectant.

Thou expectant and the lingering hours!
How languidly they stir, the torpid plants!
It seems the four-and-twenty sisters are shod
with clogs of lead.

This incandescent rose impends already
within the verdant clusters of its bodice.
Within the verdant clusters the wonder lurks
of its sacred flesh.

But when shall we behold the open rose!

1

Frankie was a good woman,
Ev'rybody knows,
Gave forty-one dollars to buy Albert
A suit of clothes:
" Yes, he's my man, but he done me wrong. "

2

Frankie went to the corner,
Took a forty-four gun,
Shot her Albert a-rooty-ti-toot,
And away he tried to run:
" He was my man, but he done me wrong. "

3

" Roll me over easy,
Roll me over slow,
Roll me over on my right side,
'Cause the bullet hurt me so;
I was your man, but I done you wrong. "

4

Frankie sit in a parlor,

Wind:
Why do you play
that long, beautiful adagio,
that archaic air
tonight?
Will it never end?
Or is it the beginning,
some prelude you seek?

Is it a tale you strum?
Yesterday, yesterday —
Have you no more for us?

Wind:
Play on.
There is nor hope

Framed in the cavernous fire-place sits a boy,
Watching the embers from his grandsire's knee:
One sees red castles rise, and laughs with joy;
The other marks them crumble, silently.

Frail , wistful guardian of the broom,
— The dwelling's drudge and stay,
Whom destiny gave a single task —
— To keep the dust away! —

Sweep off the floor and polish the chair.
— It will not always last:
Some day, for all your arms can do,
— The dust will hold you fast.

Frail Sleep, that blowest by fresh banks
Of quiet, crystal pools, beside whose brink
The varicolored dreams, like cattle, come to drink,

Cool Sleep, thy reeds, in solemn ranks,
That murmur peace to me by midnight's streams,
At dawn I pluck, and dayward pipe my flock of dreams.

The fragments were trying to huddle into one.
The cracks were trying to smile again.
The gun barrel was trying to rise, to sit again on the gun carriage.
All were dreaming of their fragile original shape.
With each wind, they were buried further in the sand.
Invisible ocean — bird of passage flashes.

Fra bank to bank, fra wood to wood I rin,
Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie,
Like til a leaf that fallis from a tree
Or til a reed ourblawin with the win.
Twa gods guides me: the ane of them is blin,
Yea, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie,
The next a wife ingenrit of the sea,
And lichter nor a dauphin with her fin.

Unhappy is the man for evermair
That tills the sand and sawis in the air;
But twice unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desire
And follows on a woman thro the fire,