For one brief day, did Queenie stay
To brighten each fond heart,
Then sped like dove to realms above,
Ne'er more to feel death's dart.

O! in that land, where infants stand
Arrayed in spotless sheen,
No griefs to share, nor sorrows bear,
No death to intervene.

We would not care, nay, would not dare
To wish thee back again,
Nay, rather say, " Queenie, good day,
Till we your rest attain. "

For noble minds, the worst of miseries,
Worse than old age, or wearisome disease,
Is Poverty. From Poverty to flee,
From some tall precipice into the sea,
It were a fair escape to leap below!
In Poverty, dear Kyrnus, we forego
Freedom in word and deed, body and mind;
Action and thought are fetter'd and confin'd.
Let me then fly, dear Kyrnus, once again!
Wide as the limits of the land and main,
From these entanglements; with these in view,
Death is the lighter evil of the two.

For morning sun and evening dew,
For every bud that April knew,
For storm and silence, gloom and light,
And for the solemn stars at night;
For fallow field and burdened byre,
For roof-tree and the hearth-side fire;
For everything that shines and sings,
For dear, familiar daily things —
The friendly trees, and in the sky
The white cloud-squadrons sailing by;
For hope that waits, for faith that dares
For patience that still smiles and bears,
For love that fails not, nor withstands;
For healing touch of children's hands,

For mercy, courage, kindness, mirth
There is no measure upon earth.
Nay, they wither, root and stem,
If an end be set to them.

Overbrim and overflow
If your own heart you would know;
For the spirit born to bless
Lives but in its own excess.

For memories
I raise a moon cup
and toast.
But the white melancholy
still wore
the candlelike skin.
Beyond a cucumber garden
the noon sun was knocking
on a Chiangching tree.
I break off a branch,
and a sap raw-smelling as a skink
comes out.
Country people abhor it
as Medusa.
On memories' plate
Salome's black lips like fancy beads
quiver.
A tendril, severed by a memory,
trembles for fear in a bush
with a man.

Memories are twisted
as the Western man's pipe
that parasitizes the roots

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,

For me, for me, two horses wait,
Two horses stand before my gate:
Their vast black plumes on high are cast,
Their black manes swing in the midnight blast,
Red sparkles from their eyes fly fast.
But can they drag the hearse behind,
Whose black plumes mystify the wind?
What a thing for this heap of bones and hair!
Despair, despair!
Yet think of half the world's winged shapes
Which have come to thee wondering:
At thee the terrible idiot gapes,
At thee the running devil japes,
And angels stoop to thee and sing

For many thousand ages
The steadfast stars above
Have gazed upon each other
With ever mournful love.

They speak a certain language,
So beautiful, so grand,
Which none of the philologians
Could ever understand.

But I have learned it, learned it,
For ever, by the grace
Of studying one grammar,
My heart's own darling's face.

For Life I had never cared greatly,
As worth a man's while;
Peradventures unsought,
Peradventures that finished in nought,
Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately
Unwon by its style.

In earliest years--why I know not--
I viewed it askance;
Conditions of doubt,
Conditions that leaked slowly out,
May haply have bent me to stand and to show not
Much zest for its dance.

With symphonies soft and sweet colour
It courted me then,
Till evasions seemed wrong,
Till evasions gave in to its song,

How is it,
That you, whom I can never know,
My beloved,
Are a wall between me and those I have known well —
So that my familiars vanish
Farther than the blue roofs of Nankow
And are lost among the desert hills?