So, YOU'VE COME to the tropics, heard all you had to do
Was sit in the shade of a cocoanut glade while the dollars roll in to you.
They told you that at the bureau? Did you get the statistics all straight?
Well, hear what it did to another kid, before you decide your fate.
You don't go down with a hard, short fall—you just sort of shuffle along
And loosen your load of the moral code, till you can't tell the right from the wrong.

I started out to be honest, with everything on the square,
But a man can't fool with the Golden Rule in a crowd that won't play fair.

In vesture white, the Eternal Child
Lay on his Mother's lap and smiled:
What joy to see that longed-for sight—
Her spotless Lily of delight,
Her Love, her Dove, her Undefiled.
She recked not of the anguish wild,
The sorrow upon sorrow piled,
His dead Form swathed one awful night
In vesture white.

Oh, let our hearts, this birthday bright,
The sorrow and the joy unite;
While, by the twofold grace beguiled
Of suffering Man and Infant mild,
We walk with him on Faith's calm height
In vesture white.

O hurry where by water among trees
The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh,
When they have but looked upon their images,—
O that none ever loved but you and I!

Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed
Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky,
When the sun looked out of his golden hood?—
O that none ever loved but you and I!

O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I'll hollo all those lovers out and cry—
O my share of the world, O yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.

It was bright day, and all the trees were still
In the deep valley, and the dim Sun glowed;
The clay in hard-baked fire along the hill
Leapt through dark trunks to apples green and gold,
Smooth, hard and cold, they shone like lamps of stone:

They were bright bubbles bursting from the trees,
Swollen and still among the dark green boughs;
On their bright skins the shadows of the leaves
Seemed the faint ghosts of summers long since gone,
Faint ghosts of ghosts, the dreams of ghostly eyes.

There was no sound between those breathless hills,

Beneath a silvery sycamore
His willow pipe I saw him playing.
The heifer down the hill was straying—
Her lengthening shadow went before,—
Toward the near stubble-land: the lowing
Of labored oxen, pasturing,
Called her that way. The wind was blowing,
And the tall reeds against a spring
Of unsunned waters, slantwise fell,
But you might hear his song right well—
“I would that I were bird or bee,
Or anything that I am not—
Sweet lady-love, I care not what,
So I might live and die with thee.”

The grass beneath its flowery cover

Can you love my dear lassie the hills o' wild thyme
Where I made a Ballad in true lovers rhyme
Do you love the wild Common that neer was in furrow
Where I courted you truly to wed you tomorrow.

Do ye love the win bushes my ain bonny Bessey
Where the rude scenes o' nature still keeps her ain dress
Do ye love the wild Common where first I loved thee
Then come bonny Bess and gae walking wi me.

Where the wheat-ear is building her nes[t] i' the gorse
Where the orchis is blooming over beds o' green moss
And the Rabbit and Pheasant are bob[b]ing about

Once I was happy, but now I'm forlorn,
Like an old coat, all tattered and torn,
Left in this wide world to fret and to mourn,
Betrayed by a wife in her teens.
Oh, the girl that I loved she was handsome,
I tried all I knew her to please,
But I could not please one quarter as well
As the man on the flying trapeze.
Chorus
She floats through the air
With the greatest of ease,
You'd think her a man
On the flying trapeze.
She does all the work
While he takes his ease,
And that's what became of my love.

He would fly through the air

Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue—
The letting go
A Presence—for an Expectation—
Not now—
The putting out of Eyes—
Just Sunrise—
Lest Day—
Day's Great Progenitor—
Outvie
Renunciation—is the Choosing
Against itself—
Itself to justify
Unto itself—
When larger function&mdash:
Make that appear—
Smaller—that Covered Vision—Here—

O very, very far from our dull earth,
The land where poets spring to glorious birth.
Thrice blessed land, where brood thrice happy skies,
Where he increaseth joy who groweth wise;
Where truth is not too beautiful to see,
Action is music, life a harmony.
There dwells the poet, till some luckless day
Prisons his spirit in our coarser clay,
And in our dull and dusty commonplace
He loses memory of his name and race,—
Till some bird twitters from a wayside thorn,
The language of the land where he was born;
Or west winds, whispering to the tall pine trees,

Minutes swiftly throb and pass,
Shadows cross the dial-glass,
Speeding ever to some call,
Weary world and shadows, all.

Down the closing aisles of day,
Tramping footsteps die away,
But no tidings thread the gloom,
From the hushed and silent tomb.