Deign, Sovereign Mistress! to accept a Lay,
No laureate Offering of elaborate art;
But salutation taking its glad way
From deep recesses of a loyal heart.

Queen, Wife and Mother! may All-judging Heaven
Shower with a bounteous hand on Thee and Thine
Felicity that only can be given
On earth to goodness blest by Grace divine.

Lady! devoutly honoured and beloved
Through every realm confided to thy sway;
Mayst thou pursue thy course by God approved,
And He will teach thy People to obey;

As thou art wont, thy Sovereignty adorn

Innocent spirits, bright, immaculate ghosts!
Why throng your heavenly hosts,
As eager for their birth
In this sad home of death, this sorrow-haunted earth?

Beware! Beware! Content you where you are,
And shun this evil star,
Where we who are doomed to die
Have our brief being, and pass, we know not where or why.

We have not to consent or to refuse;
It is not ours to choose:
We come because we must,
We know not by what law, if unjust or if just.

The doom is on us, as it is on you,
That nothing can undo;
And all in vain you warn:

S YNG a song of Saxons
In the Wapentake of Rye
Four and twenty eaoldormen
Too eaold to die . . . .

You ask me in a general way
To state my Platform and to say
What several planks compose it:
Yet can a pure Philosopher
(Prone like the rest of us to err)
Know what he thinks—I ask you, Sir!—
Who only thinks he knows it?

Pass we that point. I'll do my best,
In answer to your strange request,
To satisfy your wishes:
To serve the Good is still my plan,
Rejecting with a ruthless ban
And crushing down whene'er I can
All elements pernicious!

‘But will you vote’ (I hear you cry)
‘For every cause and purpose high,

Is this my tomb, this humble stone
Above this narrow mound
Is this my resting place, so lone
So green so quiet round?
Not even a stately tree to shade
The sunbeam from my bed
Not even a flower in tribute laid
As sacred to the dead

I look along those evening hills
As mute as earth may be
I hear not even the voice of rills
Not even a cloud I see
How long is it since human tread
Was heard on that dim track
Which through the shadowy valley's bed
Winds far & farther back

And was I not a lady once
My home a princely hall

Just like the spray
of a whale
rising for air
in
the salt breeze—
in the offing,
one clump of clouds
dropping
an evening shower.

There are remembrances that sear the brain,
There are sweet thoughts of other times, that wing
Their dove-like passage o'er the mind, and bring
Returning peace, and musings free from pain.
I have distinct remembrances of thee,
That fall upon me with a leaden weight,
Revealing days of past anxiety;
And then, again, calm visions, that recall
Far holier joys than Fancy can create.
Indeed, I deem these bright realities
Ofttimes, for they seem breathing ecstacies
Of present bliss passing before mine eyes.

I WAKE in the night,
And sudden my eyes grope,
High through the dark of the battlefields,
For the place where he is flying
Through thin perilous ether.
In cold dizzy heights
Over the foe I see him,
His soaring plane in a swirl of clouds hidden,
And he, my little boy,
Who once crawled at my feet,
Nor dared to take three steps across my chamber,
He the eagle soul of it!

Ah yes, I see and hear him,
There in the earthless chill,
With iron talons ready
To release swift bombs on sleeping Rhine cities.

Fair am I, mortals, as a stone-carved dream,
And all men wound themselves against my breast,
The poet's last desire, the loveliest.
Voiceless, eternal as the world I seem.
In the blue air, strange sphinx, I brood supreme
With heart of snow whiter than swan's white crest,
No movement mars the plastic line—I rest
With lips untaught to laugh or eyes to stream.

Singers who see, in trancèd interludes,
My splendour set with all superb design,
Consume their days, in toilful ecstasy.
To these revealed, the starry amplitudes