Short Poems

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.

Four stiff standers,
Four lily landers,
Two lookers, two crookers,
And a wig-wag.

Since the day
I saw the treetop blossoms
in Yoshino's mountains
my heart has not stayed
with my body at all.

For physic and farces his equal there scarce is;
His farces are physic; his physic a farce is.

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?

There were tiny flames in her eyes,
Her mouth was a flame,
And her flesh. . . . . . .
Now she is ashes.

For every evil under the sun,
There is a remedy, or there is none.
If there be one, try and find it;
If there be none, never mind it.

In an English Distick.

A Fool much bit by fleas put out the light,
You shall not see me now (quoth he) good night.

The fog is freezing on the trees and shrubs;
Each tendril of the larch is edged with lace;
The tiniest twigs are filigreed with frost;
There is faint movement through an open space —
And lovely white ghosts wake mysteriously
Like white thoughts smiling through gray memory.

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.