Poems, 1914-1919

When he took flight,
And roosted high aloft,
Beyond the shrubbery and the garden fence,
He would return and seek his safer bars,
All of his own accord; and he would plead
Forgiveness for the trouble and the search,
And for the anxious heart he caused to bleed,
And settle once again upon his perch,
And utter a propitiating note,
And take the heart
Of Juliet by his pretty winning ways.
His was the art
Of pleasing without effort easily.
His fluffy throat,
His sage round eye,
Sad with old knowledge, bright with young amaze,
Where are they now? ah! where?
Perchance in the pale halls of Hecate,
Or in the poplars of Elysium,
He wanders careless and completely free.
But in the regions dumb,
And in the pallid air,
He will not find a sweet, caressing hand
Like Juliet’s; not in all that glimmering land
Shall he behold a silver planet rise
As splendid as the light of Juliet’s eyes.
Therefore in weeping with you, Juliet,
Oh! let us not forget,
To drop with sprigs of rosemary and rue,
A not untimely tear
Upon the bier,
Of him who lost so much in losing you.

LE PRINCE ERRANT

I am the Prince of unremembered towers
Destroyed before the birth of Babylon;
And I was there when all the forest shone
While pale Medea culled her deadly flowers.
I heard the iron weeping of the King,
When Orpheus sang to life his buried joy;
And I beheld upon the walls of Troy
The woman who made of death a little thing.

I heard the horn that shook the mountain tall,
When Roland lay a-dying, and the call
That fevered Tristram whispered o’er the sea,
And brought Iseult of Cornwall to his side.
I saw the Queen of Egypt like a bride
Go glorious to her dead Mark Antony.