New Collected Rhymes

Who weigh each gift the world can give,
And sigh and murmur, What’s the odds
So long’s you’re happy?  Nay, what Man
Finds Happiness since Time began?

Ode of Jubilee

By A. C. S

Me, that have sung and shrieked, and foamed in praise of Freedom,
Me do you ask to sing
Parochial pomps, and waste, the wail of Jubileedom
For Queen, or Prince, or King!

* * * * *

Nay, by the foam that fleeting oars have feathered,
In Grecian seas;
Nay, by the winds that barques Athenian weathered —
By all of these
I bid you each be mute, Bards tamed and tethered,
And fee’d with fees!

For you the laurel smirched, for you the gold, too,
Of Magazines;
For me the Spirit of Song, unbought, unsold to
Pale Priests or Queens!

For you the gleam of gain, the fluttering cheque
Of Mr. Knowles,
For me, to soar above the ruins and wreck
Of Snobs and “Souls”!

When aflush with the dew of the dawn, and the
Rose of the Mystical Vision,
The spirit and soul of the Men of the
Future shall rise and be free,
They shall hail me with hymning and harping,
With eloquent Art and Elysian, —
The Singer who sung not but spurned them,
The slaves that could sing “Jubilee;”
With pinchbeck lyre and tongue,
Praising their tyrant sung,
They shall fail and shall fade in derision,
As wind on the ways of the sea!

Jubilee Before Revolution

By W. M

“Tell me, O Muse of the Shifty, the Man who wandered afar,”
So have I chanted of late, and of Troy burg wasted of war —
Now of the sorrows of Menfolk that fifty years have been,
Now of the Grace of the Commune I sing, and the days of a Queen!
Surely I curse rich Menfolk, “the Wights of the Whirlwind” may they —
This is my style of translating ‘Αρπυίαι, – snatch them away!
The Rich Thieves rolling in wealth that make profit of labouring men,
Surely the Wights of the Whirlwind shall swallow them quick in their den!
O baneful, O wit-straying, in the Burg of London ye dwell,
And ever of Profits and three per cent. are the tales ye tell,
But the stark, strong Polyphemus shall answer you back again,
Him whom “No man slayeth by guile and not by main.”
(By “main” I mean “main force,” if aught at all do I mean.
In the Greek of the blindfold Bard it is simpler the sense to glean.)
You Polyphemus shall swallow and fill his mighty maw,
What time he maketh an end of the Priests, the Police, and the Law,
And then, ah, who shall purchase the poems of old that I sang,
Who shall pay twelve-and-six for an epic in Saga slang?
But perchance even “Hermes the Flitter” could scarcely expound what I mean,
And I trow that another were fitter to sing you a song for a Queen.

FOLK SONGS

French Peasant Songs

I

Oh, fair apple tree, and oh, fair apple tree,
As heavy and sweet as the blossoms on thee,
My heart is heavy with love.
It wanteth but a little wind
To make the blossoms fall;
It wanteth but a young lover
To win me heart and all.

II

I send my love letters
By larks on the wing;
My love sends me letters
When nightingales sing.

Without reading or writing,
Their burden we know:
They only say, “Love me,
Who love you so.”

III

And if they ask for me, brother,