English

On the picket line
The morning starts with
A flaming mass of scorn and
Endurance;
With the parade of the humble and
Cops
With judicial assurance to
The big
Cheap buyers of life.

On the picket line
Peddlers sell red, ripe, sliced watermelon
And workers give their red blood free.
On the picket line policemen chew fleshy desires for live human steak.
On the picket line we can detect the buzzing of a bee and
The sneering of
A snake

On the picket line

Poet and Flute-player, that flute of thine
To me must ever seem thy perfect sign!
Tho' strenuously with breath divine inspired,
To thy strait law is due thy deathless line.

When snows the dead earth cumber
And weary Winter reigns
When streams in frozen slumber
Lie torpid in the plains;
Though all seems dead forever,
We know that nought can sever
Cold earth and rigid river
From Spring's awakening.

When trees are bare, and shining
With Winter's frozen breath,
The buds in their warm lining
Know 'tis but seeming death;
Know that not all his keenness,
Nor North Wind's hungry leanness
Can freeze their sleeping greenness
From waking in the spring.

A placed alone is but an idle worde.
E parce E, spells nothinge but it selfe;
I yet alone male lovely thoughtes afoorde:
but O, alas, dothe plaie the frowarde elfe:
to prove the Reason of this Riddle true:
not A nor E nor O, but I and yow.

Hail, puissant god, lord of all the gods,
The pillars of the world uprear thine hall;
Nations supply thy loaded table's feast
And thou, O pitiless, devourest all.
What meat thro' ages has not filled thy maw—
Brave glutton—sweeter for men's agonies?
O Mammon, thou hast many sacrifices
The smoke of thy altars overwhelms the skies.

The groan of starvelings and the sweat of toil,
Success and failure; centuries of strife;
Drink, death, disease, and every rottenness;
Joy, beauty, strength, the flower, the weed of life;

Tyme is but shorte, and shorte the course of tyme
Pleasures doe pas but as a puffe of wynde,
Care hath accompte to make for euery cryme
And peace abids but with the settled minde

Of litle paine doth pacience great proceede,
And after sickenes helthe is daintie sweete;
A frende is best approuèd at a neede,
And sweete the thought where care and kindnes meete

Then thinke what comfort dothe of kyndnes breede
To knowe thy sycknes sorrowe to thy frende;
And lett thy faithe vpon this favoure feede

Scene, final;
Setting, modern;
House, interior.
Left centre, window open to the west;
Right centre, swing door (showing some exterior
And eastern garden seats where one may rest).

Dramatis Personae,
Two wand'ring spirits
Who speak their lines, then flit across the stage,
Trusting the audience to applaud their merits,
Hoping their failures earn not failure's wage.

Enter
The ‘Gentle Reader’ with this paper—
Then, warning tinkle of the curtain-bell;
The footlights lower; something like a vapour

A HUNDRED years ago they quarried for the stone here;
The carts came through the wood by the track still plain;
The drills show in the rock where the blasts were blown here,
They show up dark after rain.

Then the last cart of stone went away through the wood,
To build the great house for some April of a woman,
Till her beauty stood in stone, as her man's thought made it good,
And the dumb rock was made human.

The house still stands, but the April of its glory
Is gone, long since, with the beauty that has gone;

The broad earth smiles in open benison,
An emerald sea, whose waves of leaf and shade
On far-off shores of misty turquoise fade;
And all the host of life steers blithely on,
With joy for captain, fancy at the helm:
The woodpecker taps roundly at his tree,
The vaulting high-ho flings abroad his glee
In fluty laughter from the towering elm.
Here at my feet are violets, and below—
A gracile spirit tremulously alive—
Spring water fills a little greenish pool,
Paved all with mottled leaves and crystal cool.

Once , and in the daytime too, I made myself afraid,
Playing Eyelids-Up-and-Down, with the window-shade;
Till the Houses seemed to watch People going by;
And they kept me looking, too,—wondering where and why.

If I were that Other Boy,—if I were those Men,
Going by with things to sell,—who would I be, then?

Windows with their eyebrows high; windows like a frown,
Thinking it all over, so, with the curtains down;
Tall ones that are somehow sad, narrow ones that blink,—
All the Windows you can see make you think, and think.