Whatever in Philoclea the fair
Or the discreet Pamela figur'd are,
Change but the name the virtues are your owne,
And for a fiction there a truth is knowne:
If any service here perform'd you see,
If duty and affection paynted bee
Within these leaves: may you be pleas'd to know
They only shadow what I truly owe
To your desart: thus I a glasse have sent
Which both myself and you doth represent.
Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
I.
Oh, what a dawn of day!
How the March sun feels like May!
All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey,
II.
Runnels, which rillets swell,
Must be dancing down the dell,
With a foaming head
On the beryl bed
Paven smooth as a hermit's cell;
Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love but attend as well.
III.
The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned
To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,
And spread the roof above them,---ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication. For his simple heart
Might not resist the sacred influences,
Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For peg and Meg and Paris' love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.
Were I but there and none to hear
I'd have a peacock cry,
For that is natural to a man
That lives in memory,
Being all alone I'd nurse a stone
And sing it lullaby.
There's sunshine in the heart of me,
My blood sings in the breeze;
The mountains are a part of me,
I'm fellow to the trees.
My golden youth I'm squandering,
Sun-libertine am I;
A-wandering, a-wandering,
Until the day I die.
II
I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,
And I roomed in the cool of a cave;
I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,
The fret and the sweat of a slave:
For far over all that folks hold worth,
There lives and there leaps in me
We two were lovers, the Sea and I;
We plighted our troth ‘neath a summer sky.
And all through the riotous ardent weather
We dreamed, and loved, and rejoiced together.
* * *
At times my lover would rage and storm.
I said: ‘No matter, his heart is warm.’
Whatever his humour, I loved his ways,
And so we lived though the golden days.
I know not the manner it came about,
But in the autumn we two fell out.
Yet this I know – ‘twas the fault of the Sea,
St. Andrews, 1923
The, Gods that are wiser than Learning
But kinder than Life have made sure
No mortal may boast in the morning
That even will find him secure.
With naught for fresh faith or new trial,
With little unsoiled or unsold,
Can the shadow go back on the dial,
Or a new world be given for the old?
But he knows not that time shall awaken,
As he knows not what tide shall lay bare,
The heart of a man to be taken --
Taken and changed unaware.
To all to whom this little book may come--
Health for yourselves and those you hold most dear!
Content abroad, and happiness at home,
And--one grand Secret in your private ear: --
Nations have passed away and left no traces,
And History gives the naked cause of it--
One single, simple reason in all cases;
They fell because their peoples were not fit.
Now, though your Body be mis-shapen, blind,
Lame, feverish, lacking substance, power or skill,
Certain it is that men can school the Mind
We are very slightly changed
From the semi-apes who ranged
India's Prehistoric clay;
He that drew the longest bow
Ran his brother down, you know,
As we run men down to-day.
"Dowb," the first of all his race,
Met the Mammoth face to face
On the lake or in the cave:
Stole the steadiest canoe,
Ate the quarry others slew,
Died -- and took the finest grave.
When they scratched the reindeer-bone,
Some one made the sketch his own,
Filched it from the artist -- then,
Even in those early days,
