THE PRINCES AT THE GATE

Prince, you are late!
The princess watches for you at the gate:
Looks down the long dull road with eager eyes
And whispers softly, " Love, I wait ... I wait. "

Prince, is it wise
To be so long in coming? for youth flies,
And other men pass lightly on their way
And see a pretty princess there who sighs,

And one might say,
" I am the prince you watch for every day,
" Pale princess looking out with eyes like stars,
" I love you, little princess, let me stay. "

Behind her bars

WITH THE IMMORTALS

Life and Love went flying, flying,
Out of the world together.
Nothing cared they for pain or dying,
Nothing for stormy weather.
Up they flew
Towards the blue,
Earth and time defying.

Life and Love kept winging, winging,
Higher and ever higher.
Slowly their bright forms vanished, swinging

O LOVELY Griddle where my Cakes of Song
Are baked! O Gulf Stream of my ocean deep!
O Human Thermos Bottle! will you keep
My love as hot as this our whole lives long?
Or will the slow years moderate the strong
Caloric currents? ... gradual years that creep
To frost Love's tootsies where he lies asleep
Shall our fate be that of the common throng?

Well, you at least will live in memory;
And that, Suzanne, is more than I can say
Of my Wife Number Twenty-one, for she
Out of my mind has faded quite away.

Sun of my Heaven! Harvest Moon of love!
Bright Planet! Comet! ... whether earth or sky
I scan, your Pink Bean meets my spirit's eye,
O peer of flowers beneath and stars above!
O Aphrodite's Crimson-Crested Dove,
I love you as New Englanders love pie!
Vesuvius Girl! your fiery head fling high
And give yon leering Zenith's face a shove!

My Twelfth Wife used to go about with twisters
Of kid upon her hair to keep it curley ...
I pulled it all out by the roots ... Poor girlie!
Her baldness rather shocked her aunts and sisters ...

I

P ITTIE mee, Chloris, and the flame
Disdaine, and distance, cannot tame;
And pittie my necessitie,
That makes my Court-shippe, wanting thee,
Nothing but fond Idolatrie.

II

In darke, and Melancholly Groves,
Where prettie birds discourse their Loves,
I dayly worshippe on my knee,
Thy shaddow, all I have of thee,
And sue to that to pittie me.

III

I vow to it the sacred vow,
To thee, and only thee, I owe
When (as it knew my true intent)

Heaven, if it be thy undisputed will
That still
This charming Sex we must adore,
Let us love less, or they love more;
For so the Ills that we endure,
Will find some ease, if not a cure:
Or if their hearts from the first Gangrene be
Infected to that desperate degree
As will no Surgery admit;
Out of thy love to Men at least forbear
To make their faces so subduing fair,
And if thou wilt give Beauty, limit it:
For moderate Beauty, though it bear no price,
Is yet a mighty enemy to Vice,

This is the dusk-hour when for old love's sake
Ghosts in this garden might arise and move
Down vanished paths, and memories might awake
Out of the death that is so chill to love.
You whose old sins have in the later time
Become a legend perilous and sweet
With tragic whisperings of courtly rhyme, —
Lovely dead chatelaine! — are these your feet
That now across my silence slowly pace
Thrilling the darkness of this garden-close?
Turn! ... No, this is no golden harlot's face, —
This is the bud that is not yet the rose,

Great are thy gifts and greater yet shall be —
For thou alone, dear Sire, canst conquer thee.
But 'tis not they that our affection move;
It is because of thee thy gifts we love.

Weep for your crime, weep o'er the Lucrine lake,
Ye Naiads, till your cries e'en Thetis wake.
For Eutychos 'neath Baiae's waves you drew
And for my Castricus his comrade slew,
Who was his comfort and his chiefest joy,
Loved by our bard as Virgil loved his boy.

Did the nymph see thee naked in the mere
And give Alcides back his Hylas dear?
Or does the goddess in thy love delight
And for thy arms neglect Hermaphrodite?
Whate'er the cause of rape so sudden be,
Let earth, I pray, and wave be kind to thee.

Me kindly Rome loves, quotes my books, and buys them;
But till that critic feigning to despise them
Blushed and turned pale, then yawned and looked confounded,
I never felt my fame was surely grounded.