Ten o'clock! the rain begins to fall,
And Nellie still from home!
Vainly now, her loving name we call,
Oh whither does she roam!
Can it be she wanders from the street,
Thro' the wood to find her lonely way,
Bless the child! I fear her little feet
Have carried her astray.

Wake the boys to search for Nellie!
Stay not for the dawn;
Who shall sleep when from the mother's fold
One little lamb is gone.

Eleven of o'clock! the little brothers wait,
Still hoping her return;
Peeping through the lattice of the gate,

I was only eight years old;
And before I grew up and knew what it meant
I had no words for it, except
That I was frightened and told my Mother;
And that my Father got a pistol
And would have killed Charlie, who was a big boy,
Fifteen years old, except for his Mother.
Nevertheless the story clung to me.
But the man who married me, a widower of thirty-five,
Was a newcomer and never heard it
Till two years after we were married.
Then he considered himself cheated,
And the village agreed that I was not really a virgin.

In kindergarten classed
Dislike they knew;
And as the years went past
It grew and grew;
Until in maidenhood
Each sought a mate,
Then venom in their mood
Was almost hate.

The lure of love they learned
And they were wed;
Yet when they met each turned
Away a head;
Each went her waspish way
With muted damns--
Until they met one day
With baby prams.

Then lo! Away was swept
The scorn of years;
Hands clasped they almost wept

Nature the gentlest mother is,
Impatient of no child,
The feeblest of the waywardest.
Her admonition mild

In forest and the hill
By traveller be heard,
Restraining rampant squirrel
Or too impetuous bird.

How fair her conversation
A summer afternoon,
Her household her assembly;
And when the sun go down,

Her voice among the aisles
Incite the timid prayer
Of the minutest cricket,
The most unworthy flower.

When all the children sleep,
She turns as long away

Primitive

I ate my fill of a whale that died
And stranded after a month at sea. . . .
There is a pain in my inside.
Why have the Gods afflicted me?
Ow! I am purged till I am a wraith!
Wow! I am sick till I cannot see!
What is the sense of Religion and Faith:
Look how the Gods have afflicted me!


Pagan

How can the skin of rat or mouse hold
Anything more than a harmless flea?. . .
The burning plague has taken my household.
Why have my Gods afflicted me?
All my kith and kin are deceased,

I.

Bleak was the pathway and barren the mountain,
As the traveller passed on his wearisome way,
Sealed by the frost was each murmuring fountain,
And the sun shone through mist with a blood-coloured ray.
But neither the road nor the danger together,
Could alter his purpose, nor yet the rough weather;
So on went the wayfarer through the thick heather,
Till he came to the cave where the dread witches stay.


II.

Hewn from the rock was that cavern so dreary,
And the entrance by bushes was hid from the sight,

Even the beauteous must die! This vanquishes men and immortals;
But of the Stygian god moves not the bosom of steel.
Once and once only could love prevail on the ruler of shadows,
And on the threshold, e'en then, sternly his gift he recalled.
Venus could never heal the wounds of the beauteous stripling,
That the terrible boar made in his delicate skin;
Nor could his mother immortal preserve the hero so godlike,
When at the west gate of Troy, falling, his fate he fulfilled.
But she arose from the ocean with all the daughters of Nereus,

I, WITH whose colours Myra dress'd her head,
   I, that ware posies of her own hand-making,
I, that mine own name in the chimneys read
   By Myra finely wrought ere I was waking:
Must I look on, in hope time coming may
With change bring back my turn again to play?

I, that on Sunday at the church-stile found
   A garland sweet with true-love-knots in flowers,
Which I to wear about mine arms was bound
   That each of us might know that all was ours:

I

Half of the fellow father as he doubles
His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,
Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
To-morrow's diver in her horny milk,
Bisected shadows on the thunder's bone
Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
Corrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,
The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,
For half of love was planted in the lost,
And the unplanted ghost.

The broken halves are fellowed in a cripple,

Wherever my feet may wander
Wherever I chance to be,
There comes, with the coming of even' time
A vision sweet to me.
I see my mother sitting
In the old familiar place,
And she rocks to the tune her needles sing,
And thinks of an absent face.

I can hear the roar of the city
AAbout me now as I write;
But over an hundred miles of snow
My thought-steeds fly tonight,
To the dear little cozy cottage,
And the room where mother sits,
And slowly rocks in her easy chair
And thinks of me as she knits.