Campos, ubi Troja fuit.
Virg.


Where Kensington, high o'er the neighbouring lands
Midst greens and sweets, a regal fabric, stands,
And sees each spring, luxuriant in her bowers,
A snow of blossoms, and a wild of flowers,
The dames of Britain oft in crowds repair
To gravel walks, and unpolluted air.
Here, while the town in damps and darkness lies,
They breathe in sun-shine, and see azure skies;
Each walk, with robes of various dyes bespread,
Seems from afar a moving tulip-bed,

Oh Julie Claire was very fair,
Yet generous as well,
And many a lad of metal had
A saucy tale to tell
Of sultry squeeze beneath the trees
Or hugging in the hay . . .
Of love her share had Julie Claire
When life was lush and gay.
II
And then the village wealth to pillage
Came the Teuton horde;
The haughty Huns with mighty guns
And clattering of sword.
And Julie Claire had honey hair
With eyes of soft azure,
So she became the favoured flame
Of the Kommandatur.
III
But when at last the plague was past,

Canadian


Jubal sang of the Wrath of God
And the curse of thistle and thorn--
But Tubal got him a pointed rod,
And scrabbled the earth for corn.
Old--old as that early mould,
Young as the sprouting grain--
Yearly green is the strife between
Jubal and Tubal Cain!

Jubal sang of the new-found sea,
And the love that its waves divide--
But Tubal hollowed a fallen tree
And passed to the further side.
Black-black as the hurricane-wrack,
Salt as the under-main-
Bitter and cold is the hate they hold--

When Joshua in the days of old
Stood forth upon old Jordan’s bank,
And past the flood that backward rolled
His host came dryshod, rank on rank;
The warrior angel of the Lord,
A glorious shining creature, bared
Before him there a flaming sword,
And thus the mind of God declared—
“Lo, I am with you! Here shall dwell
My chosen people; here I plant thee, Israel!”
The walls of Jericho are strong,
And ribbed throughout with many a tower,

One Joseph 'Rudy' Julian,
A World War Two Marine,
Was killed on Iwo Jima in a
A most heroic scene.

On Iwo Jima, forty-five,
Where three Marine Divisions fought,
The enemy vowed kill ten of us
Before each being caught.

The nineteenth day of battle loomed
As Joe went on ahead.
His men were told to cover him:
The last thing he had said.
Because they were receiving fire
From several cliff-side caves,
Their chief went forward, covered by
The firing from his braves.

Oh! the dew-wet grass of the meadow in North Carolina
Through which Rebecca followed me wailing, wailing,
One child in her arms, and three that ran along wailing,
Lengthening out the farewell to me off to the war with the British,
And then the long, hard years down to the day of Yorktown.
And then my search for Rebecca,
Finding her at last in Virginia,
Two children dead in the meanwhile.
We went by oxen to Tennessee,
Thence after years to Illinois,
At last to Spoon River.
We cut the buffalo grass,
We felled the forests,

I won the prize essay at school
Here in the village,
And published a novel before I was twenty-five.
I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art;
There married the banker’s daughter,
And later became president of the bank—
Always looking forward to some leisure
To write an epic novel of the war.
Meanwhile friend of the great, and lover of letters,
And host to Matthew Arnold and to Emerson.
An after dinner speaker, writing essays
For local clubs. At last brought here—
My boyhood home, you know—

Neither spite, fellow citizens,
Nor forgetfulness of the shiftlessness,
And the lawlessness and waste
Under democracy's rule in Spoon River
Made me desert the party of law and order
And lead the liberal party.
Fellow citizens! I saw as one with second sight
That every man of the millions of men
Who give themselves to Freedom,
And fail while Freedom fails,
Enduring waste and lawlessness,
And the rule of the weak and the blind,
Dies in the hope of building earth,
Like the coral insect, for the temple
To stand on at the last.

Though for your sake I would not have you now
So near to me tonight as now you are,
God knows how much a stranger to my heart
Was any cold word that I may have written;
And you, poor woman that I made my wife,
You have had more of loneliness, I fear,
Than I—though I have been the most alone,
Even when the most attended. So it was
God set the mark of his inscrutable
Necessity on one that was to grope,
And serve, and suffer, and withal be glad
For what was his, and is, and is to be,
When his old bones, that are a burden now,

Never knew Jim, did you? Our boy Jim?
Bless you, there was the likely lad;
Supple and straight and long of limb,
Clean as a whistle, and just as glad.
Always laughing, wasn't he, dad?
Joy, pure joy to the heart of him,
And, oh, but the soothering ways he had,
Jim, our Jim!
II
But I see him best as a tiny tot,
A bonny babe, though it's me that speaks;
Laughing there in his little cot,
With his sunny hair and his apple cheeks.
And my! but the blue, blue eyes he'd got,