Poems

								


      Happy, and pensive past for ever is.
I shall be then a garden charmed from changing,

   In which your June has never passed away.

      Walk there awhile among my memories.

IN AUTUMN

The leaves are many under my feet,

   And drift one way.
Their scent of death is weary and sweet.

   A flight of them is in the grey
Where sky and forest meet.
The low winds moan for dead sweet years;

   The birds sing all for pain,
Of a common thing, to weary ears,--

   Only a summer's fate of rain,
And a woman's fate of tears.
I walk to love and life alone

   Over these mournful places,
Across the summer overthrown,

   The dead joys of these silent faces,
To claim my own.
I know his heart has beat to bright

   Sweet loves gone by.
I know the leaves that die to-night

   Once budded to the sky,
And I shall die from his delight.
O leaves, so quietly ending now,

   You have heard cuckoos sing.
And I will grow upon my bough

   If only for a Spring,
And fall when the rain is on my brow.
O tell me, tell me ere you die,

   Is it worth the pain?
You bloomed so fair, you waved so high;

   Now that the sad days wane,
Are you repenting where you lie?
I lie amongst you, and I kiss

   Your fragrance mouldering.
O dead delights, is it such bliss,

   That tuneful Spring?
Is love so sweet, that comes to this?
O dying blisses of the year,

   I hear the young lambs bleat,
The clamouring birds i' the copse I hear,

   I hear the waving wheat,
Together laid on a dead-leaf bier.
Kiss me again as I kiss you;

   Kiss me again;
For all your tuneful nights of dew,

   In this your time of rain,
For all your kisses when Spring was new.
You will not, broken hearts; let be.

   I pass across your death
To a golden summer you shall not see,

   And in your dying breath
There is no benison for me.
There is an autumn yet to wane,

   There are leaves yet to fall,
Which, when I kiss, may kiss again,

   And, pitied, pity me all for all,
And love me in mist and rain.

A LETTER FROM A GIRL TO HER OWN OLD AGE

Listen, and when thy hand this paper presses,
O time-worn woman, think of her who blesses
What thy thin fingers touch, with her caresses.
O mother, for the weight of years that break thee!
O daughter, for slow time must yet awake thee,
And from the changes of my heart must make thee.
O fainting traveller, morn is grey in heaven.
Dost thou remember how the clouds were driven?
And are they calm about the fall of even?
Pause near the ending of thy long migration,
For this one sudden hour of desolation
Appeals to one hour of thy meditation.
Suffer, O silent one, that I remind thee
Of the great hills that stormed the sky behind thee,
Of the wild winds of power that have resigned thee.
Know that the mournful plain where thou must wander
Is but a grey and silent world, but ponder
The misty mountains of the morning yonder.
Listen:- the mountain winds with rain were fretting,