Juvenilia
A Fable for Feasters
In England, long before that royal Mormon
King Henry VIII found out that monks were quacks,
And took their lands and money from the poor men,
And brought their abbeys tumbling at their backs,
There was a village founded by some Norman
Who levied on all travelers his tax;
Nearby this hamlet was a monastary
Inhabited by a band of friars merry.
They were possessors of rich lands and wide,
An orchard, and a vineyard, and a dairy;
Whenever some old villainous baron died,
He added to their hoards—a deed which ne’er he
Had done before—their fortune multiplied,
As if they had been kept by a kind fairy.
Alas! no fairy visited their host,
Oh, no; much worse than that, they had a ghost.
Some wicked and heretical old sinner
Perhaps, who had been walled up for his crimes;
At any rate, he sometimes came to dinner,
Whene’er the monks were having merry times.
He stole the fatter cows and left the thinner
To furnish all the milk—upset the chimes,
And once he set the prior on the steeple,
To the astonishment of all the people.
When Christmas time was near the Abbot vowed
They’d eat their meal from ghosts and phantoms free,
The fiend must stay home—no ghosts allowed
At this exclusive feast. From over sea
He purchased at his own expense a crowd
Of relics from a Spanish saint—said he:
“If ghosts come uninvited, then, of course,
I’ll be compelled to keep them off by force.”
He drenched the gown he wore with holy water,
The turkeys, capons, boars, they were to eat,
He even soakt the uncomplaining porter
Who stood outside the door from head to feet.
To make a rather lengthy story shorter,
He left no wise precaution incomplete;
He doused the room in which they were to dine,
And watered everything except the wine.
So when all preparations had been made,
The jovial epicures sat down to table.
The menus of that time I am afraid
I don’t know much about—as well’s I’m able
I’ll go through the account: They made a raid
On every bird and beast in Aesop’s fable
To fill out their repast, and pies and puddings,
And jellies, pasties, cakes among the good things.
A mighty peacock standing on both legs
With difficulty kept from toppling over,
Next came a viand made of turtle eggs,
And after that a great pie made of plover,
And flagons which perhaps held several kegs
Of ale, and cheese which they kept under cover.
Last, a boar’s head, which to bring in took for pages,
His mouth an apple held, his skull held sausages.
Over their Christmas wassail the monks dozed,
A fine old drink, though now gone out of use—
His feet upon the table superposed
Each wisht he had not eaten so much goose.
The Abbot with proposing every toast
Had drank more than he ought t’ have of grape juice.
The lights began to burn distinctly blue,
As in ghost stories lights most always do.
The doors, though barred and bolted most securely,
Gave way—my statement nobody can doubt,
Who knows the well known fact, as you do surely—
That ghosts are fellows whom you can’t keep out;
It is a thing to be lamented sorely
Such slippery folk should be allowed about,
For often they drop in at awkward moments,
As everybody’ll know who reads this romance.
The Abbot sat as pasted to his chair,
His eye became the size of any dollar,
The ghost then took him roughly by the hair
And bade him come with him, in accents hollow.
The friars could do nought but gape and stare,
The spirit pulled him rudely by the collar,
And before any one could say “O jiminy!”
The pair had vanisht swiftly up the chimney.
Naturally every one searcht everywhere,
But not a shred of Bishop could be found,
The monks, when anyone questioned, would declare
St. Peter’d snatcht to heaven their lord renowned,
Though the wicked said (such rascals are not rare)
That the Abbot’s course lay nearer underground;
But the church straightaway put to his name the handle
of Saint, thereby rebuking all such scandal.
But after this the monks grew most devout,
And lived on milk and breakfast food entirely;
Each morn from four to five one took a knout
And flogged his mates ’til they grew good and friarly.
Spirits from that time forth they did without,
And lived the admiration of the shire. We
Got the veracious record of those doings
From an old manuscript found in the ruins.
A Lyric
If space and time, as sages say,
Are things that cannot be,
The fly that lives a single day
Has lived as long as we.
But let us live while yet we may,
While love and life are free,
For time is time, and runs away,
Though sages disagree.
The flowers I sent thee when the dew
Was trembling on the vine
Were withered ere the wild bee flew
To suck the eglantine.
But let us haste to pluck anew
Nor mourn to see them pine,
And though the flowers of life be few
Yet let them be divine.
Song
When We Came Home Across the Hill
When we came home across the hill
No leaves were fallen from the trees;
The gentle fingers of the breeze
Had torn no quivering cobweb down.
The hedgerow bloomed with flowers still,
No withered petals lay beneath;
But the wild roses in your wreath
Were faded, and the leaves were brown.
Before Morning
While all the East was weaving red with gray,
The flowers at the window turned toward dawn,
Petal on petal, waiting for the day,
Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn.
This morning’s flowers and flowers of yesterday
Their fragrance drifts across the room at dawn,
Fragrance of bloom and fragrance of decay,
Fresh flowers, withered flowers, flowers of dawn.
Circe’s Palace
Around her fountain which flows
With the voice of men in pain,
Are flowers that no man knows.
Their petals are fanged and red
With hideous streak and stain.
They sprang from the limbs of the dead.—
We shall not come here again.
Panthers rise from their lairs
In the forest which thickens below,
Along the garden stairs
The sluggish python lies;
The peacock’s walk, stately and slow
And they look at us with the eyes
Of men whom we knew long ago.
On a Portrait
Among a crowd of tenuous dreams, unknown
To us of restless brain and weary feet,
Forever hurrying, up and down the street,
She stands at evening in the room alone.
Not like a tranquil goddess carved of stone
But evanescent, as if one should meet
A pensive lamia in some wood-retreat,
An immaterial fancy of one’s own.
No meditations glad or ominous
Disturb her lips, or move the slender hands;
Her dark eyes keep their secrets hid from us,
Beyond the circle of our thoughts she stands.
The parrot on the bar, a silent spy,
Regards her with a patient curious eye.
Song
The Moonflower Opens to the Moth
The moonflower opens to the moth,
The mist crawls in from sea;
A great white bird, a snowy owl,
Slips from the alder tree.
Whiter the flowers, love, you hold,
Than the white mist on the sea;
Have you no brighter tropic flowers
With scarlet life, for me?
Nocturne
Romeo, grand sérieux, to importune
Guitar and hat in hand, beside the gate
With Juliet, in the usual debate
Of love, beneath a bored but courteous moon;
The conversation failing, strikes some tune
Banal, and out of pity for their fate
Behind the wall I have some servant wait,
Stab, and the lady sinks into a swoon.
Blood looks effective on the moonlit ground—
The hero smiles; in my best mode oblique
Rolls toward the moon a frenzied eye profound,
(No need of “Love forever?”—“Love next week?”)
While female readers all in tears are drowned:—
“The perfect climax all true lovers seek!”
One of my marionettes is dead
Though not yet tired of the game—
But weak in body as in head,
(A jumping-jack has such a frame).
But this deceasèd marionette
I rather liked: a common face,
(The kind of face that we forget)
Pinched in a comic, dull grimace;
Half bullying, half imploring air,
Mouth twisted to the latest tune;
His who-the-devil-are-you stare;
Translated, maybe, to the moon.
With Limbo’s other useless things
Haranguing spectres, set him there;
“The snappiest fashion since last spring’s,
“The newest style, on Earth, I swear.
“Why don’t you people get some class?
(Feebly contemptuous of nose),
“Your damned thin moonlight, worse than gas—
“Now in New York”—and so it goes.
Logic a marionette’s, all wrong
Of premises; yet in some star
A hero!—Where would he belong?
But, even at that, what mask bizarre!
Spleen
Sunday: this satisfied procession
Of definite Sunday faces;
Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces
In repetition that displaces
Your mental self-possession
By this unwarranted digression.
Evening, lights, and tea!
Children and cats in the alley;
Dejection unable to rally
Against this dull conspiracy.
And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute.
Ode
For the Hour That Is Left Us Fair Harvard, with Thee
For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard, with thee,
Ere we face the importunate years,
In thy shadow we wait, while thy presence dispels
Our vain hesitations and fears.
And we turn as thy sons ever turn, in the strength
Of the hopes that thy blessings bestow,
From the hopes and ambitions that sprang at thy feet
To the thoughts of the past as we go.
Yet for all of these years that to-morrow has lost
We are still the less able to grieve,
With so much that of Harvard we carry away
In the place of the life that we leave.
And only the years that efface and destroy
Give us also the vision to see
What we owe for the future, the present, and past,
Fair Harvard, to thine and to thee.