Lest we do our youth wrong,
Gather them while we may:
Wine and woman and song.

Three things render us strong,
Vine leaves, kisses and bay;
Yet is day over long.

Unto us they belong,

Us the bitter and gay, Wine and woman and song.

We, as we pass along,

Are sad that they will not stay;

Yet is day over long.

Fruits and flowers among,

What is better than they: Wine and woman and song? Yet is day over long.

DREGS [1899.]

THE fire is out, and spent the warmth

thereof

(This is the end of every song man sings!) The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,

Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain; And health and hope have gone the way of love

Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and
wait

For the dropt curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.

LIBERA ME [1899.]

GODDESS the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, befriend!

Long have I served thine altars, serve me now at the end,

Let me have peace of thee, truce of thee, golden one, send.

Heart of my heart have I offered thee, pain of my pain.

Yielding my life for the love of thee into thy chain;

Lady and goddess be merciful, loose me again.

All things I had that were fairest, my dearest and best,

Fed the fierce flames on thine altar: ah, surely, my breast

THE STREET-SINGER

[1889.]

SHE sings a pious ballad wearily;
Her shivering body creeps on painful feet
Along the muddy runlets of the street;
The damp is in her throat; she coughs to
free

The cracked and husky notes that tear her chest;

From side to side she looks with eyes that grope,

Feverishly hungering in a hopeless hope, For pence that will not come; and pence mean rest,

The rest that pain may steal at night from sleep,

The rest that hunger gives when satisfied; Her fingers twitch to handle them; she sings

Shriller; her eyes, too hot with tears to

NIGHT, a grey sky, a ghostly sea,
The soft beginning of the rain;
Black on the horizon, sails that wane
Into the distance mistily.

The tide is rising, I can hear

The soft roar broadening far along;
It cries and murmurs in my ear
A sleepy old forgotten song.

Softly the stealthy night descends,
The black sails fade into the sky:
Is not this, where the sea-line ends,
The shore-line of infinity?

I cannot think or dream; the grey
Unending waste of sea and night,
Dull, impotently infinite,

Blots out the very hope of day.

APRIL MIDNIGHT

[1892.]

SIDE by side through the streets at midnight,
Roaming together,
Through the tumultuous night of London,
In the miraculous April weather.

Roaming together under the gaslight,
Day's work over,

How the Spring calls to us, here in the city, Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!

Cool the wind blows, fresh in our faces, Cleansing, entrancing,

After the heat and the fumes and the footlights,

Where you dance and I watch your dancing.

Good it is to be here together,

Good to be roaming,

Even in London, even at midnight,

Lover-like in a lover's gloaming.

You the dancer and I the dreamer,
Children together,

Wandering lost in the night of London,
In the miraculous April weather.

IN THE TRAIN [1892.]

THE train through the night of the town,
Through a blackness broken in twain
By the sudden finger of streets;
Lights, red, yellow, and brown,
From curtain and window-pane,
The flashing eyes of the streets.

Night, and the rush of the train,
A cloud of smoke through the town,
Scaring the life of the streets;
And the leap of the heart again,
Out into the night, and down
The dazzling vista of streets!

PROLOGUE: BEFORE THE CURTAIN [1895.]

WE are the puppets of a shadow-play,
We dream the plot is woven of our hearts,
Passionately we play the self-same parts
Our fathers have played passionately yes-
terday,

And our sons play to-morrow. There's no speech

In all desire, nor any idle word,

Men have not said and women have not

heard;

And when we lean and whisper each to each Until the silence quickens to a kiss,

Even so the actor and the actress played
The lovers yesterday; when the lights fade
Before our feet, and the obscure abyss
Opens, and darkness falls about our eyes,
'Tis only that some momentary rage
Or rapture blinds us to forget the stage,
Like the wise actor, most in this thing wise.
We pass, and have our gesture; love and
pain

And hope and apprehension and regret
Weave ordered lines into a pattern set
Not for our pleasure, and for us in vain.
The gesture is eternal; we who pass
Pass on the gesture; we, who pass, pass on
One after one into oblivion,

As shadows dim and vanish from a glass.

If he has any valiancy within,

If he has made his life his very own,

If he has loved or laboured, and has known A strenuous virtue, or a strenuous sin; Then, being dead, his life was not all vain, For he has saved what most desire to lose, And he has chosen what the few must choose,

Since life, once lived, shall not return again.

For of our time we lose so large a part
In serious trifles, and so oft let slip
The wine of every moment, at the lip
Its moment, and the moment of the heart.
We are awake so little on the earth,

And we shall sleep so long, and rise so late,

If there is any knocking at that gate Which is the gate of death, the gate of birth.

SEA-WIND

(Translated from Stéphane Mallarmé.)

THE flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read.

Flight, only flight! I feel that birds are wild to tread

The floor of unknown foam, and to attain the skies!

Nought, neither ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,

Nor the young wife who rocks her baby on her breast.

I will depart! O steamer, swaying rope and spar,

Lift anchor for exotic lands that lie afar! A weariness, outworn by cruel hopes, still clings

To the last farewell handkerchief's last beckonings!

And are not these, the masts inviting storms, not these

That an awakening wind bends over wrecking seas,

Lost, not a sail, a sail, a flowering isle, ere long?

But, O my heart, hear thou, hear thou the sailors' song!

FROM ROMANCES SANS PAROLES
(Translated from Paul Verlaine.)
TEARS in my heart that weeps,
Like the rain upon the town.
What drowsy languor steeps
In tears my heart that weeps?

O sweet sound of the rain
On earth and on the roofs!
For a heart's weary pain
O the song of the rain!

Vain tears, vain tears, my heart!
What, none hath done thee wrong?
Tears without reason start
From my disheartened heart.

This is the weariest woe,

O heart, of love and hate Too weary, not to know Why thou hast all this woe.

ARQUES AFTERNOON

[1897.]

GENTLY a little breeze begins to creep
Into the valley, and the sleeping trees
Are stirred, and breathe a little in their
sleep,

And nod, half-wakened, to the breeze.

Cool little quiet shadows wander out Across the fields, and dapple with dark trails

The snake-grey road coiled stealthily abou The green hill climbing from the vales.

And faintlier, in this cooler peace of things,
My brooding thoughts, a scattered flock
grown few,
Withdrawn upon their melancholy wing,
Float farther off against the blue.

CHOPIN [1897.]

O PASSIONATE music beating the troubled beat

I have heard in my heart, in the wind, in the passing of feet,

In the passing of dreams, when on heartthrobbing wings they move;

O passionate music pallid with ghostly fears,

Chill with the coming of rain, the beginning of tears,

I come to you, fleeing you, finding you, fever of love!

When I am sleepless at night and I play through the night,

Lest I hear a voice, lest I see, appealing and white,

The face that never, in dreams or at dawn, departs,

Then it is, shuddering music my hands have played,

I find you, fleeing you, finding you, music, made

Of all passionate, wounded, capricious consuming hearts.

THE OLD WOMEN
[1899.]

THEY pass upon their old, tremulous feet, Creeping with little satchels down the street,

And they remember, many years ago, Passing that way in silks. They wander, slow

And solitary, through the city ways,

And they alone remember those old days Men have forgotten. In their shaking heads

A dancer of old carnivals yet treads
The measure of past waltzes, and they see
The candles lit again, the patchouli
Sweeten the air, and the warm cloud of
musk

Enchant the passing of the passionate dusk.

Then you will see a light begin to creep Under the earthen eyelids, dimmed with sleep,

And a new tremor, happy and uncouth,
Jerking about the corners of the mouth.
Then the old head drops down again, and
shakes,
Muttering.

Sometimes, when the swift gaslight wakes The dreams and fever of the sleepless town,

A shaking huddled thing in a black gown
Will steal at midnight, carrying with her
Violet little bags of lavender,

Into the tap-room full of noisy light;
Or, at the crowded earlier hour of night,
Sidle, with matches, up to some who stand
About a stage-door, and, with furtive hand,
Appealing: "I too was a dancer, when
Your fathers would have been young
gentlemen!"

And sometimes, out of some lean ancient throat,

A broken voice, with here and there a note Of unspoilt crystal, suddenly will arise Into the night, while a cracked fiddle cries Pantingly after; and you know she sings The passing of light, famous, passing things.

And sometimes, in the hours past midnight, reels

Out of an alley upon staggering heels,
Or into the dark keeping of the stones
About a doorway, a vague thing of bones
And draggled hair.

And all these have been loved.

And not one ruinous body has not moved The heart of man's desire, nor has not seemed

Immortal in the eyes of one who dreamed The dream that men call love. This is the end

Of much fair flesh; it is for this you tend
Your delicate bodies many careful years,
To be this thing of laughter and of tears,
To be this living judgment of the dead,
An old grey woman with a shaking head.

THE UNLOVED

THESE are the women whom no man has loved.

Year after year, day after day has moved These hearts with many longings, and with tears,

And with content; they have received the years

With empty hands, expecting no good thing;

Life has passed by their doors, not entering.

In solitude, and without vain desire, They have warmed themselves beside a lonely fire;

And, without scorn, beheld as in a glass The blown and painted leaves of Beauty pass.

Their souls have been made fragrant with the spice

Of costly virtues lit for sacrifice;

They have accepted Life, the unpaid debt, And looked for no vain day of reckoning. Yet

They too in certain windless summer hours Have felt the stir of dreams, and dreamed the powers

And the exemptions and the miracles
And the cruelty of Beauty. Citadels
Of many-walled and deeply-moated hearts
Have suddenly surrendered to the arts
Of so compelling magic; entering,
They have esteemed it but a little thing
To have won so great a conquest; and
with haste
They have cast down, and utterly laid
waste,

Tower upon tower, and sapped their roots with flame;

And passed on that eternity of shame Which is the way of Beauty on the earth. And they have shaken laughter from its mirth,

To be a sound of trumpets and of horns Crying the battle-cry of those red morns Against a sky of triumph.

Of the uncertainty of human things.
Wandering on eternal wanderings,
They know the world; and, tasting but the
bread

Of charity, know man; and, strangely led By some vague, certain, and appointed hand,

Know fate; and, being lonely, understand
Some little of the thing without a name
That sits by the roadside and talks with
them,

When they are silent; for the soul is shy
If more than its own shadow loiter by.
They and the birds are old acquaintances,
Knowing the dawn together; theirs it is
To settle on the dusty land like crows,
The ragged vagabonds of the air; who
knows

How they too shall be fed, day after day,
And surer than the birds, for are not they
The prodigal sons of God, our piteous
Aliens, outcast and accusing us?

Do they not ask of us their own, and wait, Humbly, among the dogs about the gate, While we are feasting? They will wait till night:

Who shall wait longer?

Dim, shadowy, white,

The highway calls; they follow till it ends, And all the way they walk among their friends,

Sun, wind, and rain, their tearful sister rain,