A Roadside Harp: A Book of VersesGuiney, Louise Imogen
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A Roadside Harp: A Book of Verses
Guiney, Louise Imogen
American poetry -- 19th century
TOO well I know, pacing the place of awe,
Three queens, young save in trouble, moulder by;
More in his halo, Monmouth’s mocking eye,
The eagle Essex in a harpy’s claw;
Seymour and Dudley, and stout heads that saw
Sundown of Scotland: how with treasons lie
White martyrdoms; rank in a company
Breaker and builder of the eternal law.
Oft as I come, the hateful garden-row
Of ruined roses hanging from the stem,
Where winds of old defeat yet batter them,
Infects me: suddenly must I depart,
Ere thought of men’s injustice then and now
Add to these aisles one other broken heart.
[Illustration]
_Strikers in Hyde Park_
A WOOF reversed the fatal shuttles weave,
How slow! but never once they slip the thread.
Hither, upon the Georgian idlers’ tread,
Up spacious ways the lindens interleave,
Clouding the royal air since yester-eve,
Come men bereft of time and scant of bread,
Loud, who were dumb, immortal, who were dead,
Thro’ the cowed world their kingdom to retrieve.
What ails thee, England? Altar, mart, and grange
Dream of the knife by night; not so, not so
The clear Republic waits the general throe,
Along her noonday mountains’ open range.
God be with both! for one is young to know
The other’s rote of evil and of change.
[Illustration]
_Changes in the Temple_
THE cry is at thy gates, thou darling ground,
Again; for oft ere now thy children went
Beggared and wroth, and parting greeting sent
Some red old alley with a dial crowned;
Some house of honor, in a glory bound
With lives and deaths of spirits excellent;
Some tree rude-taken from his kingly tent
Hard by a little fountain’s friendly sound.
O for Virginius’ hand, if only that
Maintain the whole, and spoil these spoilings soon!
Better the scowling Strand should lose, alas,
Her peopled oasis, and where it was
All mournful in the cleared quadrangle sat
Echo, and ivy, and the loitering moon.
[Illustration]
_The Lights of London_
THE evenfall, so slow on hills, hath shot
Far down into the valley’s cold extreme,
Untimely midnight; spire and roof and stream
Like fleeing spectres, shudder and are not.
The Hampstead hollies, from their sylvan plot
Yet cloudless, lean to watch as in a dream,
From chaos climb with many a sudden gleam,
London, one moment fallen and forgot.
Her booths begin to flare; and gases bright
Prick door and window; all her streets obscure
Sparkle and swarm with nothing true nor sure,
Full as a marsh of mist and winking light;
Heaven thickens over, Heaven that cannot cure
Her tear by day, her fevered smile by night.
[Illustration]
_Doves_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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