He fetches nightcaps, one and nine, Grey apes he dowers three, His house as fair as the Malmsey wine Seems sad as cypress-tree. Three bowls he brims with sweet honeycomb To feast the bumble bees, Saying, "O bees, be this your home, For grief is on the seas!" He sate him lone in a coral grot, At the flowing in of the tide; When ebbed the billow, there was not, Save coral, aught beside. So hairy apes in three white beds, And nightcaps, one and nine, On moonlit pillows lay three heads Bemused with dwarfish wine. A tomb of coral, the dirge of bee, The grey apes' guttural groan For Alliolyle, for Lallerie, For thee, O Muziomone! SUNK LYONESSE In sea-cold Lyonesse, When the Sabbath eve shafts down On the roofs, walls, belfries Of the foundered town, The Nereids pluck their lyres Where the green translucency beats, And with motionless eyes at gaze Make minstrelsy in the streets. The ocean water stirs In salt-worn casemate and porch Plies the blunt-snouted fish With fire in his skull for torch. And the ringing wires resound; And the unearthly lovely weep, In lament of the music they make In the sullen courts of sleep. Whose marble flowers bloom for aye, And--lapped by the moon-guiled tide-- Mock their carver with heart of stone, Caged in his stone-ribbed side. [Illustration] SLEEPING BEAUTY [Illustration] The scent of bramble fills the air, Amid her folded sheets she lies, The gold of evening in her hair, The blue of morn shut in her eyes. How many a changing moon hath lit The unchanging roses of her face! Her mirror ever broods on it In silver stillness of the days. Oft flits the moth on filmy wings Into his solitary lair; Shrill evensong the cricket sings From some still shadow in her hair. In heat, in snow, in wind, in flood, She sleeps in lovely loneliness, Half-folded like an April bud On winter-haunted trees. BEWITCHED [Illustration] I have heard a lady this night, Lissom and jimp and slim, Calling me--calling me over the heather, 'Neath the beech boughs dusk and dim. I have followed a lady this night, Followed her far and lone, Fox and adder and weasel know The ways that we have gone. I sit at my supper 'mid honest faces, And crumble my crust and say Nought in the long-drawn drawl of the voices Talking the hours away. I'll go to my chamber under the gable, And the moon will lift her light In at my lattice from over the moorland Hollow and still and bright. And I know she will shine on a lady of witchcraft, Gladness and grief to see, Who has taken my heart with her nimble fingers, Calls in my dreams to me: