Smear, daub! Plaster on canvas an unsightly gob Yellow and scarlet and purple and pink, Looks like a mess that has spilled in the sink. But call it a sunset o’er Harlem, in truth Or a beautiful woman enamoured with youth. Just a name, any name that you think of will do, And if you insert a poor outline or two, Be sure that you violate all the known rules. The masters were fools! For painting is only a sleep walker’s trance. Walpurgis is with us so on with the dance! For the forms that great Phidias carved out of stone Misshapen monstrosities, muscle and bone Now simper and leer, At vapid admirers who openly jeer At beauty of tinting or outline or form And foment a storm, Of sickly approval at each newest fright That clutters our galleries, angers our sight. For art is a blight! O that some genius great hearted and sane Would banish such trash of a disordered brain! For beauty will ever be noble and fine And speaking through music or color or line Her voice is divine! WHEN THE LOCUSTS ARE IN BLOOM When the locusts are in bloom Every bud - a riven tomb Yields a spirit form, emerging pure as snow, Dancing lightly on the breeze Like the foam on fairy seas, Swinging like enchanted censers to and fro. And the moonbeams, white and chaste, Through the branches interlaced, How they seem to drip into each ivory cup, Where anon, the summer heats Mingle all those honeyed sweets That the bee, with nectar drunken, loves to sup. Wondrous pendants set with gems Clinging to the swaying stems How each chalice overflows into the stream Of the scented hours that glide Down a timeless, golden tide To the islands where the lotus eaters dream. So we idly float along On the bluebird’s lilting song To a region where the blossoms never die. For through all the cloying hours In the thralldom of the flowers Fancy roams in far off cloudlands of the sky. THE HARVEST OF THE SEA It is harvest time in the teeming sea And the surges labor tirelessly Like toil bent reapers with sickles of foam They garner the harvest and carry it home, Till the beaches throb to the rhythmic beat As they strew it in windrows at our feet. Slender strands like a whip lash, tear At the cowering sands - ’tis the Dead-Man’s Hair And the rockweed bulges with bulbous lumps All yellow and brown, with the jagged stumps Of kelp stalks wrenched by the undertow From sunken glens where the sea things grow.