Oh Gerald dear! Oh Shuv! Oh Shoave! My late-found bliss, my treasure-trove; My poor heart yearns to counter-prove Those double facets that me move So strangely; therefore, deign t'approve This syncretism--Gerald Shoove. 1912. MARCH If I could catch all the stars in a net And make them tell me their Christian names, Or snare the dream of a violet, Or persuade the squirrels to teach me their games, Or quite surprise, on a warm June night, The lilac bushes that laugh for delight And tremble for fear lest we should hear them,-- If I could tiptoe breathlessly near them And overhear them And master so Secrets that only the lilacs know: If I could feel what a young bird feels When first it flutters across the road, Or learn at last from the creaking wheels Of a wagon that story they tell their load-- The hillside legend that never grows old: If I could be told All the subtle, impalpable, exquisite things That we just surmise when the country sings, That week before they begin the hay: If I could contrive to sing, or to say, Or to be, what the poets have never invented, Should I be contented? Was I to-day? 1915. APRIL After so many days... The moon lies right across the sea, The tide's up to the brink, A door keeps flapping in the wind, I cannot sleep a wink, Although I'm sleepy as can be. But lie in bed and think Of you and all your proud, gay ways. 1915. JUNE They say you are the latest, loveliest jest Of some transmigratory ghost, The last embodiment, and best, Of some small being--tell me, are you most Yourself when most A squirrel or jerboa? Or rather, Since you are tender, humorous, and wise, Is yours the spirit of some steadier goer, A grave, precautious donkey, whose wide eyes See, far away, the thin ambiguous towers, Nor miss the pebbly road nor truant flowers-- See farther, And less painfully, than ours? Or, as I think, Have you, like some Too curious spirit peering from the East, O'erleant the ramparts or your little town In Fairyland; and from the brink Of The Impossible tumbled down To where we now uneasily surmise Your vagrant figure, trailing Sirenwise-- Strayed reveller, from some fairy banquet come To sow sedition at our sober feast? 1915. OCTOBER O up the hill and down the hill And all across the ferry, Avid as bees under the trees-- Probably they'll be merry: And back again, under the rain, As wild as wind-tossed plovers, Wet and chill and enchanted still-- I fear they must be lovers. 1915. DECEMBER In some few years, when you and I-- Perhaps in some few months--shall lie, Where lie at last everyone must, Little will it approve our dust That one shall write above our tombs: "They gave their days to glums and glooms."