Truant there from Time and Pain, What I had, I find again: Sunlight in the boughs above, Sunlight in your hair and dress, The hands too proud for all but Love, The Lips of utter kindliness, The Heart of bravery swift and clean Where the best was safe, I knew, And laughter in the gold and green, And song, and friends, and ever you With smiling and familiar eyes, You--but friendly: you--but true. And Innocence accounted wise, And Faith the fool, the pitiable. Love so rare, one would swear All of earth for ever well-- Careless lips and flying hair, And little things I may not tell. It does but double the heart-ache When I wake, when I wake. 1912 (?). Sonnet: in Time of Revolt The Thing must End. I am no boy! I am No BOY! I being twenty-one. Uncle, you make A great mistake, a very great mistake, In chiding me for letting slip a "Damn!" What's more, you called me "Mother's one ewe lamb," Bade me "refrain from swearing--for her sake-- Till I'm grown up" . . . --By God! I think you take Too much upon you, Uncle William! You say I am your brother's only son. I know it. And, "What of it?" I reply. My heart's resolved. Something must be done. So shall I curb, so baffle, so suppress This too avuncular officiousness, Intolerable consanguinity. January 1908. A Letter to a Live Poet Sir, since the last Elizabethan died, Or, rather, that more Paradisal muse, Blind with much light, passed to the light more glorious Or deeper blindness, no man's hand, as thine, Has, on the world's most noblest chord of song, Struck certain magic strains. Ears satiate With the clamorous, timorous whisperings of to-day, Thrilled to perceive once more the spacious voice And serene utterance of old. We heard --With rapturous breath half-held, as a dreamer dreams Who dares not know it dreaming, lest he wake-- The odorous, amorous style of poetry, The melancholy knocking of those lines, The long, low soughing of pentameters, --Or the sharp of rhyme as a bird's cry-- And the innumerable truant polysyllables Multitudinously twittering like a bee. Fulfilled our hearts were with that music then, And all the evenings sighed it to the dawn, And all the lovers heard it from all the trees. All of the accents upon all the norms! --And ah! the stress on the penultimate! We never knew blank verse could have such feet. Where is it now? Oh, more than ever, now I sometimes think no poetry is read Save where some sepultured Caesura bled, Royally incarnadining all the line. Is the imperial iamb laid to rest, And the young trochee, having done enough?