Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. | Page 6

also April hid away,?Leaving the Spring faint with Mercutio.
JULIET'S NURSE
In old-world nursery vacant now of children,?With posied walls, familiar, fair, demure,?And facing southward o'er romantic streets,?Sits yet and gossips winter's dark away?One gloomy, vast, glossy, and wise, and sly:?And at her side a cherried country cousin.?Her tongue claps ever like a ram's sweet bell;?There's not a name but calls a tale to mind--?Some marrowy patty of farce or melodram;?There's not a soldier but hath babes in view;?There's not on earth what minds not of the midwife:?"O, widowhood that left me still espoused!"?Beauty she sighs o'er, and she sighs o'er gold;?Gold will buy all things, even a sweet husband,?Else only Heaven is left and--farewell youth!?Yet, strangely, in that money-haunted head,?The sad, gemmed crucifix and incense blue?Is childhood once again. Her memory?Is like an ant-hill which a twig disturbs,?But twig stilled never. And to see her face,?Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands,?Ever like 'lighting doves, and her small eyes--?Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious--?To darken all sudden into Stygian gloom,?And paint disaster with uplifted whites,?Is life's epitome. She prates and prates--?A waterbrook of words o'er twelve small pebbles.?And when she dies--some grey, long, summer evening,?When the bird shouts of childhood through the dusk,?'Neath night's faint tapers--then her body shall?Lie stiff with silks of sixty thrifty years.
IAGO
A dark lean face, a narrow, slanting eye,?Whose deeps of blackness one pale taper's beam?Haunts with a fitting madness of desire;?A heart whose cinder at the breath of passion?Glows to a momentary core of heat?Almost beyond indifference to endure:?So parched Iago frets his life away.?His scorn works ever in a brain whose wit?This world hath fools too many and gross to seek.?Ever to live incredibly alone,?Masked, shivering, deadly, with a simple Moor?Of idiot gravity, and one pale flower?Whose chill would quench in everlasting peace?His soul's unmeasured flame--O paradox!?Might he but learn the trick!--to wear her heart?One fragile hour of heedless innocence,?And then, farewell, and the incessant grave.?"O fool! O villain!"--'tis the shuttlecock?Wit never leaves at rest. It is his fate?To be a needle in a world of hay,?Where honour is the flattery of the fool;?Sin, a tame bauble; lies, a tiresome jest;?Virtue, a silly, whitewashed block of wood?For words to fell. Ah! but the secret lacking,?The secret of the child, the bird, the night,?Faded, flouted, bespattered, in days so far?Hate cannot bitter them, nor wrath deny;?Else were this Desdemona.... Why!?Woman a harlot is, and life a nest?Fouled by long ages of forked fools. And God--?Iago deals not with a tale so dull:?To have made the world! Fie on thee, Artisan!
IMOGEN
Even she too dead! all languor on her brow,?All mute humanity's last simpleness,--?And yet the roses in her cheeks unfallen!?Can death haunt silence with a silver sound??Can death, that hushes all music to a close,?Pluck one sweet wire scarce-audible that trembles,?As if a little child, called Purity,?Sang heedlessly on of his dear Imogen??Surely if some young flowers of Spring were put?Into the tender hollow of her heart,?'Twould faintly answer, trembling in their petals.?Poise but a wild bird's feather, it will stir?On lips that even in silence wear the badge?Only of truth. Let but a cricket wake,?And sing of home, and bid her lids unseal?The unspeakable hospitality of her eyes.?O childless soul--call once her husband's name!?And even if indeed from these green hills?Of England, far, her spirit flits forlorn,?Back to its youthful mansion it will turn,?Back to the floods of sorrow these sweet locks?Yet heavy bear in drops; and Night shall see?Unwearying as her stars still Imogen,?Pausing 'twixt death and life on one hushed word.
POLONIUS
There haunts in Time's bare house an active ghost,?Enamoured of his name, Polonius.?He moves small fingers much, and all his speech?Is like a sampler of precisest words,?Set in the pattern of a simpleton.?His mirth floats eerily down chill corridors;?His sigh--it is a sound that loves a keyhole;?His tenderness a faint court-tarnished thing;?His wisdom prates as from a wicker cage;?His very belly is a pompous nought;?His eye a page that hath forgot his errand.?Yet in his brain--his spiritual brain--?Lies hid a child's demure, small, silver whistle?Which, to his horror, God blows, unawares,?And sets men staring. It is sad to think,?Might he but don indeed thin flesh and blood,?And pace important to Law's inmost room,?He would see, much marvelling, one immensely wise,?Named Bacon, who, at sound of his youth's step,?Would turn and call him Cousin--for the likeness.
OPHELIA
There runs a crisscross pattern of small leaves?Espalier, in a fading summer air,?And there Ophelia walks, an azure flower,?Whom wind, and snowflakes, and the sudden rain?Of love's wild skies have purified to heaven.?There is a beauty past all weeping now?In that sweet, crooked mouth, that vacant smile;?Only a lonely grey in those mad eyes,?Which never on earth shall learn their loneliness.?And when amid startled birds she sings lament,?Mocking in hope the long voice of the stream,?It seems