Last Poems | Page 3

and shall not fail.
Bear them we can, and if we can
we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
X
Could man be drunk for ever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down of nights.
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts.
XI

Yonder see the morning blink:
The sun is up, and up must I,
To wash and dress and eat and drink

And look at things and talk and think
And work, and God knows why.
Oh often have I washed and dressed
And what’s to show for all my pain?
Let me lie abed and rest:
Ten
thousand times I’ve done my best
And all’s to do again.
XII
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;

Now I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;

And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.

Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws
for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the
other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their
neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail
and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s
bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never
made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish,
both are strong,
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn or
Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God
and man.
XIII
THE DESERTER
"What sound awakened me, I wonder,
For now ‘tis dumb."
"Wheels on the road most like, or thunder:

Lie down; ‘twas not the drum.:
"Toil at sea and two in haven
And trouble far:
Fly, crow, away, and follow, raven,
And all that croaks for war."
"Hark, I heard the bugle crying,
And where am I?
My friends are up and dressed and dying,
And I will dress and die."
"Oh love is rare and trouble plenty
And carrion cheap,
And daylight dear at four-and-twenty:
Lie down again and sleep."
"Reach me my belt and leave your prattle:
Your hour is gone;
But my day is the day of battle,
And that comes dawning on.
"They mow the field of man in season:
Farewell, my fair,
And, call it truth or call it treason,
Farewell the vows that were."
"Ay, false heart, forsake me lightly:
‘Tis like the brave.
They find no bed to joy in rightly
Before they find the grave.
"Their love is for their own undoing.

And east and west
They scour about the world a-wooing
The bullet in their breast.
"Sail away the ocean over,
Oh sail away,
And lie there with your leaden lover
For ever and a day."
XIV
THE CULPRIT
The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.
The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,
For all the pain I cost her,
That she had borne the lad
That borne she had.
My mother and my father
Out of the light they lie;
The warrant would not find them,
And here ‘tis only I
Shall hang so high.
Oh let not man remember
The soul that God forgot,
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot,
And I will rot.

For so the game is ended
That should not have begun.
My father and my mother
They had a likely son,
And I have none.
XV
EIGHT O’CLOCK
He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to
market-place and people
It tossed them down.
Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour,
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck;
And then the clock
collected in the tower
Its strength, and struck.
XVI
SPRING MORNING
Star and coronal and bell
April underfoot renews,
And the hope of man as well
Flowers among the morning dews.
Now the old come out to look,
Winter past and winter’s pains.
How the sky in pool and brook
Glitters on the grassy plains.

Easily the gentle air
Wafts the turning season on;
Things to comfort them are there,
Though ‘tis true the best are gone.
Now the scorned unlucky lad
Rousing from his pillow gnawn
Mans his heart and deep and glad
Drinks the valiant air of dawn.
Half the night he longed to die,
Now are sown on hill and plain
Pleasures worth his while to try
Ere he longs to die again.
Blue the sky from east to west
Arches, and the world is wide,
Though the girl he loves the best
Rouses from another’s side.
XVII
ASTRONOMY
The Wain upon the northern steep
Descends and lifts away.
Oh I will sit me down and weep
For bones in Africa.