Last Poems | Page 3

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.
For pay and medals, name and rank,
Things that he has not found,?He hove the Cross to heaven and sank
The pole-star underground.
And now he does not even see
Signs of the nadir roll?At night over the ground where he
Is buried with the pole.
XVIII
The rain, it streams on stone and hillock,
The boot clings to the clay.?Since all is done that’s due and right?Let’s home; and now, my lad, good-night,
For I must turn away.
Good-night, my lad, for nought’s eternal;
No league of ours, for sure.?Tomorrow I shall miss you less,?And ache of heart and heaviness
Are things that time should cure.
Over the hill the highway marches
And what’s beyond is wide:?Oh soon enough will pine to nought?Remembrance and the faithful thought
That sits the grave beside.
The skies, they are not always raining
Nor grey the twelvemonth through;?And I shall meet good days and mirth,?And range the lovely lands of earth
With friends no worse than you.
But oh, my man, the house is fallen
That none can build again;?My man, how full of joy and woe?Your mother bore you years ago
To-night to lie in the rain.
XIX
In midnights of November,
When Dead Man’s Fair is nigh,?And danger in the valley,
And anger in the sky,
Around the huddling homesteads
The leafless timber roars,?And the dead call the dying
And finger at the doors.
Oh, yonder faltering fingers
Are hands I used to hold;?Their false companion drowses
And leaves them in the cold.
Oh, to the bed of ocean,
To Africk and to Ind,?I will arise and follow
Along the rainy wind.
The night goes out and