More Songs From Vagabondia | Page 2

44
THE MOTHER OF POETS 48
A GOOD-BY 49
IN A COPY OF BROWNING 49
SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF 53
AT THE ROAD-HOUSE 56
VERLAINE 58
DISTILLATION 59
A FRIEND'S WISH 59
LAL OF KILRUDDEN 60
HUNTING-SONG 61
BUIE ANNAJOHN 62
MARY OF MARKA 63
PREMONITION 63
THE HEARSE-HORSE 64
THE NIGHT-WASHERS 64
MR. MOON 66
HEM AND HAW 70
ACCIDENT IN ART 71
IN A GARDEN 71

AT THE END OF THE DAY 72
_And ever with the vanguard?The vagrant singers come?The gamins of the city?Who dance before the drum_
JONGLEURS.
What is the stir in the street??Hurry of feet!?And after,?A sound as of pipes and of tabers!
Men of the conflicts and labors,?Struggling and shifting and shoving,?Pushing and pounding your neighbors,?Fighting for leeway for laughter,?Toiling for leisure for loving!?Hark, through the window and up to the rafter,?Madder and merrier,?Deeper and verier,?Sweeter, contrarier,?Dafter and dafter,?A song arises,--?A thrill, an intrusion,?A reel, an illusion,?A rapture, a crisis?Of bells in the air!
Ay, up from your work and look out of the window!?"Who are the newcomers, Arab or Hindoo??Persians, or Japs, or the children of Isis?"?--Guesses, surmises--?Forth with you, fare?Down in the street to draw nearer and stare!?Come from your palaces, come from your hovels!?Lay down your ledgers, your picks and your shovels,?Your trowels and bricks,?Hammers and nails,?Scythes and flails,?Bargains and sales,?And the trader's tricks,?Deals, overreachings,?Worries and griefs,?Teachings and preachings,?Boluses, briefs,?Writs and attachments,?Quarterings, hatchments,?Clans and cognomens,?Comments and scholia,?(World's melancholia)--?Cast them aside, and good riddance to rubbish!?Here at the street-corner, hearken, a strain,?Rough and off-hand and a bit rub-a-dub-ish,?Gives us a taste of the life we'd attain.
Who are they, what are they, whence have they come to us??Where will they go when their singing is done??What is the garb they wear, tattered and sumptuous,?Faded with days and superb in the sun??What are they singing of??Hush!?... There's a ringing of?Delicate chimes;?And the blush?Of a veiled bride morning?Beats in the rhymes.?Listen!?Out of the merriment,?Clear as the glisten?Of dew on the brier,?A silver warning!?Sudden, a dare--?Lyric experiment--?Up like a lark in the air,?Higher and higher and higher,?The song shoots out of our blunder?Of thought to the blue sky of wonder,?And broken strains only fall down?Like pearls on the roofs of the town.
Somebody says they have come from the moon,?Seen with their eyes Eldorado,?Sat in the Bo-tree's shadow,?Wandered at noon?In the valleys of Van,?Tented in Lebanon, tarried in Ophir,?Last year in Tartary piped for the Khan.?Now it's the song of a lover;?Now it's the lilt of a loafer,--?Under the trees in a midsummer noon,?Dreaming the haze into isles to discover,?Beating the silences into a croon;?Soon?Up from the marshes a fall of the plover!?Out from the cover?A flurry of quail!?Down from the height where the slow hawks hover,?The thin far ghost of a hail!?And near, and near,?Throbbing and tingling,--?With a human cheer?In the earth-song mingling,--?Mirth and carousal,?Wooing,