Songs Of The Road | Page 9

a thing of yesterday;?The shade beneath the willow tree,
The word you looked but feared to say.?Ah! when I learned to love you so?What recked we of December's snow?
But swift the ruthless seasons sped
And swifter still they speed away.?What though they bow the dainty head
And fleck the raven hair with gray??The boy and girl of long ago?Are laughing through the veil of snow.
SHAKESPEARE'S EXPOSTULATION
Masters, I sleep not quiet in my grave,?There where they laid me, by the Avon
shore,?In that some crazy wights have set it forth?By arguments most false and fanciful,?Analogy and far-drawn inference,?That Francis Bacon, Earl of Verulam?(A man whom I remember in old days,?A learned judge with sly adhesive palms,?To which the suitor's gold was wont to?stick) --?That this same Verulam had writ the plays?Which were the fancies of my frolic brain.?What can they urge to dispossess the crown?Which all my comrades and the whole loud
world?Did in my lifetime lay upon my brow??Look straitly at these arguments and see?How witless and how fondly slight they be.
_Imprimis_, they have urged that, being?born?In the mean compass of a paltry town,?I could not in my youth have trimmed
my mind?To such an eagle pitch, but must be found,?Like the hedge sparrow, somewhere near
the ground.?Bethink you, sirs, that though I was?denied?The learning which in colleges is found,?Yet may a hungry brain still find its fo?Wherever books may lie or men may be;?And though perchance by Isis or by Cam?The meditative, philosophic plant?May best luxuriate; yet some would say?That in the task of limning mortal life?A fitter preparation might be made?Beside the banks of Thames. And then
again,?If I be suspect, in that I was not?A fellow of a college, how, I pray,?Will Jonson pass, or Marlowe, or the rest,?Whose measured verse treads with as
proud a gait?As that which was my own? Whence did
they suck?This honey that they stored? Can you
recite?The vantages which each of these has had?And I had not? Or is the argument?That my Lord Verulam hath written all,?And covers in his wide-embracing self?The stolen fame of twenty smaller men?
You prate about my learning. I?would urge?My want of learning rather as a proof?That I am still myself. Have I not traced?A seaboard to Bohemia, and made?The cannons roar a whole wide century?Before the first was forged? Think you,
then,?That he, the ever-learned Verulam,?Would have erred thus? So may my very
faults?In their gross falseness prove that I am true,?And by that falseness gender truth in you.?And what is left? They say that they
have found?A script, wherein the writer tells my Lord?He is a secret poet. True enough!?But surely now that secret is o'er past.?Have you not read his poems? Know
you not?That in our day a learned chancellor?Might better far dispense unjustest law?Than be suspect of such frivolity?As lies in verse? Therefore his poetry?Was secret. Now that he is gone?'Tis so no longer. You may read his verse,?And judge if mine be better or be worse:?Read and pronounce! The meed of
praise is thine;?But still let his be his and mine be mine.
I say no more; but how can you forswear
Outspoken Jonson, he who knew me well;?So, too, the epitaph which still you read??Think you they faced my sepulchre with
lies --?Gross lies, so evident and palpable?That every townsman must have wot of it,?And not a worshipper within the church?But must have smiled to see the marbled
fraud??Surely this touches you? But if by chance?My reasoning still leaves you obdurate,?I'll lay one final plea. I pray you look?On my presentment, as it reaches you.?My features shall be sponsors for my fame;?My brow shall speak when Shakespeare's
voice is dumb,?And be his warrant in an age to come.
THE EMPIRE
1902
They said that it had feet of clay,
That its fall was sure and quick.?In the flames of yesterday
All the clay was burned to brick.
When they carved our epitaph
And marked us doomed beyond recall,?"We are," we answered, with a laugh,
"The Empire that declines to fall."
A VOYAGE
1909
Breathing the stale and stuffy air
Of office or consulting room,?Our thoughts will wander back to where
We heard the low Atlantic boom,
And, creaming underneath our screw,
We watched the swirling waters break,?Silver filagrees on blue
Spreading fan-wise in our wake.
Cribbed within the city's fold,
Fettered to our daily round,?We'll conjure up the haze of gold
Which ringed the wide horizon round.
And still we'll break the sordid day
By fleeting visions far and fair,?The silver shield of Vigo Bay,
The long brown cliff of Finisterre.
Where once the Roman galley sped,
Or Moorish corsair spread his sail,?By wooded shore, or sunlit head,
By barren hill or sea-washed vale
We took our way. But we can swear,
That many countries we have scanned,?But never one that could compare
With our own island mother-land.
The dream is o'er. No more we view
The shores of Christian or of Turk,?But turning to our tasks anew,
We bend us to our wonted work.
But there will come to you and me
Some glimpse of spacious days gone?by,?The wide, wide stretches of the sea,
The