Verses

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by Susan Coolidge
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Title: Verses
Author: Susan Coolidge
Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4560]
[Yes, we are more than

one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on February 11,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
The Project Gutenberg Etext of Verses
by Susan Coolidge

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VERSES.
BY
SUSAN COOLIDGE.
TO J. H. AND E. W. H.
Nourished by peaceful suns and gracious dew,
Your sweet youth
budded and your sweet lives grew,
And all the world seemed
rose-beset for you.

The rose of beauty was your mutual dower,
The stainless rose of love,
an early flower,
The stately blooms of ease and wealth and power.
And treading thus on pathways flower-bestrewn,
It well might be,
that, cold and careless grown,
You both had lived for your own joys
alone.
But, holding all these fair things as in trust.
Gently you walked, still
scattering on the dust
Of harder roads, which others tread, and must,--
Your heritage of brightness, not a ray
Of noontide sought you out, but
straight away
You caught and halved it with some darker day:
And as the sweet saint's loaves were turned, it is said,
To roses, so
your roses turned to bread,
That hungering souls and weary might be
fed.
Dear friends, my poor words do but paint you wrong,
Nor can I utter,
in one trivial song,
The goodness I have honored for so long.
Only this leaf, a single petal flung,
One chord from a full harmony
unsung,
May speak the life-long love that lacks a tongue.
CONTENTS.
To J. H. and E. W. H.
Prelude
Commissioned
The Cradle Tomb
in Westminster Abbey
"Of such as I have"
A Portrait
When?
On
the Shore
Among the Lilies
November
Embalmed
Ginevra
Degli Amieri
Easter Lilies
Ebb-Tide
Flood-Tide
A Year

Tokens
Her Going
A Lonely Moment
Communion
A Farewell

Ebb and Flow
Angelus
The Morning Comes Before the Sun

Laborare est Orare
Eighteen

Outward Bound
From East to West

Una
Two Ways to Love
After-Glow
Hope and I
Left Behind

Savoir c'est Pardonner
Morning
A Blind Singer
Mary
When
Love went
Overshadowed
Time to Go
Gulf-Stream
My White

Chrysanthemum
Till the Day Dawn
My Birthday
By the Cradle

A Thunder Storm
Through the Door
Readjustment
At the Gate

A Home
The Legend of Kintu
Easter
Bind-Weed
April
May

Secrets
How the Leaves Came Down
Barcaroles
My Rights

Solstice
In the Mist
Within
Menace
"He That Believeth Shall
Not Make Haste"
My Little Ghost
Christmas
Benedicam Domino
PRELUDE.
Poems are heavenly things,
And only souls with wings
May reach
them where they grow,
May pluck and bear below,
Feeding the
nations thus
With food all glorious.
Verses are not of these;
They bloom on earthly trees,
Poised on a
low-hung stem,
And those may gather them
Who cannot fly to
where
The heavenly gardens are.
So I by devious ways
Have pulled some easy sprays
From the
down-dropping bough
Which all may reach, and now
I knot them,
bud and leaf,
Into a rhymed sheaf.
Not mine the pinion strong
To win the nobler song;
I only cull and
bring
A hedge-row offering

Of berry, flower, and brake,
If haply
some may take.
VERSES.
COMMISSIONED.
"Do their errands; enter into the sacrifice with them; be a link yourself
in the divine chain, and feel the joy and life of it." --ADELINE D. T.
WHITNEY
What can I do for thee,