The Second Book of Modern Verse Part 27

A Lady. [Amy Lowell]

You are beautiful and faded Like an old opera tune Played upon a harpsichord; Or like the sun-flooded silks Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes, And the perfume of your soul Is vague and suffusing, With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.

Your half-tones delight me, And I grow mad with gazing At your blent colours.

My vigour is a new-minted penny, Which I cast at your feet.

Gather it up from the dust, That its sparkle may amuse you.

The Child in Me. [May Riley Smith]

She follows me about my House of Life (This happy little ghost of my dead Youth!) She has no part in Time's relentless strife She keeps her old simplicity and truth -- And laughs at grim Mortality, This deathless Child that stays with me -- (This happy little ghost of my dead Youth!)

My House of Life is weather-stained with years -- (O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay.) Its windows are bedimmed with rain of tears, The walls have lost their rose, its thatch is gray.

One after one its guests depart, So dull a host is my old heart.

(O Child in Me, I wonder why you stay!)

For jealous Age, whose face I would forget, Pulls the bright flowers you bring me from my hair And powders it with snow; and yet -- and yet I love your dancing feet and jocund air.

I have no taste for caps of lace To tie about my faded face -- I love to wear your flowers in my hair.

O Child in Me, leave not my House of Clay Until we pa.s.s together through the Door, When lights are out, and Life has gone away And we depart to come again no more.

We comrades who have travelled far Will hail the Twilight and the Star, And smiling, pa.s.s together through the Door!

The Son. [Ridgely Torrence]

I heard an old farm-wife, Selling some barley, Mingle her life with life And the name "Charley".

Saying, "The crop's all in, We're about through now; Long nights will soon begin, We're just us two now.

Twelve bushels at sixty cents, It's all I carried -- He sickened making fence; He was to be married --

It feels like frost was near -- His hair was curly.

The spring was late that year, But the harvest early."

Muy Vieja Mexicana. [Alice Corbin]

I've seen her pa.s.s with eyes upon the road -- An old bent woman in a bronze-black shawl, With skin as dried and wrinkled as a mummy's, As brown as a cigar-box, and her voice Like the low vibrant strings of a guitar.

And I have fancied from the girls about What she was at their age, what they will be When they are old as she. But now she sits And smokes away each night till dawn comes round, Thinking, beside the pinyons' flame, of days Long past and gone, when she was young -- content To be no longer young, her epic done:

For a woman has work and much to do, And it's good at the last to know it's through, And still have time to sit alone, To have some time you can call your own.

It's good at the last to know your mind And travel the paths that you traveled blind, To see each turn and even make Trips in the byways you did not take -- But that, 'por Dios', is over and done, It's pleasanter now in the way we've come; It's good to smoke and none to say What's to be done on the coming day, No mouths to feed or coat to mend, And none to call till the last long end.

Though one have sons and friends of one's own, It's better at last to live alone.

For a man must think of food to buy, And a woman's thoughts may be wild and high; But when she is young she must curb her pride, And her heart is tamed for the child at her side.

But when she is old her thoughts may go Wherever they will, and none to know.

And night is the time to think and dream, And not to get up with the dawn's first gleam; Night is the time to laugh or weep, And when dawn comes it is time to sleep . . .

When it's all over and there's none to care, I mean to be like her and take my share Of comfort when the long day's done, And smoke away the nights, and see the sun Far off, a shrivelled orange in a sky gone black, Through eyes that open inward and look back.

Hrolf's Thrall, His Song. [Willard Wattles]

There be five things to a man's desire: Kine flesh, roof-tree, his own fire, Clean cup of sweet wine from goat's hide, And through dark night one to lie beside.

Four things poor and homely be: Hearth-fire, white cheese, own roof-tree, True mead slow brewed with brown malt; But a good woman is savour and salt.

Plow, shove deep through gray loam; Hack, sword, hack for straw-thatch home; Guard, buckler, guard both beast and human -- G.o.d, send true man his true woman!

The Interpreter. [Orrick Johns]

In the very early morning when the light was low She got all together and she went like snow, Like snow in the springtime on a sunny hill, And we were only frightened and can't think still.

We can't think quite that the katydids and frogs And the little crying chickens and the little grunting hogs, And the other living things that she spoke for to us Have nothing more to tell her since it happened thus.

She never is around for any one to touch, But of ecstasy and longing she too knew much, And always when any one has time to call his own She will come and be beside him as quiet as a stone.

Old King Cole. [Edwin Arlington Robinson]

In Tilbury Town did Old King Cole A wise old age antic.i.p.ate, Desiring, with his pipe and bowl, No Khan's extravagant estate.

No crown annoyed his honest head, No fiddlers three were called or needed; For two disastrous heirs instead Made music more than ever three did.