Faustinus, the martyr child,

  Candytuft and mustards grow.

  Ah, how many a June has smiled

  On the turf he lies below.

  Ages gone they laid him there,

  Quit of sun and wholesome air,

  Broken flesh and tortured limb;

  Leaving all his faith the heir

  Of his gentle hope and him.

  Yonder, under pagan skies,

  Bleached by rains, the circus lies,

  Where they brought him from his play.

  Comeliest his of sacrifice,

  Youth and tender April day.

  “Art thou not the shepherd’s son? —

  There the hills thy lambkins run? —

  These the fields thy brethren keep?”

  “On a higher hill than yon

  Doth my Father lead His sheep.”

  “Bring thy ransom, then,” they say,

  “Gold enough to pave the way

  From the temple to the Rhone.”

  When he came, upon his day,

  Slender, tremulous, alone,

  Mustard flowers like these he pressed,

  Golden, flame-like, to his breast,

  Blooms the early weanlings eat.

  When his Triumph brought him rest,

  Yellow bloom lay at his feet.

  Golden play-days came: the air

  Called him, weanlings bleated there,

  Roman boys ran fleet with spring;

  Shorn of youth and usage fair,

  Hope nor hill-top days they bring.

  But the shepherd children still

  Come at Easter, warm or chill,

  Come with violets gathered wild

  From his sloping pasture hill,

  Play-fellows who would fulfill

  Play-time to that martyr child.

  THE ENCORE

  No garlands in the winter-time,

  No trumpets in the night!

  The song ye praise was done lang syne,

  And was its own delight.

  O’ God’s name take the wreath away,

  Since now the music’s sped;

  Ye never cry, “Long live the king!”

  Until the king is dead.

  When I came piping through the land,

  One morning in the spring,

  With cockle-burrs upon my coat,

  ’Twas then I was a king:

  A mullein sceptre in my hand,

  My order daisies three,

  With song’s first freshness on my lips —

  And then ye pitied me!

  SONG

  Troubadour, when you were gay,

  You wooed with rose and roundelay,

  Singing harp-strings, sweet as May.

  From beneath the crown of bay

  Fell the wild, abundant hair.

  Scent of cherry bloom and pear

  With you from the south did fare,

  Buds of myrtle for your wear.

  Soft as summer stars thine eyes,

  Planets pale in violet skies;

  Summer wind that sings and dies

  Was the music of thy sighs.

  Troubadour, one winter’s night,

  When the pasture-lands were white

  And the cruel stars were bright,

  Fortune held thee in despite.

  Then beneath my tower you bore

  Rose nor rondel as of yore,

  But a heavy grief and sore

  Laid in silence at my door.

  April yearneth, April goes;

  Not for me her violet blow’s,

  I have done for long with those.

  At my breast thy sorrow grows,

  Nearer to my heart, God knows,

  Than ever roundelay or rose!

  L’ENVOI

  Where are the loves that we have loved before

  When once we are alone, and shut the door?

  No matter whose the arms that held me fast,

  The arms of Darkness hold me at the last.

  No matter down what primrose path I tend,

  I kiss the lips of Silence in the end.

  No matter on what heart I found delight,

  I come again unto the breast of Night.

  No matter when or how love did befall,

  ’Tis Loneliness that loves me best of all,

  And in the end she claims me, and I know

  That she will stay, though all the rest may go.

  No matter whose the eyes that I would keep

  Near in the dark, ’tis in the eyes of Sleep

  That I must look and look forever more,

  When once I am alone, and shut the door.

  PART II. THE PALATINE

  IN THE “DARK AGES”

  Have you been with the King to Rome,

  Brother, big brother?”

  “I’ve been there and I’ve come home.

  Back to your play, little brother.”

  “Oh, how high is Caesar’s house,

  Brother, big brother?”

  “Goats about the doorways browse:

  Night hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree,

  Home of the wild bird and home of the bee.

  A thousand chambers of marble lie

  Wide to the sun and the wind and the sky.

  Poppies we find amongst our wheat

  Grow on Caesar’s banquet seat.

  Cattle crop and neatherds drowse

  On the floors of Caesar’s house.”

  “But what has become of Caesar’s gold,

  Brother, big brother?”

  “The times are bad and the world is old —

  Who knows the where of the Caesars’ gold?

  Night comes black on the Caesars’ hill;

  The wells are deep and the tales are ill.

  Fire-flies gleam in the damp and mould, —

  All that is left of the Caesars’ gold.

  Back to your play, little brother.”

  “What has become of the Caesars’ men,

  Brother, big brother?”

  “Dogs in the kennel and wolf in the den

  Howl for the fate of the Caesars’ men.

  Slain in Asia, slain in Gaul,

  By Dacian border and Persian wall;

  Rhineland orchard and Danube fen

  Fatten their roots on Caesar’s men.”

  “Why is the world so sad and wide,

  Brother, big brother?” —

  “Saxon boys by their fields that bide

  Need not know if the world is wide.

  Climb no mountain but Shire-end Hill,

  Cross no water but goes to mill;

  Ox in the stable and cow in the byre,

  Smell of the wood smoke and sleep by the fire;

  Sun-up in seed-time — a likely lad

  Hurts not his head that the world is sad.

  Back to your play, little brother.”

  THE GAUL IN THE CAPITOL

  The murmur of old, old water,

  The yellow of old, old stone,

  The fountain that sings through the silence,

  The river-god, dreaming alone;

  The Antonine booted and mounted

  In his sun-lit, hill-top place,

  The Julians, gigantic in armour,

  The low-browed Claudian race.

  The wolf and the twin boys she suckled,

  And the powerful breed they bred;

  Caesars of duplicate empires,

  All under one roof-stead.

  Fronting these fronts triumphant,

  Conquest on conquest pressed

  By these marching, arrogant masters,

  Who could have hoped for the West?

  At the feet of his multiple victors,

  Beaten and dazed and dumb,

  One, from the wild new races,

  Clay of the kings to come.

  Hail, in the halls of the Caesars!

  Hail, from the thrones oversea!

  Sheath of the sword-like vigour,

  Sap of the kings to be!

  A LIKENESS

  (PORTRAIT BUST OF AN UNKNOWN, CAPITOL, ROME)

  In every line a supple beauty —

  The restless head a little bent —

  Disgust of pleasure, scorn of duty,

  The unseeing eyes of discontent.

  I often come to sit beside him,

  This youth who passed and left no trace

  Of good or ill that did betide him,

  Save the disdain upon his face.

  The hope of all his House, the brother

  Adored, the golden-hearted son,

  Whom Fortune pampered like a mother;

  And then — a shadow on the sun.

  Whether he followed Caesar’s trumpet,

  Or chanced the riskier game at home

  To find how favour played the strumpet

  In fickle politics at Rome;

  Whether he dreamed a dream in Asia

  He never could forget by day,

  Or gave his youth to some Aspasia,

  Or gamed his heritage away —

  Once lost, across the Empire’s border

  This man would seek his peace in vain;

  His look arraigns a social order

  Somehow entrammelled with his pain.

  “The dice of gods are always loaded”;

  One gambler, arrogant as they,

  Fierce, and by fierce injustice goaded,

  Left both his hazard and the play.

  Incapable of compromises,

  Unable to forgive or spare,

  The strange awarding of the prizes

  He had no fortitude to bear.

  Tricked by the forms of things material, —

  The solid-seeming arch and stone,

  The noise of war, the pomp Imperial,

  The heights and depths about a throne —

  He missed, among the shapes diurnal,

  The old, deep-travelled road from pain,

  The thoughts of men, which are eternal,

  In which, eternal, men remain.

  Ritratto d’ignoto; defying

  Things unsubstantial as a dream —

  An empire, long in ashes lying —

  His face still set against the stream —

  Yes, so he looked, that gifted brother

  I loved, who passed and left no trace,

  Not even — luckier than this other —

  His sorrow in a marble face.

  THE SWEDISH MOTHER

  (NEBRASKA)

  You shall hear the tale again —

  Hush, my red-haired daughter.”

  Brightly burned the sunset gold

  On the black pond water.

  Red the pasture ridges gleamed

  Where the sun was sinking.

  Slow the windmill rasped and wheezed

  Where the herd was drinking.

  On the kitchen doorstep low

  Sat a Swedish mother;

  In her arms one baby slept,

  By her sat another.

  ‘An time, ‘way back in old countree,

  Your grandpa, he been good to me.

  Your grandpa, he been young man, too,

  And I been yust li’l’ girl, like you.

  All time in spring, when evening come,

  We go bring sheep an’ li’l’ lambs home.

  We go big field, ‘way up on hill,

  Ten times high like our windmill.

  One time your grandpa leave me wait

  While he call sheep down. By de gate

  I sit still till night come dark;

  Rabbits run an’ strange dogs bark,

  Old owl hoot, an’ your modder cry,

  She been so ‘fraid big bear come by.

  Last, ‘way off, she hear de sheep,

  Li’l’ bells ring and li’l’ lambs bleat.

  Then all sheep come over de hills,

  Big white dust, an’ old dog Nils.

  Then come grandpa, in his arm

  Li’l’ sick lamb dat somet’ing harm.

  He so young then, big and strong,

  Pick li’l’ girl up, take her ‘long, —

  Poor li’l’ tired girl yust like you, —

  Lift her up an’ take her too.

  Hold her tight an’ carry her far, —

  Ain’t no light but yust one star.

  Sheep go ‘bah-h,’ an’ road so steep;

  Li’l’ girl she go fast asleep.”

  Every night the red-haired child

  Begs to hear the story,

  When the pasture ridges burn

  With the sunset glory.

  She can never understand,

  Since the tale ends gladly,

  Why her mother, telling it,

  Always smiles so sadly.

  Wonderingly she looks away

  Where her mother’s gazing;

  Only sees the drifting herd,

  In the sunset grazing.

  SPANISH JOHNNY

  The old West, the old time,

  The old wind singing through

  The red, red grass a thousand miles,

  And, Spanish Johnny, you!

  He’d sit beside the water-ditch

  When all his herd was in,

  And never mind a child, but sing

  To his mandolin.

  The big stars, the blue night,

  The moon-enchanted plain:

  The olive man who never spoke,

  But sang the songs of Spain.

  His speech with men was wicked talk —

  To hear it was a sin;

  But those were golden things he said

  To his mandolin.

  The gold songs, the gold stars,

  The world so golden then:

  And the hand so tender to a child

  Had killed so many men.

  He died a hard death long ago

  Before the Road came in;

  The night before he swung, he sang

  To his mandolin.

  AUTUMN MELODY

  In the autumn days, the days of parting,

  Days that in a golden silence fall,.

  When the air is quick with bird-wings starting,

  And the asters darken by the wall;

  Strong and sweet the wine of heaven is flowing,

  Bees and sun and sleep and golden dyes;

  Long forgot is budding-time and blowing,

  Sunk in honeyed sleep the garden lies.

  Spring and storm and summer midnight madness

  Dream within the grape but never wake;

  Bees and sun and sweetness, — oh, and sadness!

  Sun and sweet that reach the heart — and break.

  Ah, the pain at heart forever starting,

  Ah, the cup untasted that we spilled

  In the autumn days, the days of parting!

  Would our shades could drink it, and he stilled.

  PRAIRIE SPRING

  Evening and the flat land,

  Rich and somber and always silent;

  The miles of fresh-plowed soil,

  Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;

  The growing wheat, the growing weeds,

  The toiling horses, the tired men;

  The long, empty roads,

  Sullen fires of sunset, fading,

  The eternal, unresponsive sky.

  Against all this, Youth,

  Flaming like the wild roses,

  Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,

  Flashing like a star out of the twilight;

  Youth with its insupportable sweetness,

  Its fierce necessity,

  Its sharp desire;

  Singing and singing,

  Out of the lips of silence,

  Out of the earthy dusk.

  MACON PRAIRIE

  (NEBRASKA)

  She held me for a night against her bosom,

  The aunt who died when I was yet a baby,

  The girl who scarcely lived to be a woman.

  Stricken, she left familiar earth behind her,

  Mortally ill, she braved the boisterous ocean,

  Dying, she crossed irrevocable rivers,

  Hailed the blue Lakes, and saw them fade forever,

  Hungry for distances; — her heart exulting

  That God had made so many seas and countries

  To break upon the eye and sweep behind her.

  From one whose love was tempered by discretion,

  From all the net of caution and convenience

  She snatched her high heart for the great adventure,

  Broke her bright bubble under far horizons, —

  Among the skirmishers that teased the future,

  Precursors of the grave slow-moving millions

  Already destined to the Westward-faring.

  They came, at last, to where the railway ended,

  The strange troop captained by a dying woman;

  The father, the old man of perfect silence,

  The mother, unresisting, broken-hearted,

  The gentle brother and his wife, both timid,

  Not knowing why they left their native hamlet;

  Going as in a dream, but ever going.

  In all the glory of an Indian summer,

  The lambent transmutations of October,

  They started with the great ox-teams from Hastings

  And trekked in a southwesterly direction,

  Boring directly toward the fiery sunset.

  Over the red grass prairies, shaggy-coated,

  Without a goal the caravan proceeded;

  Across the tablelands and rugged ridges,

  Through the coarse grasses which the oxen breasted,

  Blue-stem and bunch-grass, red as sea-marsh samphire.

  Always the similar, soft undulations

  Of the free-breathing earth in golden sunshine,

  The hardy wind, and dun hawks flying over

  Against the unstained firmament of heaven.

  In the front wagon, under the white cover,

  Stretched on her feather-bed and propped with pillows,

  Never dismayed by the rude oxen’s scrambling,

  The jolt of the tied wheel or brake or hold-back,

  She lay, the leader of the expedition;

  And with her burning eyes she took possession

  Of the red waste, — for hers, and theirs, forever.

  A wagon-top, rocking in seas of grasses,

  A camp-fire on a prairie chartless, trackless,

  A red spark under the dark tent of heaven.

  Surely, they said, by day she saw a vision,