CEASELESS the magic pollen drifts.
Unshaped, but germed with shaping power:
Too rare to price, it brings its gifts
To him whose clasp can keep its dower.
A wave of sound, a glimpse of light,
A fragrance wafted from the past,
Sudden enchantment to the sight
Can weave the spell that holds them fast.
Like seed in earth’s dark, potent womb,
Budding unseen of human eyes,
And soaring from its cradle-tomb,
When it is fledged in fitting guise,
So the unhoused, unmoulded grain,
Snared by the spirit’s cryptogram
To blossom in a wizard brain,
Light-ward exults: “I am! I am!”
In molten flux it stirs and strives,
Shred-wise united, shred-wise torn,
Till with a bursting of its gyves
In pangs of rapture it is born.
IN the old room above the darkening square,
When the acacias had begun to drowse,
In the old room (oh, the dead echoes there!)
I spoke my litany of youthful vows.
The mute surrender gathering in her eyes
Slew the past years, and in my soul arose
The mournful splendour of a day that dies,
The radiant magic that a dawn bestows.
For then the pall of chill and shadowy days
Through which I had been groping till that hour,
Was lifted, and with newly kindled gaze
I saw a sudden miracle in flower,
While my whole life before that moment seemed
A lifeless thing that I had only dreamed.
SICILIAN OCTAVE OF THE LECTURE-ROOM
THIS fat professor is a monstrous bore.
— Hark to the bird that twitters from the lawn.
What gritty shreds of desiccated lore!
— Hark to the bird that twitters from the lawn.
What hellish heat! I thought I heard a snore . . .
— Hark to the bird that twitters from the lawn.
O' frowning finals! Only six weeks more.
— O' happy bird that twitters from the lawn.
PALLID with heat, a taut metallic sky
Is looped above the siding, drably scarred
With rails that flank a sooty engine-yard,
Ash-heaps and sheds and roofing all awry.
Derelict mouse-grey trucks are mirrored by
The sepia of a mute canal, where charred
Gasometers squat sullenly on guard,
And barges drowse and boilers faintly sigh.
Tonight the arc-lamps, poised from slender stems,
Will bloom like silvery fruits. Signals will gleam
With shifting specks of jade and crimson gems.
Then music: hiss and gasp of throttled steam,
Staccato gamut of the shunted trains,
And murmurous diapason of the cranes.
