A FRAGMENT OF A TRAGEDY
ACT I.
SCENE I. Field of Battle.
Alarum. Enter King STEPHEN, Knights, and Soldiers.
Stephen. If shame can on a soldier’s vein-swoll’n front
Spread deeper crimson than the battle’s toil,
Blush in your casing helmets! for see, see!
Yonder my chivalry, my pride of war,
Wrench’d with an iron hand from firm array,
Are routed
The black one is squatting-the red one is licking
his bottom.
(Cooking-pot and fire)
Two tiny birds jump over two hundred trees.
(Eyes)
The mourner has stopped weeping.
The pitying friend is still crying.
(Rain and the dripping leaves after rain)
And now the bell, – the bell
She had so often heard by night and day
And listened to with solemn pleasure,
E’en as a living voice, –
Rung its remorseless toll for her,
So young, so beautiful, so good.
Decrepit age, and vigorous life,
And blooming youth, and helpless infancy,
Poured forth, – on crutches, in the pride of strength<br
Dim vales—and shadowy floods—
And cloudy-looking woods,
Whose forms we can’t discover
For the tears that drip all over:
Huge moons there wax and wane—
Again—again—again—
Every moment of the night—
Forever changing places—
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces.
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember
Thank Heaven! the crisis,
The danger, is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last—
And the fever called “Living”
Is conquered at last.
Sadly, I know
I am shorn of my strength,
And no muscle I move
As I lie at full length—
But no matter!—I feel
I am better at length.
GOD of the golden bow,
And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
And of the golden fire,
Charioteer
Of the patient year,
Where—where slept thine ire,
When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,
Thy laurel, thy glory,
The light of thy story,
Or was I a worm—too low crawling for death?
O Delphic Apollo!
I
Oh my child, be silent, do not cry;
Listen to the tale of the King of Bauri,
Listen to the tale of the exiled King
Who was cheated of election as the Ruler.
He left his renown, he left
In all silence King Mringwari.
Cease your sobbing, child, don’t cry,
Listen to my tale which is true:
The mercenaries were given
What colour is this?
Colour white
As white as snow
What colour is this?
Colour black
As black as charcoal
What colour is this?
Colour blue
As blue as the ocean
The wind howls, the trees sway,
The loose house-top sheets clatter and clang,
The open window shuts with a bang,
And the sky makes night of the day.
Helter-skelter the parents run,
Pressed with a thousand minor cares:
‘Hey, you there! pack the house-wares!
And where on earth’s my son?
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I:
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry:
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks
If you sit down at set of sun
And count the acts that you have done,
And, counting, find
One self-denying deed, one word
That eased the heart of him who heard,
One glance most kind
That fell like sunshine where it went —
Then you may count that day well spent.
But if, through all the livelong day,
You’ve cheered
I see a beggar in front of me,
Who hardly can walk and can’t even see.
Betrayed by her family for no reason.
Sadness is, what she has for all season.
Crumpled in torn Saree with a blanket around
Beg’s a whole day and eats whatever she finds.
Sadness on her face, a story to tell.
God-given her this, a
Take me home
Where your elders
Can see our love
Stash me not away from the sky
Where your elders we say
I am not a highbrow suitor
As my elders
Known everything
About our relationship
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o’er his heart a shadow—
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
O Great Spirit,
You who in Your form of the Chapungu,
the great eagle with sharper eye than any aeroplane,
watches over us and knows all things;
who even descends from your great circles of flight
over our beautiful land of stone and earth and tree
to show a child lost in the bush
the way back to the village
Courage came to you with your boyhood’s grace
Of ardent life and limb.
Each day new dangers steeled you to the test,
To ride, to climb, to swim.
Your hot blood taught you carelessness of death
With every breath.
So when you went to play another game
You could not but be brave:
An Empire’s team, a rougher football field,
The
There’s a certain sadness to this body of water
adjacent to the runway, its reeds and weeds,
handful of ducks, the water color
manmade. A still life. And still
life’s a cold exercise in looking back,
back to Florida, craning my neck
like a sandhill crane in Alachua Basin.
As for the scrub oaks,
the hot wind in the leaves was language,
Spanish
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen
