WHAT LIPS MY LIPS HAVE KISSED

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

PITY ME NOT

Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man's desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.

This have I known always: love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails;
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?

Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer; We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted—

We shall not feel it again.

We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.

Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued—

See now the slug and the mildew plunder.

Let us sit here, sit still,

Here in the sitting-room until we die;

At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;

1 Written after the final decision in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.

Leaving to our children's children this beautiful doorway, And this elm,

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds! oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.

SONNET TO GATH

Country of hunchbacks!-where the strong, straight spine
Jeered at by crooked children, makes his way
Through by-streets at the kindest hour of day,
Till he deplore his stature, and incline.
To measure manhood with a gibbous line;
Till out of loneliness, being flawed with clay,
He stoop into his neighbor's house and say,
"Your roof is low for me-the fault is mine."

Dust in an urn long since, dispersed and dead
Is great Apollo; and the happier he;

Since who amongst you all would lift a head
At a god's radiance on the mean door-tree,
Saving to run and hide your dates and bread,
And cluck your children in about your knee?

THE CAMEO

Forever over now, forever, forever gone

That day. Clear and diminished like a scene

Carven in cameo, the lighthouse, and the cove between
The sandy cliffs, and the boat drawn up on the beach;
And the long skirt of a lady innocent and young,
Her hand resting on her bosom, her head hung;
And the figure of a man in earnest speech.

Clear and diminished like a scene cut in cameo

The lighthouse, and the boat on the beach, and the two shapes

Of the woman and the man; lost like the lost day

Are the words that passed, and the pain,-discarded, cut away

From the stone, as from the memory the heat of the tears escapes.

O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,

Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure;

From the action of the waves and from the action of sorrow forever secure, White against a ruddy cliff you stand, chalcedony on sard.

OH, SLEEP FOREVER IN THE LATMIAN CAVE

Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave,
Mortal Endymion, darling of the Moon!
Her silver garments by the senseless wave

Shouldered and dropped and on the shingle strewn,

Her fluttering hand against her forehead pressed,
Her scattered looks that trouble all the sky,
Her rapid footsteps running down the west-
Of all her altered state, oblivious lie!
Whom earthen you, by deathless lips adored,
Wild-eyed and stammering to the grasses thrust,
And deep into her crystal body poured
The hot and sorrowful sweetness of the dust:
Whereof she wanders mad, being all unfit
For mortal love, that might not die of it.

SEE WHERE CAPELLA WITH HER GOLDEN KIDS

See where Capella with her golden kids

Grazes the slope between the east and north?

Thus when the builders of the pyramids

Flung down their tools at nightfall and poured forth