Chapter I: CANNOT write, I may not write,

I dare not write to thee,
But look on the face of the moon by night,
And my letters shalt thou see.
For every letter that lovers write,
By their loves on the moon is seen,
If they pen their thought on the paper white,
With the magic juice of the bean!

LUI.

Oh, I had written this many a year,
And my letters you had read.
Had you only told me the spell, my dear,
Ere ever we twain were wed!
But I have a lady and you have a lord,
And their eyes are of the green,
And we dared not trust to the written word,
Lest our long, long love be seen!

ELLE.

“Oh, every thought that your heart has thought,
Since the world came us between,
The birds of the air to my heart have brought,
With no word heard or seen.”
’_Twas thus in a dream we spoke and said_
_Myself and my love unseen_,
_But I woke and sighed on my weary bed_,
_For the spell of the juice of the bean_!

_Tusitala_.

WE spoke of a rest in a fairy knowe of the North, but he,
Far from the firths of the East, and the racing tides of the West,
Sleeps in the sight and the sound of the infinite Southern Sea,
Weary and well content in his grave on the Vaëa crest.

Tusitala, the lover of children, the teller of tales,
Giver of counsel and dreams, a wonder, a world’s delight,
Looks o’er the labours of men in the plain and the hill; and the sails
Pass and repass on the sea that he loved, in the day and the night.

Winds of the West and the East in the rainy season blow
Heavy with perfume, and all his fragrant woods are wet,
Winds of the East and West as they wander to and fro,
Bear him the love of the land he loved, and the long regret.

Once we were kindest, he said, when leagues of the limitless sea
Flowed between us, but now that no wash of the wandering tides
Sunders us each from each, yet nearer we seem to be,
Whom only the unbridged stream of the river of Death divides.

_Disdainful Diaphenia_.

THERE is no venom in the Rose
That any bee should shrink from it;
No poison from the Lily flows,
She hath not a disdainful wit;
But thou, that Rose and Lily art,
Thy tongue doth poison Cupid’s dart!

Nature herself to deadly flowers
Refuseth beauty lest the vain
Insects that hum through August hours
With beauty should suck in their bane;
But thou, as Rose or Lily fair,
Art circled with envenomed air!

Like Progne didst thou lose thy tongue,
Thy lovers might adore and live;
Like that witch Circe, oft besung,
Thou hast dear gifts, if thou wouldst give;
But since thou hast a wicked wit,
Thy lovers fade, or flee from it.

_Tall Salmacis_.

WERE an apple tree a pine,
Tall and slim, and softly swaying,
Then her beauty were like thine,
Salmacis, when boune a Maying,
Tall as any poplar tree,
Sweet as apple blossoms be!

Had the Amazonian Queen
Seen thee ’midst thy maiden peers,
Thou the Coronel hadst been
Of that lady’s Grenadiers;
Troy had never mourned her fall,
With thine axe to guard her wall.

As Penthesilea brave
Is the maiden (in her dreams);
Ilium she well might save,
Though Achilles’ armour gleams,
’Midst the Greeks; all vain it is,
’Gainst the glance of Salmacis!

JUBILEE POEMS BY BARDS WHO WERE SILENT

_What Francesco said of the Jubilee_.

BY R. B.

WHAT if we call it fifty years! ’Tis steep!
To climb so high a gradient? Prate of Guides?
Are we not roped? The Danger? Nay, the Turf,
No less nor more than mountain peaks, my friend,
Hears talk of Roping,—but the Jubilee!
Nay, there you have me: old Francesco once
(This was in Milan, in Visconti’s time,
Our wild Visconti, with one lip askance,
And beard tongue-twisted in the nostril’s nook)
Parlous enough,—these times—what? “So are ours”?
Or any times, i’fegs, to him who thinks,—
Well ’twas in Spring “the frolic myrtle trees
There gendered the grave olive stocks,”—you cry
“A miracle!”—Sordello writeth thus,—
Believe me that indeed ’twas thus, and he,
Francesco, you are with me? Well, there’s gloom
No less than gladness in your fifty years,
“And so,” said he, “to supper as we may.”
“Voltairean?” So you take it; but ’tis late,
And dinner seven, sharp, at Primrose Hill.

_The Poet and the Jubilee_.

POSCIMUR!

BY A. D.

A _Birthday Ode_ for MEG or NAN,
A Rhyme for Lady FLORA’s Fan,
A Verse on _Smut_, who’s gone astray,
These Things are in the _Poet’s_ way;
At Home with praise of JULIA’s Lace,
Or DELIA’s Ankles, ROSE’s Face,
But “Something _overparted_” He,
When asked to rhyme the _jubilee_!

He therefore turns, the _Poet_ wary,
And Thumbs his _Carmen Seculare_,
To PHŒBUS and to DIAN prays,
Who tune Men’s Lyres of Holidays,
He reads of the _Sibylline_ Shades,
Of Stainless Boys and chosen Maids.
He turns, and reads the other Page,
Of docile Youth, and placid Age,
Then Sings how, in this golden Year
_Fides Pudorque_ reappear,—
And if they don’t appear, you know it
Were quite unjust to blame the Poet!

_On any Beach_.

BY M. A.

YES, in the stream and stress of things,
That breaks around us like the sea,
There comes to Peasants and to Kings,
The solemn Hour of Jubilee.
If they, till strenuous Nature give
Some fifty harvests, chance to live!

Ah, Fifty harvests! But the corn
Is grown beside the barren main,
Is salt with sea-spray, blown and borne
Across the green unvintaged plain.
And life, lived out for fifty years,
Is briny with the spray of tears!

Ah, such is Life, to us that live
Here, in the twilight of the Gods,
Who weigh each gift the world can give,
And sigh and murmur, _What’s the odds_
_So long’s you’re happy_? Nay, what Man
Finds Happiness since Time began?

_Ode of Jubilee_.

BY A. C. S.

ME, that have sung and shrieked, and foamed in praise of Freedom,
_Me_ do you ask to sing
Parochial pomps, and waste, the wail of Jubileedom
For Queen, or Prince, or King!

* * * * *

Nay, by the foam that fleeting oars have feathered,
In Grecian seas;
Nay, by the winds that barques Athenian weathered—
By all of these
I bid you each be mute, Bards tamed and tethered,
And fee’d with fees!

For you the laurel smirched, for you the gold, too,
Of Magazines;
For me the Spirit of Song, unbought, unsold to
Pale Priests or Queens!

For you the gleam of gain, the fluttering cheque
Of Mr. Knowles,
For me, to soar above the ruins and wreck
Of Snobs and “Souls”!

When aflush with the dew of the dawn, and the
Rose of the Mystical Vision,
The spirit and soul of the Men of the
Future shall rise and be free,
They shall hail me with hymning and harping,
With eloquent Art and Elysian,—
The Singer who sung not but spurned them,
The slaves that could sing “Jubilee;”
With pinchbeck lyre and tongue,
Praising their tyrant sung,
They shall fail and shall fade in derision,
As wind on the ways of the sea!

_Jubilee Before Revolution_.

BY W. M.

“TELL me, O Muse of the Shifty, the Man who wandered afar,”
So have I chanted of late, and of Troy burg wasted of war—
Now of the sorrows of Menfolk that fifty years have been,
Now of the Grace of the Commune I sing, and the days of a Queen!
Surely I curse rich Menfolk, “the Wights of the Whirlwind” may they—
This is my style of translating ‘Αρπυίαι,—snatch them away!
The Rich Thieves rolling in wealth that make profit of labouring men,
Surely the Wights of the Whirlwind shall swallow them quick in their
den!
O baneful, O wit-straying, in the Burg of London ye dwell,
And ever of Profits and three per cent. are the tales ye tell,
But the stark, strong Polyphemus shall answer you back again,
Him whom “No man slayeth by guile and not by main.”
(By “main” I mean “main force,” if aught at all do I mean.
In the Greek of the blindfold Bard it is simpler the sense to glean.)
You Polyphemus shall swallow and fill his mighty maw,
What time he maketh an end of the Priests, the Police, and the Law,
And then, ah, who shall purchase the poems of old that I sang,
Who shall pay twelve-and-six for an epic in Saga slang?
But perchance even “Hermes the Flitter” could scarcely expound what I
mean,
And I trow that another were fitter to sing you a song for a Queen.

FOLK SONGS

_French Peasant Songs_.