Chapter II

"I would not care, perhaps," you said, watching your roses,
"If only 'twere dust and ruin and emptiness left behind!
But the thought that Earth and April
Year by casual year
Shall waken around the old ways, soft and beautiful,
Year by year when I am away,
--This, this breaks my heart!"

THE STEEL WORKERS

I watched the workers in steel,
The Pit-like glow of the furnace,
The rivers of molten metal,
The tremulous rumble of cranes,
The throb of the Thor-like hammers
On sullen and resonant anvils!
I saw the half-clad workers
Twisting earth's iron to their use,
Shaping the steel to their thoughts;
And, in some way, out of the fury
And the fires of mortal passion,
It seemed to me,
In some way, out of the torture
And tumult of inchoate Time,
The hammer of sin is shaping
The soul of man!

THE CHILDREN

The city is old in sin,
And children are not for cities,
And, wan-eyed woman, you want them not,
You say with a broken laugh.
Yet out of each wayward softness of voice,
And each fulness of breast,
And each flute-throated echo of song,
Each flutter of lace and quest of beautiful things,
Each coil of entangling hair built into its crown,
Each whisper and touch in the silence of night,
Each red unreasoning mouth that is lifted to mouth,
Each whiteness of brow that is furrowed no more with thought,
Each careless soft curve of lips that can never explain,
Arises the old and the inappeasable cry!
Every girl who leans from a tenement sill
And flutters a hand to a youth,
Every woman who waits for a man in the dusk,
Every harlotous arm flung up to a drunken heel
That would trample truth down in the dust,
Reaches unknowingly out for its own,
And blind to its heritage waits
For its child!

THE NOCTURNE

Remote, in some dim room,
On this dark April morning soft with rain,
I hear her pensive touch
Fall aimless on the keys,
And stop, and play again.

And as the music wakens
And the shadowy house is still,
How all my troubled soul cries out
For things I know not of!
Ah, keen the quick chords fall,
And weighted with regret,
Fade through the quiet rooms;
And warm as April rain
The strange tears fall,
And life in some way seems
Too deep to bear!

THE WILD GEESE

Over my home-sick head,
High in the paling light
And touched with the sunset's glow,
Soaring and strong and free,
The unswerving phalanx sweeps,
The honking wild geese go,--
Go with a flurry of wings
Home to their norland lakes
And the sedge-fringed tarns of peace
And the pinelands soft with Spring!

I cannot go as the geese go,
But into the steadfast North,
The North that is dark and tender,
My home-sick spirit wings,--
Wings with a flurry of longing thoughts
And nests in the tarns of youth.

THE DAY

I

Dewy, dewy lawn-slopes,
Is this the day she comes?
O wild-flower face of Morning,
Must you never wake?
Silvery, silvery sea-line,
Does she come to-day?
O murmurous, murmurous birch-leaves,
Beneath your whispering shadow
She will surely pass;
And thrush beneath the black-thorn
And white-throat in the pine-top,
Sing as you have never sung,
For she will surely come!