Must years go by in sad uncertainty Leaving us doubting whose the conquering blows,Are we or Fate the victors?Time which shows All inner meanings will reveal,but we Shall never know the upshot.Ours to be Wasted with longing,shattered in the throes,The agonies of splendid dreams,which day Dims from our vision,but each night brings back;We strive to hold their grandeur,and essay To be the thing we dream.Sudden we lack The flash of insight,life grows drear and gray,And hour follows hour,nerveless,slack.
Before Dawn Life!Austere arbiter of each man's fate,By whom he learns that Nature's steadfast laws Are as decrees immutable;O pause Your even forward march!Not yet too late Teach me the needed lesson,when to wait Inactive as a ship when no wind draws To stretch the loosened cordage.One implores Thy clemency,whose wilfulness innate Has gone uncurbed and roughshod while the years Have lengthened into decades;now distressed He knows no rule by which to move or stay,And teased with restlessness and desperate fears He dares not watch in silence thy wise way Bringing about results none could have guessed.
The Poet What instinct forces man to journey on,Urged by a longing blind but dominant!
Nothing he sees can hold him,nothing daunt His never failing eagerness.The sun Setting in splendour every night has won His vassalage;those towers flamboyant Of airy cloudland palaces now haunt His daylight wanderings.Forever done With simple joys and quiet happiness He guards the vision of the sunset sky;Though faint with weariness he must possess Some fragment of the sunset's majesty;He spurns life's human friendships to profess Life's loneliness of dreaming ecstasy.
At Night The wind is singing through the trees to-night,A deep-voiced song of rushing cadences And crashing intervals.No summer breeze Is this,though hot July is at its height,Gone is her gentler music;with delight She listens to this booming like the seas,These elemental,loud necessities Which call to her to answer their swift might.