No More Learning

AUF WIEDERSEHEN.

IN MEMORY OF J. T. F.

Until we meet again! That is the meaning
Of the familiar words, that men repeat
At parting in the street.
Ah yes, till then! but when death intervening
Rends us asunder, with what ceaseless pain
We wait for the Again!

The friends who leave us do not feel the sorrow
Of parting, as we feel it, who must stay
Lamenting day by day,
And knowing, when we wake upon the morrow,
We shall not find in its accustomed place
The one beloved face.

It were a double grief, if the departed,
Being released from earth, should still retain
A sense of earthly pain;
It were a double grief, if the true-hearted,
Who loved us here, should on the farther shore
Remember us no more.

Believing, in the midst of our afflictions,
That death is a beginning, not an end,
We cry to them, and send
Farewells, that better might be called predictions,
Being fore-shadowings of the future, thrown
Into the vast Unknown.

Faith overleaps the confines of our reason,
And if by faith, as in old times was said,
Women received their dead
Raised up to life, then only for a season
Our partings are, nor shall we wait in vain
Until we meet again!



ELEGIAC VERSE

I

Peradventure of old, some bard in Ionian Islands,
Walking alone by the sea, hearing the wash of the waves,
Learned the secret from them of the beautiful verse elegiac,
Breathing into his song motion and sound of the sea.

For as the wave of the sea, upheaving in long undulations,
Plunges loud on the sands, pauses, and turns, and retreats,
So the Hexameter, rising and singing, with cadence sonorous,
Falls; and in refluent rhythm back the Pentameter flows?

II

Not in his youth alone, but in age, may the heart of the poet
Bloom into song, as the gorse blossoms in autumn and spring.
III

Not in tenderness wanting, yet rough are the rhymes of our poet;
Though it be Jacob's voice, Esau's, alas! are the hands.

IV

Let us be grateful to writers for what is left in the inkstand;
When to leave off is an art only attained by the few.

V

How can the Three be One? you ask me; I answer by asking,
Hail and snow and rain, are they not three, and yet one?

VI

By the mirage uplifted the land floats vague in the ether,
Ships and the shadows of ships hang in the motionless air;
So by the art of the poet our common life is uplifted,
So, transfigured, the world floats in a luminous haze.

VII

Like a French poem is Life; being only perfect in structure
When with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

VIII

Down from the mountain descends the brooklet, rejoicing in
freedom;
Little it dreams of the mill hid in the valley below;
Glad with the joy of existence, the child goes singing and
laughing,
Little dreaming what toils lie in the future concealed.

IX

As the ink from our pen, so flow our thoughts and our feelings
When we begin to write, however sluggish before.

X

Like the Kingdom of Heaven, the Fountain of Youth is within us;
If we seek it elsewhere, old shall we grow in the search.

XI

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it;
Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.

XII

Wisely the Hebrews admit no Present tense in their language;
While we are speaking the word, it is is already the Past.

XIII

In the twilight of age all things seem strange and phantasmal,
As between daylight and dark ghost-like the landscape appears.

XIV

Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending;
Many a poem is marred by a superfluous verse.



THE CITY AND THE SEA

The panting City cried to the Sea,
"I am faint with heat,--O breathe on me! "

And the Sea said, "Lo, I breathe!