No More Learning

He seems the center around which stars glow
While all earth's ostentations surge below.

Immovably and silently he stands
Placed where the confused current ebbs and flows;
Past fathomless dark depths that he commands
A shallow generation drifting goes. . . .




MADNESS


She thinks: I am--Have you not seen?
Who are you then, Marie?
I am a Queen, I am a Queen!
To your knee, to your knee!

And then she weeps: I was--a child--
Who were you then, Marie?
Know you that I was no man's child,
Poor and in rags--said she.

And then a Princess I became
To whom men bend their knees;
To princes things are not the same
As those a beggar sees.

And those things which have made you great
Came to you, tell me, when?
One night, one night, one night quite late,
Things became different then.

I walked the lane which presently
With strung chords seemed to bend;
Then Marie became Melody
And danced from end to end.
The people watched with startled mien
And passed with frightened glance
For all know that only a Queen
May dance in the lanes: dance! . . .




LAMENT


Oh! All things are long passed away and far.
A light is shining but the distant star
From which it still comes to me has been dead
A thousand years . . . In the dim phantom boat
That glided past some ghastly thing was said.
A clock just struck within some house remote.
Which house? --I long to still my beating heart.
Beneath the sky's vast dome I long to pray . . .