No More Learning

But in these weeks of the awakening Spring
Something within me has been freed--something
That in the past dark years unconscious lay,
Which rises now within me and commands
And gives my poor warm life into your hands
Who know not what I was that Yesterday.




PONT DU CARROUSEL


Upon the bridge the blind man stands alone,
Gray like a mist veiled monument he towers
As though of nameless realms the boundary stone
About which circle distant starry hours.

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 .