An Epitaph for a Husbandman
He who would start and rise
Before the crowing cocks, --
No more he lifts his eyes,
Whoever knocks.
He who before the stars
Would call the cattle home, --
They wait about the bars
For him to come.
Him at whose hearty calls
The farmstead woke again
The horses in their stalls
Expect in vain.
Busy and blithe and bold
He laboured for the morrow, --
The plough his hands would hold
Rusts in the furrow.
His fields he had to leave,
His orchards cool and dim;
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poem by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
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Bat, Bat, Come Under my Hat
(A Modernity)
Twelve good friends
Passed under her hat,
And devil a one of them
Knew where he was at.
Had they but known,
Then had they known all things, --
The littleness of great things,
The unmeasured immensity of small things.
They had known the Where and the Why,
The When and the Wherefore,
And how the Eternal
Conceived the Eternal, and therefore
Beginning began the Beginning;
They had apprehended
The ultimate virtue of sinning;
They had caught the whisper
That Vega vibrates to Arcturus,
Piercing the walls
Of heavy flesh that immure us.
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poem by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
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Wayfarer of Earth
Up, heart of mine,
Thou wayfarer of Earth!
Of seed divine,
Be mindful of thy birth.
Though the flesh faint
Through long-endured constraint
Of nights and days,
Lift up thy praise
To Life, that set thee in such strenuous ways,
And left thee not
To drowse and rot
In some thick-perfumed and luxurious plot.
Strong, strong is Earth,
With vigour for thy feet,
To make thy wayfaring
Tireless and fleet.
And good is Earth–
But Earth not all thy good,
O thou with seed of suns
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Afoot
Comes the lure of green things growing,
Comes the call of waters flowing -
And the wayfarer desire
Moves and wakes and would be going.
Hark the migrant hosts of June
Marching nearer noon by noon!
Hark the gossip of the grasses
Bivouacked beneath the moon!
Long the quest and far the ending
When my wayfarer is wending -
When desire is once afoot,
Doom behind and dream attending!
In his ears the phantom chime
Of incommunicable rhyme,
He shall chase the fleeting camp-fires
Of the Bedouins of Time.
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O Earth, Sufficing All our Needs
O earth, sufficing all our needs, O you
With room for body and for spirit too,
How patient while your children vex their souls
Devising alien heavens beyond your blue!
Dear dwelling of the immortal and unseen,
How obstinate in my blindness have I been,
Not comprehending what your tender calls,
Veiled promises and reassurance, mean.
Not far and cold the way that they have gone
Who through your sundering darkness have withdrawn;
Almost within our hand-reach they remain
Who pass beyond the sequence of the dawn.
Not far and strange the Heaven, but very near,
Your children's hearts unknowingly hold dear.
At times we almost catch the door swung wide.
An unforgotten voice almost we hear.
I am the heir of Heaven -- and you are just.
You, you alone I know -- and you I trust.
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poem by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
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When The Sleepy Man Comes
When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes,
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)
He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun;
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
The stars that he loves he lets out one by one.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)
He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town;
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)
He comes with a murmur of dream in his wings;
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
And whispers of mermaids and wonderful things.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)
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The Skater
My glad feet shod with the glittering steel
I was the god of the wingèd heel.
The hills in the far white sky were lost;
The world lay still in the wide white frost;
And the woods hung hushed in their long white dream
By the ghostly, glimmering, ice-blue stream.
Here was a pathway, smooth like glass,
Where I and the wandering wind might pass
To the far-off palaces, drifted deep,
Where Winter's retinue rests in sleep.
I followed the lure, I fled like a bird,
Till the startled hollows awoke and heard
A spinning whisper, a sibilant twang,
As the stroke of the steel on the tense ice rang;
And the wandering wind was left behind
As faster, faster I followed my mind;
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The Recessional
Now along the solemn heights
Fade the Autumn's altar-lights;
Down the great earth's glimmering chancel
Glide the days and nights.
Little kindred of the grass,
Like a shadow in a glass
Falls the dark and falls the stillness;
We must rise and pass.
We must rise and follow, wending
Where the nights and days have ending, --
Pass in order pale and slow
Unto sleep extending.
Little brothers of the clod,
Soul of fire and seed of sod,
We must fare into the silence
At the knees of God.
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Canadian Streams
O rivers rolling to the sea
From lands that bear the maple-tree,
How swell your voices with the strain
Of loyalty and liberty!
A holy music, heard in vain
By coward heart and sordid brain,
To whom this strenuous being seems
Naught but a greedy race for gain.
O unsung streams--not splendid themes
Ye lack to fire your patriot dreams!
Annals of glory gild your waves,
Hope freights your tides, Canadian streams!
St. Lawrence, whose wide water laves
The shores that ne'er have nourished slaves!
Swift Richelieu of lilied fame!
Niagara of glorious graves!
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Cambrai and Marne
Before our trenches at Cambrai
We saw their columns cringe away.
We saw their masses melt and reel
Before our line of leaping steel.
A handful to their storming hordes,
We scourged them with the scourge of swords,
And still, the more we slew, the more
Came up for every slain a score.
Between the hedges and the town
The cursing squadrons we rode down;
To stay them we outpoured our blood
Between the beetfields and the wood.
In that red hell of shrieking shell
Unfaltering our gunners fell;
They fell, or ere that day was done,
Beside the last unshattered gun.
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