Love and Life
I.
AS some faint wisp of fragrance, floating wide—
A pennant-perfume on the evening air—
From a walled garden, flower-filled and fair,
To drape a sudden beauty long denied
Upon life's highway desolate and dried—
So come you to me, as I, unaware,
Bend my strict eyes upon my pathway bare;
But at your presence straight I turn aside,
And passing in the garden see uncurled
The heart of hidden beauty in the world,
And love as life's one blossom is revealed.
My backward glance your floating tresses blind,
About my struggling hopes your white arms wind,
And I have yielded—but how sweet to yield!
II.
Yet, in the prison of the garden bound,
The sluggish perfumes o'er my spirit fall,
And I lie languid in their sweetness' thrall,
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poem by Arthur Henry Adams
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A Woman's Farewell
SO with this farewell kiss I taste at last
The all of life; the Future and the Past
Upon your dear lips dwell.
Love will not come again, though I implore;
And in my heart a twilight evermore—
Farewell!
A man's heart is so wide that I was wrong
To dream that I could fill it with the song
A woman loves so well;
A woman's heart is narrow, but I filled
Mine brimming with your kisses—none was spilled—
Farewell!
So fierce your love was, I was half-afraid.
The roses blossom and the roses fade;
The withered petals tell!
So high into your heart you lifted me,
So far I have to fall, since it must be
Farewell!
Now all the world I fashioned round me falls;
And from the past one memory calls and calls,
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poem by Arthur Henry Adams
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A Song of Failure
HERE is my hand to you, brother,
You of the ruck who have failed
I, too, am only another
Fighter who faltered and quailed.
Now with my courage for token
Here to grim Fate I give tithe;
I, too, am beaten and broken,
Lying, the swath of the scythe!
We to the conquerors' seeming
Crouch, an incongruous horde—
Fighters, enmeshed in their dreaming,
Dreamers who girl on the sword,
Weaklings with splendid ambitions,
Heroes who learnt to succumb,
Poets a-swoon in their visions,
Singers with ecstasy dumb.
Failed! So we cast off our burden,
Done with our doubts and our fears:
These we have won for our guerdon—
Pity and tears—women's tears!
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poem by Arthur Henry Adams
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The Goal
ON the grey levels of the plain of life
When, slowly swirled,
The moving hills of morning mist
Hedged in the world—
While yet undared the path of toil and strife,
I found a friend
Whose faith I pictured would persist
Until the end.
Then peered the stooping sun across the plain—
The world he kissed;
In sudden glory shimmering
Flamed all the mist!
The sullen Darkness carried off his slain,
And straight away,
Like a forefinger beckoning,
The white road lay.
Her hand in mine, upon the path we pressed;
Together shared
The flowers we plucked—to find them pain;
And forward fared
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poem by Arthur Henry Adams
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A Question
AND so in the death-darkened chamber they met,
The woman that once he had loved and the one he loved yet—
The wife who had warped his desire and the woman he could not forget.
They stood by the bier where between them he slept,
And the love he had lost in his wife to her swimming eyes leapt;
But the woman his life had belonged to—his paramour—spoke not nor wept.
It was only a story of sated desire—
Of a love merely sensual burnt to an ash by its fire,
And a husband who turned to a more luscious love that was his for the hire.
All had sinned. For the husband had killed by his clutch,
Rough-handed, the fruit of a love that had dropped at his touch.
One woman's great sin was not loving, his wife's was in loving too much.
And so he had died; it was over at last;
And across him the two women looked at each other aghast—
Across his cold corse, and across the cold corse of the loathsome dead Past!
Then the smouldering love of the wife leapt to flame,
And she poured forth her kisses upon him, and called on his name.
But the other said “No, he is nothing to you; soul and body I claim!”
They looked at each other awhile. Said the wife wearily,
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The Australian
ONCE more this Autumn-earth is ripe,
Parturient of another type.
While with the Past old nations merge
His foot is on the Future’s verge.
They watch him, as they huddle, pent,
Striding a spacious continent,
Above the level desert’s marge
Looming in his aloofness large.
No flower with fragile sweetness graced—
A lank weed wrestling with the waste;
Pallid of face and gaunt of limb,
The sweetness withered out of him;
Sombre, indomitable, wan,
The juices dried, the glad youth gone.
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poem by Arthur Henry Adams
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The Garden of the Sea
THE infinite garden of the sea is His
To play in. Gravely smiling He resigns
To man his choice—this rugged plot of earth,
Watches man tear it with his deep canals,
Wound it with iron rails, scar it with roads,
And spot its pleasant freshness with the sore
Of festering cities, oozing heavy smoke.
He sees and He forgives. Then gently takes
His pliant sea into His yearning hands—
As an old mother might caress a doll
When all her sons are dead—and wistfully
He moulds it. O, that He might so thrust man—
That interloping soul of stubbornness—
The solitary irreconcilable
Of His subservient Universe—within
The grim, unalterable grooves of law!
But, ah! the sea, the fecund woman-sea,
Is His to fashion as He wills! He girds
It round with whitely gleaming paths of beach;
Then, at His word, the blossoms of the spray
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A Pair Of Lovers In The Street
A PAIR of lovers in the street!
I dare not mock: with reverence meet
My unforgetting heart I cheat.
Ah, God, spare me—so soon again
At the barred door to beat in vain,
And find their dalliance such fierce pain!
I, yearning up from Hell’s abyss,
See, dreaming through their worlds of bliss,
This Dante and his Beatrice!
For these the distant goal have won
For which God made the plasm and sun;
His patient labouring is done.
For these each Spring has been a bride,
And lonely worlds were spawned and died.
Chaos for them in birth-throes cried.
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Afterwards
NOW that our pathways sever here,
And mine slopes down across the night,
Whence I shall see you burning clear
A beacon on the mountain-height—
Now that our pathways sever here,
I have no kiss, I have no tear.
Your eyes my lonely world have lit
With sunset peace that lingers yet,
And on my gladdened heart is writ
No shade of blame, and no regret.
Your eyes my sombre world have lit,
And made a new world out of it.
Your soul is woven, strand and strand,
With mine across the woof of Time;
Your fingers trickle from my hand—
Yet where you go my soul shall climb.
Our souls are woven, strand with strand;
Think you the pattern was not planned?
Love finds a solace in regret—
With the rich past I am content
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poem by Arthur Henry Adams
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The Dwellings Of Our Dead
They lie unwatched, in waste and vacant places,
In sombre bush or wind-swept tussock spaces,
Where seldom human tread
And never human trace is—
The dwellings of our dead!
No insolence of stone is o'er them builded;
By mockery of monuments unshielded,
Far on the unfenced plain
Forgotten graves have yielded
Earth to free earth again.
Above their crypts no air with incense reeling,
No chant of choir or sob of organ pealing;
But ever over them
The evening breezes kneeling
Whisper a requiem.
For some the margeless plain where no one passes,
Save when at morning far in misty masses
The drifting flock appears.
Lo, here the greener grasses
Glint like a stain of tears!
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poem by Arthur Henry Adams
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