Mad for Poetry

    We first saw fire on the tragic slopes     Where the flood-tide of France’s early gain,    Big with wrecked promise and abandoned hopes,     Broke in a surf…

    Though thou art now a ruin bare and cold,    Thou wert sometime the garden of a king.    The birds have sought a lovelier place to sing.    The flowers…

   Who shall invoke her, who shall be her priest,    With single rites the common debt to pay?    On some green headland fronting to the East    Our fairest boy…

    Above the ruin of God’s holy place,    Where man-forsaken lay the bleeding rood,    Whose hands, when men had craved substantial food,    Gave not, nor folded when they cried,…

    It may be for the world of weeds and tares    And dearth in Nature of sweet Beauty’s rose    That oft as Fortune from ten thousand shows    One from…

   I fancied, while you stood conversing there,    Superb, in every attitude a queen,    Her ermine thus Boadicea bare,    So moved amid the multitude Faustine.    My life, whose whole religion…

    Clouds rosy-tinted in the setting sun,    Depths of the azure eastern sky between,    Plains where the poplar-bordered highways run,    Patched with a hundred tints of brown and green,…

    Like as a dryad, from her native bole    Coming at dusk, when the dim stars emerge,    To a slow river at whose silent verge    Tall poplars tremble and…

   Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed),    Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue    Look the leftovers of mankind that rest,    Now that the cream has…