SELECTIONS

FROM THE LATER POETRY

Lyrics

Songs of Nature

Love Songs

Songs of Life's Pilgrimage

Songs of Patriotism

1

BLUE SQUILLS

How many million Aprils came
Before I ever knew

How white a cherry bough could be,
A bed of squills, how blue!

And many a dancing April

When life is done with me,

Will lift the blue flame of the flower
And the white flame of the tree.

Oh burn me with your beauty, then,

Oh hurt me, tree and flower,

Lest in the end death try to take
Even this glistening hour.

O shaken flowers, O shimmering trees,
O sunlit white and blue,

Wound me, that I, through endless sleep,

May bear the scar of you.

THE MAY-TREE

THE May-tree on the hill
Stands in the night

So fragrant and so still,
So dusky white.

Sara Teasdale.

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That, stealing from the wood

In that sweet air,

You'd think Diana stood

Before you there.

If it be so, her bloom

Trembles with bliss.

She waits across the gloom
Her shepherd's kiss.

Touch her. A bird will start

From those pure snows,-
The dark and fluttering heart
Endymion knows.

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Alfred Noyes.

MAY IS BUILDING HER HOUSE

MAY is building her house. With apple blooms
She is roofing over the glimmering rooms;
Of the oak and the beech hath she builded its
beams,

And, spinning all day at her secret looms,
With arras of leaves each wind-swayed wall
She pictureth over, and peopleth it all

With echoes and dreams,

And singing of streams.

May is building her house. Of petal and blade, Of the roots of the oak, is the flooring made,

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With a carpet of mosses and lichen and clover, Each small miracle over and over,

And tender, traveling green things strayed.

Her windows, the morning and evening star,
And her rustling doorways, ever ajar
With the coming and going

Of fair things blowing,

The thresholds of the four winds are.

May is building her house. From the dust of things

She is making the songs and the flowers
and the wings;

From October's tossed and trodden gold
She is making the young year out of the old;
Yea; out of winter's flying sleet

She is making all the summer sweet,

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And the brown leaves spurned of November's feet

She is changing back again to spring's.

Richard Le Gallienne.

TREES

I THINK that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;