Lizette Woodworth Reese

  • Keep back the one word more,
    Nor give of your whole store;
    For, it may be, in Art’s sole hour of need,
    Lacking that word, you shall be poor indeed.

  • An english lad, who, reading in a book,
    A ponderous, leathern thing set on his knee,
    Saw the broad violet of the Egean Sea
    Lap at his feet as it were village brook.
    Wide was the east; the gusts of morning shook;
    Immortal laughter beat along that shore;...

  • Along the pastoral ways I go,
    To get the healing of the trees,
    The ghostly news the hedges know;
    To hive me honey like the bees,
    Against the time of snow.

    The common hawthorn that I see,
    Beside the sunken wall astir,
    Or any other...

  • I am Thy grass, O Lord!
      I grow up sweet and tall
    But for a day, beneath Thy sword
      To lie at evenfall.

    Yet have I not enough
      In that brief day of mine?
    The wind, the bees, the wholesome stuff
      The sun pours out like wine.

    ...

  • Snatch the departing mood;
    Make yours its emptying reed, and pipe us still
    Faith in the time, faith in our common blood,
    Faith in the least of good:
    Song cannot fail if these its spirits fill!

    What if your heritage be
    The huddled trees along the...

  • Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone,
    The box dripped in the air;
    Its odor through my house was blown
    Into the chamber there.

    Remote and yet distinct the scent,
    The sole thing of the kind,
    As though one spoke a word half meant
    That...

  • Bathsheba came out to the sun,
    Out to our wallëd cherry-trees;
    The tears adown her cheek did run,
    Bathsheba standing in the sun,
    Telling the bees.

    My mother had that moment died;
    Unknowing, sped I to the trees,
    And plucked Bathsheba’s...

  • Brother of mine, good monk with cowlëd head,
    Walled from that world which thou hast long since fled,
    And pacing thy green close beyond the sea,
    I send my heart to thee.

    Down gust-sweet walks, bordered by lavender,
    While eastward, westward, the mad...

  • Battles nor songs can from oblivion save,
      But Fame upon a white deed loves to build:
    From out that cup of water Sidney gave,
      Not one drop has been spilled.

  • When i consider Life and its few years—
    A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun;
    A call to battle, and the battle done
    Ere the last echo dies within our ears;
    A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears;
    The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat;...