Lucy Robinson

  • A Ballade of Islands

    I would I had been island-born.
    I dearly love things insular:
    The coral bed, the quaint bazaar,
    The palm and breadfruit never shorn,
    The smoking cone that cannot char
    The azure of a tropic morn,
    The dancing girl in soft cymar,—
    All these...

  • Hic Me, Pater Optime, Fessam Deseris

    Ere yet in Vergil I could scan or spell,
    Or through the enchanted portal of that lay
    Dear to old Rome had found my faltering way,
    How oft with heaving breast I heard thee tell
    Of horrors that the Trojan fleet befell:
    How for a time they were the tempest’s...

  • The Fire i' the Flint

    The sudden thrust of speech is no mean test
    Of man or woman. Caesar, with his cry
    Of anguish,—Pilate, putting justice by,—
    Into three words a human soul compressed;
    Three broke from Galileo’s brooding breast;
    And Desdemona, instant to reply
    “Nobody...