Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

  • Between the falling leaf and rose-bud’s breath;
      The bird’s forsaken nest and her new song
    (And this is all the time there is for Death);
      The worm and butterfly—it is not long!

  • “my mother says I must not pass
              Too near that glass;
    She is afraid that I will see
    A little witch that looks like me,
    With a red, red mouth, to whisper low
    The very thing I should not know!”

    Alack for all your mother’s care!...

  • Sweet world, if you will hear me now:
      I may not own a sounding Lyre
    And wear my name upon my brow
      Like some great jewel quick with fire.

    But let me, singing, sit apart,
      In tender quiet with a few,
    And keep my fame upon my heart,
      A...

  • Between the falling leaf and rose-bud’s breath;
      The bird’s forsaken nest and her new song
    (And this is all the time there is for Death);
      The worm and butterfly—it is not long!

  • Almost afraid they led her in
      (A dwarf more piteous none could find):
    Withered as some weird leaf, and thin,
      The woman was—and wan and blind.

    Into his mirror with a smile—
      Not vain to be so fair, but glad—
    The South-born painter looked the...

  • She felt, I think, but as a wild-flower can,
      Through her bright fluttering rags, the dark, the cold.
    Some farthest star, remembering what man
      Forgets, had warmed her little head with gold.

    Above her, hollow-eyed, long blind to tears,
      Leaf-cloaked,...

  • “ay, not at home, then, didst thou say?
      —And, prithee, hath he gone to court?”
    “Nay; he hath sailed but yesterday,
      With Edmund Spenser, from this port.

    “This Spenser, folk do say, hath writ
      Twelve cantos, called ‘The Faërie Queene.’
    To seek...

  • Where the graves were many, we looked for one.
      Oh, the Irish rose was red,
    And the dark stones saddened the setting sun
      With the names of the early dead.
    Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him
      In the land we love so well,
    Kept lifting...

  • I read somewhere that a swan, snow-white,
    In the sun all day, in the moon all night,
    Alone by a little grave would sit
      Waiting, and watching it.

    Up out of the lake her mate would rise,
    And call her down with his piteous cries
    Into the waters...

  • His grace of Marlborough, legends say,
      Though battle-lightnings proved his worth,
    Was scathed like others, in his day,
      By fiercer fires at his own hearth.

    The patient chief, thus sadly tried,—
      Madam, the Duchess, was so fair,—
    In Blenheim’s...