This was your butterfly, you see,—
His fine wings made him vain:
The caterpillars crawl, but he
Passed them in rich disdain.—
My pretty boy says, “Let him be
Only a worm again!”
O child, when things have learned to wear
Wings once, they must be fain
To keep them always high and fair:
Think of the creeping pain...
I know a story, fairer, dimmer, sadder,
Than any story painted in your books.
You are so glad? It will not make you gladder;
Yet listen, with your pretty restless looks.
“Is it a Fairy Story?” Well, half fairy—
At least it dates far back as fairies do,
And seems to me as beautiful and airy;
Yet half, perhaps the fairy half, is...
“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!
A bird of the air,
A wistful wind, or (I suppose
Sent by some hapless boy) a rose,
With...
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 honors felt less pride
Than in the lady’s lovely hair.
Once ( shorn, she had...
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 still and dim:—
With cries she would answer him.
Hardly a shadow would she let...
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 the grass till the dew was dim
In the churchyard of Clonmel.
But the sexton came...
“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 for one to publish it,
They go—on a long voyage, I ween.”
Ah me! I came so far...
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, a skeleton of stone arose….
O castle-shadow of a thousand years,
Where you have...
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 while,
With eyes than Christ’s alone less sad.
“Mother of God,” in pale surprise...
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!
