SCYTHE SONG

Mowers, weary and brown and blithe,
What is the word, methinks, ye know,
Endless over-word that the Scythe

Sings to the blades of the grass below?
Scythes that swing in the grass and clover,
Something, still, they say as they pass;
What is the word that, over and over,
Sings the Scythe to the flowers and grass?

Hush, ah, hush, the Scythes are saying,
Hush, and heed not, and fall asleep;
Hush they say to the grasses swaying;
Hush they sing to the clover deep!
Hush 'tis the lullaby Time is singing-
Hush and heed not for all things pass;
Hush, ah, hush! and the Scythes are swinging
Over the clover, over the grass!

Robert Bridges

Robert (Seymour) Bridges was born in 1844 and educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After traveling extensively, he studied medicine in London and practiced until 1882. Most of his poems, like his occasional plays, are classical in tone as well as treatment. He was appointed poet laureate in 1913, following Alfred Austin. His command of the secrets of rhythm, especially exemplified in Shorter Poems (1894), through a subtle versification give his lines a firm delicacy and beauty of pattern.

WINTER NIGHTFALL

The day begins to droop,-
Its course is done:

But nothing tells the place
Of the setting sun.

The hazy darkness deepens,

And up the lane

You may hear, but cannot see,

The homing wain.

An engine pants and hums
In the farm hard by:
Its lowering smoke is lost
In the lowering sky.

The soaking branches drip,
And all night through
The dropping will not cease
In the avenue.

A tall man there in the house
Must keep his chair:

He knows he will never again Breathe the spring air:

His heart is worn with work; He is giddy and sick

If he rise to go as far

As the nearest rick:

He thinks of his morn of life,

His hale, strong years; And braves as he may the night Of darkness and tears.

The Irish-English singer, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, was born in London in 1844. He was connected, for a while, with the British Museum, and was transferred later to the Department of Natural History. His first literary success, Epic of Women (1870), promised a brilliant future for the young poet, a promise strengthened by his Music and Moonlight (1874). Always delicate in health, his hopes were dashed by periods of illness and an early death in London in 1881.

The poem here reprinted is not only O'Shaughnessy's best but is, because of its perfect blending of music and message, one of the immortal classics of our verse.

ODE

We are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Alice Meynell

Alice (Christina Thompson) Meynell was born in 1848, was educated privately by her father and spent a great part of her early life in Italy. She married Wilfred Meynell, the friend and editor of Francis Thompson.

Her work, which is high in conception and fine in execution, is distinguished by its pensive, religious note. Her first four volumes appeared, in a condensed form, in Collected Poems (1913). Since then, her most representative work is A Father of Women and Other Poems (1917).

THE SHEPHERDESS

She walks the lady of my delight

A shepherdess of sheep.

Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;

She guards them from the steep;

She feeds them on the fragrant height,

And folds them in for sleep.

She roams maternal hills and bright

Dark valleys safe and deep.
Into that tender breast at night,

The chastest stars may peep.
She walks the lady of my delight-
A shepherdess of sheep.

She holds her little thoughts in sight,
Though gay they run and leap.
She is so circumspect and right;
She has her soul to keep.

She walks the lady of my delight-
A shepherdess of sheep.

William Ernest Henley

William Ernest Henley was born in 1849 and was educated at the Grammar School of Gloucester. From childhood he was afflicted with a tuberculous disease which finally necessitated the amputation of a foot. His Hospital Verses, those vivid precursors of current free verse, were a record of the time when he was at the infirmary at Edinburgh; they are sharp with the sights, sensations, even the actual smells of the sickroom. In spite (or, more probably, because) of his continued poor health, Henley never ceased to worship strength and energy; courage and a triumphant belief in a harsh world shine out of the athletic London Voluntaries (1892) and the lightest and most musical lyrics in Hawthorn and Lavender (1898).

After a brilliant and varied career (see Preface), devoted mostly to journalism, Henley died in 1903.

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.