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Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew

She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast;

I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, peace; she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet;
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

John Davidson

John Davidson was born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, in 1857. His Ballads and Songs (1895) and New Ballads (1897) attained a sudden but too short-lived popularity, and his great promise was quenched by an apathetic public and by his own growing disillusion and despair. His sombre yet direct poetry never tired of repeating his favorite theme: "Man is but the Universe grown conscious."

Davidson died by his own hand at Penzance in 1909.

IMAGINATION

(From "New Year's Eve")

There is a dish to hold the sea,

A brazier to contain the sun,

A compass for the galaxy,

A voice to wake the dead and done!

That minister of ministers,
Imagination, gathers up
The undiscovered Universe,
Like jewels in a jasper cup.

Its flame can mingle north and south;
Its accent with the thunder strive;
The ruddy sentence of its mouth
Can make the ancient dead alive.

The mart of power, the fount of will,
The form and mould of every star,
The source and bound of good and ill,
The key of all the things that are,

Imagination, new and strange

In every age, can turn the year;
Can shift the poles and lightly change
The mood of men, the world's career.

William Watson

William Watson was born at Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire, August 2, 1858. He achieved his first wide success through his long and eloquent poems on Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson-poems that attempted, and sometimes successfully, to combine the manners of these masters. The Hope of the World (1897) contains some of his most characteristic

verse.

It was understood that he would be appointed poet laureate upon the death of Alfred Austin. But some of his "radical" and semi-political poems are supposed to have displeased the powers at Court, and the honor went to Robert Bridges. His best work, which has both dignity and imagination, may be found in Selected Poems, published in 1903 by John Lane Co.

SONG1

April, April,

Laugh thy girlish laughter;

Then, the moment after,
Weep thy girlish tears,
April, that mine ears
Like a lover greetest,
If I tell thee, sweetest,
All my hopes and fears.
April, April,

Laugh thy golden laughter,
But, the moment after,
Weep thy golden tears!

ESTRANGEMENT'

So, without, breach, we fall apart,
Tacitly sunder-neither you nor I
Conscious of one intelligible Why,

And both, from severance, winning equal smart.
So, with resigned and acquiescent heart,
Whene'er your name on some chance lip may lie,
I seem to see an alien shade pass by,

A spirit wherein I have no lot or part.

Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim,

From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn
That June on her triumphal progress goes

Through arched and bannered woodlands; while for him
She is a legend emptied of concern,

And idle is the rumour of the rose.

1

1 From The Hope of the World by William Watson. Copyright, 1897, by John Lane Company. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

Born in 1859 at Preston, Francis (Joseph) Thompson was educated at Owen's College, Manchester. Later he tried all manner of strange ways of earning a living. He was, at various times, assistant in a boot-shop, medical student, collector for a book seller and homeless vagabond; there was a period in his life when he sold matches on the streets of London. He was discovered in terrible poverty by the editor of a magazine to which he had sent some verses the year before. Almost immediately thereafter he became famous. His exalted mysticism is seen at its purest in "A Fallen Yew" and "The Hound of Heaven." Coventry Patmore, the distinguished poet of an earlier period, says of the latter poem, which is unfortunately too long to quote, "It is one of the very few great odes of which our language can boast."

Thompson died, after a fragile and spasmodic life, in St. John's Wood in November, 1907.

DAISY

Where the thistle lifts a purple crown
Six foot out of the turf,

And the harebell shakes on the windy hill-
O breath of the distant surf!-

The hills look over on the South,
And southward dreams the sea;
And with the sea-breeze hand in hand
Came innocence and she.

Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry
Red for the gatherer springs;

Two children did we stray and talk
Wise, idle, childish things.

She listened with big-lipped surprise,
Breast-deep 'mid flower and spine:
Her skin was like a grape whose veins
Run snow instead of wine.

She knew not those sweet words she spake,
Nor knew her own sweet way;
But there's never a bird, so sweet a song
Thronged in whose throat all day.

Oh, there were flowers in Storrington
On the turf and on the spray;

But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills
Was the Daisy-flower that day!

Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face.
She gave me tokens three:—
A look, a word of her winsome mouth,
And a wild raspberry.

A berry red, a guileless look,

A still word,-strings of sand!
And yet they made my wild, wild heart
Fly down to her little hand.

For standing artless as the air,
And candid as the skies,

She took the berries with her hand,
And the love with her sweet eyes.

The fairest things have fleetest end,
Their scent survives their close:

But the rose's scent is bitterness

To him that loved the rose.

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