You are beautiful and faded,
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir. In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust
That its sparkle may amuse you.

She walketh veiled and sleeping,
For she knoweth not her power;
She obeyeth but the pleading
Of her heart, and the high leading
Of her soul, unto this hour.
Slow advancing, halting, creeping,
Comes the Woman to the hour!—
She walketh veiled and sleeping,
For she knoweth not her power.

Yolk-colored tongue 
Parched beneath a burning sky, 
A lazy little tune 
Hummed up the crest of some 
Soft sloping hill.  
One streaming line of beauty 
Flowing by a forest 
Pregnant with tears. 
A hidden nest for beauty 
Idly flung by God 
In one lonely lingering hour 
Before the Sabbath. 
A blue-fruited black gum, 
Like a tall predella, 
Bears a dangling figure,— 
Sacrificial dower to the raff,
Swinging alone,
A solemn, tortured shadow in the air.

They are all gone away,
   The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
   The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
   To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
   Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
   For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
   In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

Who
would decry
instruments—
when grasses
ever so fragile,
provide strings
stout enough for
insect moods
to glide up and down
in glissandos
of toes along wires
or finger-tips on zithers—
   though
   the mere sounds
   be theirs, not ours—
   theirs, not ours,
   the first inspiration—
   discord 
   without resolution—
who 
would cry
being loved,
when even such tinkling
comes of the loving?

When I have passed away and am forgotten,

         And no one living can recall my face,

When under alien sod my bones lie rotten

         With not a tree or stone to mark the place;

Perchance a pensive youth, with passion burning,

         For olden verse that smacks of love and wine,

The musty pages of old volumes turning,

         May light upon a little song of mine,

And he may softly hum the tune and wonder

         Who wrote the verses in the long ago;

Or he may sit him down awhile to ponder

         Upon the simple words that touch him so.

I shall return again; I shall return

To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes

At golden noon the forest fires burn,

Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies.

I shall return to loiter by the streams

That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses,

And realize once more my thousand dreams

Of waters rushing down the mountain passes.

I shall return to hear the fiddle and fife

Of village dances, dear delicious tunes

That stir the hidden depths of native life,

Stray melodies of dim remembered runes.

I shall return, I shall return again,

To ease my mind of long, long years of pain.

          How empty seems the town now you are gone!
           A wilderness of sad streets, where gaunt walls
           Hide nothing to desire; sunshine falls
          Eery, distorted, as it long had shone
          On white, dead faces tombed in halls of stone.
           The whir of motors, stricken through with calls
           Of playing boys, floats up at intervals;
          But all these noises blur to one long moan.
           What quest is worth pursuing? And how strange
          That other men still go accustomed ways!
             I hate their interest in the things they do.
           A spectre-horde repeating without change
          An old routine. Alone I know the days
             Are still-born, and the world stopped, lacking you.

What kind of thoughts now, do you carry

   In your travels day by day

Are they bright and lofty visions, 

   Or neglected, gone astray?

Matters not how great in fancy, 

    Or what deeds of skill you’ve wrought; 

Man, though high may be his station, 

    Is no better than his thoughts. 

Catch your thoughts and hold them tightly, 

   Let each one an honor be; 

Purge them, scourge them, burnish brightly, 

   Then in love set each one free.