FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES

  THE PLAYER: Why should I thirst for it, Alone with the one man of all living men I have least cause to honor.... She is too false-- At last, to keep a spaniel's loyalty. I do believe it. And by my own soul, She shall not have me, what remains of me That may be beaten back into the ranks. I will not look upon her.... Bitter sweet. This fever that torments me day by day-- Call it not love--this servitude, this spell That haunts me like a sick man's fantasy, With pleading of her eyes, her voice, her eyes-- It shall not have me. I am too much stained: But, God or no God, yet I do not live And have to bear my own soul company, To have it stoop so low. She looks on Herbert. Oh, I have seen! But he, -- he must withstand her! For my sake, yes, for my sake!--I'll not doubt His honor; nor the love he hath to me;-- As Jonathan to David. -- I'll not doubt. He knows what I have suffered, -- suffer still -- Although I love her not. Her ways, her ways. It is her ways that eat into the heart With beauty more than Beauty; and her voice, That silvers o'er the meaning of her speech Like moonshine on black waters. Ah, uncoil!... He's the sure morning after this dark dream; Wide daylight and west wind of a lad's love; With all his golden pride, for my dull hours, Still climbing sunward. Sink all loves in him! And cleanse me of this cursèd, fell distrust That marks the pestilence. 'Fair, kind, and true.' Lad, lad. How could I turn from friendliness To worship such false gods?... 'Fair, kind, and true.' And yet, if She were true,-- To me, though false to all things else;--one truth, So one truth lived--. One truth! O beggared soul, --Foul Lazarus, so starved it can make shift To feed on crumbs of honor!--Am I this?

Fortune and Men's Eyes

  MARY: Well, headsman?... You ask not why I came here, Clouded Brow, Will you not ask me why I stay? No word? O blind, come lead the blind! For I, I too Lack sight and every sense to linger here And make me an intruder, where I once Was welcome, oh most welcome, as I dreamed! Look on me, then. I do confess, I have Too often preened my feathers in the sun, And thought to rule a little, by my wit. I have been spendthrift with men's offerings To use them like a nosegay,--tear apart, Petal by petal, leaf by leaf, until I found the heart all bare, the curious heart I longed to see, for once, and cast away. And so, at first, with you.... Ah, now I think You're wise. There's nought so fair, so ... curious, So precious-rare to find, as honesty. 'Twas all a child's play then; a counting-off Of petals. Now I know.... But ask me why I come unheralded, and in a mist Of circumstance and strangeness. Listen, love,-- Well then, dead love, if you will have it so. I have been cunning cruel,--what you will: And yet the days of late have seemed too long Even for summer! Something called me here. And so I flung my pride away and came,-- A very woman for my foolishness!-- To say once more, -- to say ... I am come back; a foot-worn runaway, Like any braggart boy. Let me sit down And take Love's horn-book in my hands again, And learn from the beginning; -- by the rod, If you will scourge me, love! Come, come, forgive. I am not wont to sue: and yet to-day I am your suppliant, I am your servant, Your link-boy, yes, your minstrel: so, -- wilt hear?

Harvest Moon

Harvest Moon
 
Over the twilight field,
Over the glimmering field
And bleeding furrows, with their sodden yield
Of sheaves that still did writhe,
After the scythe;
The teeming field, and darkly overstrewn
With all the garnered fullness of that noon--
Two looked upon each other.
One was a Woman, men had called their mother:
And one the Harvest Moon.

And one the Harvest Moon
Who stood, who gazed
On those unquiet gleanings, where they bled;
Till the lone Woman said:

"But we were crazed....
We should laugh now together, I and you;
We two.
You, for your ever dreaming it was worth
A star's while to look on, and light the earth;
And I, for ever telling to my mind
Glory it was and gladness, to give birth
To human kind.
I gave the breath,--and thought it not amiss,
I gave the breath to men,
For men to slay again;
Lording it over anguish, all to give
My life, that men might live,
For this.

"You will be laughing now, remembering
We called you once Dead World, and barren thing.
Yes, so we called you then,
You, far more wise
Than to give life to men."

Over the field that there
Gave back the skies
A scattered upward stare
From sightless eyes,
The furrowed field that lay
Striving awhile, through many a bleeding dune
Of throbbing clay,--but dumb and quiet soon,
She looked; and went her way,
The Harvest Moon.

HARVEST-MOON:1916

HARVEST-MOON
by: Josephine Preston Peabody MOON, slow rising, over the trembling sea-rim, Moon of the lifted tides and their folded burden, Look, look down; and gather the blinded oceans, Moon of compassion.   Come, white Silence, over the one sea pathway: Pour with hallowing hands on the surge and outcry, Silver flame; and over the famished blackness, Petals of moonlight.   Once again, the formless void of a world-wreck Gropes its way through the echoing dark of chaos; Tide on tide, to the calling, lost horizons, One in the darkness.   You that veil the light of the all-beholding, Shed your tidings down to the dooms of longing, Down to the timeless dark; and the sunken treasure, One in the darkness.   Touch, and harken--under the shrouding silver,-- Rise and fall of the heart of the sea and its legions All and one; -- one with the breath of the deathless, Rising and falling.   Touch and waken, so, to a far hereafter, Ebb and flow, the deep, and the dead in their longing: Till at last, on the hungering face of the waters, There shall be light.   (Light of Light, give us to see, for their sake. Light of Light, grant them eternal peace; And let Light perpetual shine upon them,-- Light, everlasting.)

Marlowe

BAME: Thou hast my meaning. When I spoke of this, She gave me such a smile as I dare vow Thou never hadst, and promised me to come; Begged me to bring her to see Benet here, That same 'old hostess that was kind to her.' I go to meet her at the waterside, Since this is all of London she would see!-- 'T is Marlowe--Marlowe--and thou knowest well The maid is pining for him. Ay, by heaven, Waiting to catch a grain of news, as pigeons Flutter and flock to peck a lentil up. She treasures every word that folk let fall About these players,--covering her ears To words that mar as true word only can; Denying all with shudders; and sometimes,-- The music that he taught her-- The man made merry for an hour with charming her, A hunter, weary of his fowling-piece Until to-morrow! But the charm has worked. She dare not breathe till he shall come and say Breathe so, or so. She lives not in to-day. I tell you more. He shall not have the girl Though I'm on my way to bring her to the Gardens Yonder, 'to see the shows.'