Chimneysmoke Part 14

CAUGHT IN THE UNDERTOW

Colin, wors.h.i.+pping some frail, By self-deprecation sways her: Calls himself unworthy male, Hardly even fit to praise her.

But this tactic insincere In the upshot greatly grieves him When he finds the lovely dear Quite implicitly believes him.

TO HIS BROWN-EYED MISTRESS

_Who Rallied Him for Praising Blue Eyes in His Verses_

If sometimes, in a random phrase (For variation in my ditty), I chance blue eyes, or gray, to praise And seem to intimate them pretty--

It is because I do not dare With too unmixed reiteration To sing the browner eyes and hair That are my true intoxication.

Know, then, that I consider brown For ladies' eyes, the only color; And deem all other orbs in town (Compared to yours), opaquer, duller.

I pray, perpend, my dearest dear; While blue-eyed maids the praise were drinking, How insubstantial was their cheer-- It was of yours that I was thinking!

PEACE

What is this Peace That statesmen sign?

How I have sought To make it mine.

Where groaning cities Clang and glow I hunted, hunted, Peace to know.

And still I saw Where I pa.s.sed by Discarded hearts,-- Heard children cry.

By willowed waters Brimmed with rain I thought to capture Peace again.

I sat me down My Peace to h.o.a.rd, But Beauty p.r.i.c.ked me With a sword.

For in the stillness Something stirred, And I was crippled For a word.

There is no peace A man can find; The anguish sits His heart behind.

The eyes he loves, The perfect breast, Too exquisite To give him rest.

This is his curse Since brain began.

His penalty For being man.

May, 1919

SONG, IN DEPRECATION OF PULCHRITUDE

Beauty (so the poets say), Thou art joy and solace great; Long ago, and far away Thou art safe to contemplate,

Beauty. But when now and here, Visible and close to touch, All too perilously near, Thou tormentest us too much!

In a picture, in a song, In a novel's conjured scenes, Beauty, that's where you belong, Where perspective intervenes.

But, my dear, in rosy fact Your appeal I have to s.h.i.+rk-- You disturb me, and distract My attention from my work!

MOUNTED POLICE

Watchful, grave, he sits astride his horse, Draped with his rubber poncho, in the rain; He speaks the pungent lingo of "The Force,"

And those who try to bluff him, try in vain.

Inured to every mood of fool and crank, Shrewdly and sternly all the crowd he cons: The rain drips down his horse's s.h.i.+ning flank, A figure n.o.bly fit for sculptor's bronze.

O knight commander of our city stress, Little you know how picturesque you are!

We hear you cry to drivers who transgress: "_Say, that's a helva place to park your car!_"

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Mounted Police._]

TO HIS MISTRESS, DEPLORING THAT HE IS NOT AN ELIZABETHAN GALAXY

Why did not Fate to me bequeath an Utterance Elizabethan?

It would have been delight to me If _natus ante_ 1603.

My stuff would not be soon forgotten If I could write like Harry Wotton.

I wish that I could wield the pen Like William Drummond of Hawthornden.