Chapter I: TRAVELLED to where in her lifetime

She’d knelt at morning prayer,
To call her up as if there;
But she paid no heed to my suing,
As though her old haunt could win not
A thought from her spirit, or care.

I went where my friend had lectioned
The prophets in high declaim,
That my soul’s ear the same
Full tones should catch as aforetime;
But silenced by gear of the Present
Was the voice that once there came!

Where the ocean had sprayed our banquet
I stood, to recall it as then:
The same eluding again!
No vision. Shows contingent
Affrighted it further from me
Even than from my home-den.

When I found them no responders,
But fugitives prone to flee
From where they had used to be,
It vouched I had been led hither
As by night wisps in bogland,
And bruised the heart of me!

AFTER A ROMANTIC DAY

THE railway bore him through
An earthen cutting out from a city:
There was no scope for view,
Though the frail light shed by a slim young moon
Fell like a friendly tune.

Fell like a liquid ditty,
And the blank lack of any charm
Of landscape did no harm.
The bald steep cutting, rigid, rough,
And moon-lit, was enough
For poetry of place: its weathered face
Formed a convenient sheet whereon
The visions of his mind were drawn.

THE TWO WIVES (SMOKER’S CLUB-STORY)

I WAITED at home all the while they were boating together—
My wife and my near neighbour’s wife:
Till there entered a woman I loved more than life,
And we sat and sat on, and beheld the uprising dark weather,
With a sense that some mischief was rife.

Tidings came that the boat had capsized, and that one of the ladies
Was drowned—which of them was unknown:
And I marvelled—my friend’s wife?—or was it my own
Who had gone in such wise to the land where the sun as the shade is?
—We learnt it was _his_ had so gone.

Then I cried in unrest: “He is free! But no good is releasing
To him as it would be to me!”
“—But it is,” said the woman I loved, quietly.
“How?” I asked her. “—Because he has long loved me too without
ceasing,
And it’s just the same thing, don’t you see.”

“I KNEW A LADY” (CLUB SONG)