Joy is fleet,
     Sorrow slow. 
     Love, so sweet,
     Sorrow will sow. 
     Love, that has flown
     Ere day’s decline,
     Love to have known,
     Sorrow, be mine!

     The lesson of grief

     Not ere the bitter herb we taste,
     Which ages thought of happy times,
     To plant us in a weeping waste,
     Rings with our fellows this one heart
     Accordant chimes.

     When I had shed my glad year’s leaf,
     I did believe I stood alone,
     Till that great company of Grief
     Taught me to know this craving heart
     For not my own.

     Wind on the lyre

     That was the chirp of Ariel
     You heard, as overhead it flew,
     The farther going more to dwell,
     And wing our green to wed our blue;
     But whether note of joy or knell,
     Not his own Father-singer knew;
     Nor yet can any mortal tell,
     Save only how it shivers through;
     The breast of us a sounded shell,
     The blood of us a lighted dew.

     The youthful quest

     His Lady queen of woods to meet,
     He wanders day and night: 
     The leaves have whisperings discreet,
     The mossy ways invite.

     Across a lustrous ring of space,
     By covert hoods and caves,
     Is promise of her secret face
     In film that onward waves.

     For darkness is the light astrain,
     Astrain for light the dark. 
     A grey moth down a larches’ lane
     Unwinds a ghostly spark.

     Her lamp he sees, and young desire
     Is fed while cloaked she flies. 
     She quivers shot of violet fire
     To ash at look of eyes.

     The empty purse—­A sermon to our later prodigal son

     Thou, run to the dry on this wayside bank,
     Too plainly of all the propellers bereft! 
     Quenched youth, and is that thy purse? 
     Even such limp slough as the snake has left
     Slack to the gale upon spikes of whin,
     For cast-off coat of a life gone blank,
     In its frame of a grin at the seeker, is thine;
     And thine to crave and to curse
     The sweet thing once within. 
     Accuse him:  some devil committed the theft,
     Which leaves of the portly a skin,
     No more; of the weighty a whine.

     Pursue him:  and first, to be sure of his track,
     Over devious ways that have led to this,
     In the stream’s consecutive line,
     Let memory lead thee back
     To where waves Morning her fleur-de-lys,
     Unflushed at the front of the roseate door
     Unopened yet:  never shadow there
     Of a Tartarus lighted by Dis
     For souls whose cry is, alack! 
     An ivory cradle rocks, apeep
     Through his eyelashes’ laugh, a breathing pearl. 
     There the young chief