EPIGRAMS

DAYLONG he seems to read, but as he peers At fading print, the sheet becomes a glass, Wherein are mirrored ghosts that smile and pass, And lovely faces, dust these forty years.

THEY cried: ‘Who learns the Truth is blest’; And forthwith gave him little tags Of scholarship, and quickly dressed The wonder of the world in rags.

WE see no painted thing, no foolish play, Under the spell of his fastidious strings: The Magic Flute pipes from the Milky Way, Juan is deathless, Figaro has wings.

YOU say the critic is a parasite: ’Tis not for such as you to scowl him down: Only to point the way to Heart’s Delight Is better than making roads to No Man’s Town.

GOOD company for vagabonds or saints, He wrought our joy out of his miseries; Coloured our dreams with a child’s box of paints; Conquered the world with that toy sword of his.

HE who confounds the young gods with the brutes, The origin, not end, his single care, May he be given naught but earthy roots, When next he calls for apple, plum or pear.

AS if a man had taken to his bed, Called in his friends, thinking the end had come, And having uttered words to move the dead, Had then recovered, well and whole—but dumb.

IN this dim region, where old phantoms flee Before the touch, where neither sight nor news Of our world reach us; here at best we see Naught but the poet saluting his grave Muse.

A SHEPHERD, having left the hills to roam, Sees from afar the cities of great kings, And so returns enraptured to his home:— A man apart—who stammers golden things.

OF this, our day, ’twere easy to speak ill; The books, the wit, the manners, could be bettered But happily while you are with us still, No man can say England is yet unlettered.

IF you paid thirty thousand for this stuff, Flesh must be dear, for dirt is cheap enough.

THE earth itself must toil and sweat and groan To bear this old Professor’s eighteen stone; And yet, though every day he’s getting fatter, He still denies reality to matter.

WOND’ROUS the ship, more wond’rous still its freight, Never another stuffed with bales like these; Yet lost so soon; by some strange freak of Fate, Swept rudderless into uncharted seas.

LADY, we go to bed before it’s night, Rather than grope in lamp or candle light: Now that your eyes are hidden from our sight.

TIME has filched all from him but some scant show of breath, And that but waits the casual pillaging of Death.

ONE crash shivers the world down to its roots, And then the music moulds anew all things: Strange moons sail in the laughter of the flutes; New suns blaze through the clamour of the strings.

I NEVER see her walk into a room But what I think: Ah, now the fiddling’s done; The world’s brave footlights leap to stab the gloom; The curtain lifts, and see—the play’s begun.