IN a new poet’s and a new friend’s honor, Forth from the scornèd town and her gold-getting, Come men with lutes and bowls, and find a welcome Here in my garden,
Find bowers and deep shade and windy grasses, And by the south wall, wet and forward-jutting, One early branch fire-tipped with Roman cherries. O naught is absent,
O naught but you, kind head that far in prison Sunk on a weary arm, feels no god’s pity Stroking and sighing where the kingly laurels Were once so plenty,
Nor dreams, from revels and strange faces turning, How on the strength of my fair tree that knew you, I lean to-day, when most my heart is laden With your rich verses!
Since, long ago, in other gentler weather Ere wrath and exile were, you lay beneath it, (Your symbol then, your innocent wild brother, Glad with your gladness,)
What has befallen in the world of wonder, That still it puts forth bubbles of sweet color, And you, and you that burst our eyes with beauty, Are sapped and rotten?
Alas! When my young guests have done with singing, I break it, leaf and fruit, my garden’s glory, And hold it high among them, and say after: “O my poor Ovid,
“Years pass, and loves pass too; and yet remember For the clear time when we were boys together, These tears at home are shed; and with you also Your bough is dying.”
I KNEAD and I spin, but my life is low the while, Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile, Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all, Why from me that ’s young should the wild tears fall?
The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams, They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams, And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall, It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.
The cabin-door looks down a furze-lighted hill, And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still; But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin hedges call, The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!
’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch, The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch, And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves In little angry spray that is the under-white of leaves; And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall, And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.