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Poems of To-Day: an Anthology

by Various



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1. ALL THAT'S PAST

  Very old are the woods;    And the buds that break  Out of the briar's boughs,    When March winds wake,  So old with their beauty are—    Oh, no man knows  Through what wild centuries    Roves back the rose.

  Very old are the brooks;    And the rills that rise  Where snow sleeps cold beneath    The azure skies  Sing such a history    Of come and gone,  Their every drop is as wise    As Solomon.

  Very old are we men;    Our dreams are tales  Told in dim Eden    By Eve's nightingales;

{2}

  We wake and whisper awhile,    But, the day gone by,  Silence and sleep like fields    Of amaranth lie.

Walter de la Mare.

2. PRE-EXISTEHCE

  I laid me down upon the shore    And dreamed a little space;  I heard the great waves break and roar;    The sun was on my face.

  My idle hands and fingers brown    Played with the pebbles grey;  The waves came up, the waves went down,    Most thundering and gay.

  The pebbles, they were smooth and round    And warm upon my hands,  Like little people I had found    Sitting among the sands.

  The grains of sands so shining-small    Soft through my fingers ran;  The sun shone down upon it all,    And so my dream began:

  How all of this had been before;    How ages far away  I lay on some forgotten shore    As here I lie to-day.

{3}

  The waves came shining up the sands,    As here to-day they shine;  And in my pre-pelasgian hands    The sand was warm and fine.

  I have forgotten whence I came,    Or what my home might be,  Or by what strange and savage name    I called that thundering sea.

  I only know the sun shone down    As still it shines to-day,  And in my fingers long and brown    The little pebbles lay.

Frances Cornford.

3. FRAGMENTS

  Troy Town is covered up with weeds,    The rabbits and the pismires brood  On broken gold, and shards, and beads    Where Priam's ancient palace stood.

  The floors of many a gallant house    Are matted with the roots of grass;  The glow-worm and the nimble mouse    Among her ruins flit and pass.

  And there, in orts of blackened bone,    The widowed Trojan beauties lie,  And Simois babbles over stone    And waps and gurgles to the sky.

{4}

  Once there were merry days in Troy,    Her chimneys smoked with cooking meals,  The passing chariots did annoy    The sunning housewives at their wheels.

  And many a lovely Trojan maid    Set Trojan lads to lovely things;  The game of life was nobly played,    They played the game like Queens and Kings.

  So that, when Troy had greatly passed    In one red roaring fiery coal,  The courts the Grecians overcast    Became a city in the soul.

  In some green island of the sea,    Where now the shadowy coral grows  In pride and pomp and empery    The courts of old Atlantis rose....