The Realms Of Gold
(Written after hearing a line of Keats repeated by a passing stranger
under the palms of Southern California.)
Under the palms of San Diego
Where gold-skinned Mexicans loll at ease,
And the red half-moons of their black-pipped melons
Drop from their hands in the sunset seas,
And an incense, out of the old brown missions,
Blows through the orange trees;
I wished that a poet who died in Europe
Had found his way to this rose-red West;
That Keats had walked by the wide Pacific
And cradled his head on its healing breast,
And made new songs of the sun-burned sea-folk,
New poems, perhaps his best.
I thought of him, under the ripe pomegranates
At the desert's edge, where the grape-vines grow,
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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Peace In A Palace
'You were weeping in the night,' said the Emperor,
'Weeping in your sleep, I am told.'
'It was nothing but a dream,' said the Empress;
But her face grew gray and old.
'You thought you saw our German God defeated?'
'Oh, no!' she said. 'I saw no lightnings fall.
I dreamed of a whirlpool of green water,
Where something had gone down. That was all.
_'All but the whimper of the sea gulls flying,
Endlessly round and round,
Waiting for the faces, the faces from the darkness,
The dreadful rising faces of the drowned._
'It was nothing but a dream,' said the Empress.
'I thought I was walking on the sea;
And the foam rushed up in a wild smother,
And a crowd of little faces looked at me.
They were drowning! They were drowning,' said the Empress,
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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Moving Through The Dew
I
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Ere I waken in the city—Life, thy dawn makes all things new!
And up a fir-clad glen, far from all the haunts of men,
Up a glen among the mountains, oh my feet are wings again!
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
O mountains of my boyhood, I come again to you,
By the little path I know, with the sea far below,
And above, the great cloud-galleons with their sails of rose and snow
As of old, when all was young, and the earth a song unsung
And the heather through the crimson dawn its Eden incense flung
From the mountain-heights of joy, for a careless-hearted boy,
And the lavrocks rose like fountain sprays of bliss that ne’er could cloy,
From their little beds of bloom, from the golden gorse and broom,
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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Princeton, May, 1917
Here Freedom stood by slaughtered friend and foe,
And, ere the wrath paled or that sunset died,
Looked through the ages; then, with eyes aglow,
Laid them to wait that future, side by side.
(Lines for a monument to the American and British soldiers of the Revolutionary War who fell on the Princeton battlefield and were buried in one grave.)
Now lamp-lit gardens in the blue dusk shine
Through dogwood, red and white;
And round the gray quadrangles, line by line,
The windows fill with light,
Where Princeton calls to Magdalen, tower to tower,
Twin lanthorns of the law;
And those cream-white magnolia boughs embower
The halls of "Old Nassau."
The dark bronze tigers crouch on either side
Where redcoats used to pass;
And round the bird-loved house where Mercer died,
And violets dusk the grass,
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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The Vindictive
How should we praise those lads of the old
Vindictive
Who looked Death straight in the eyes,
Till his gaze fell,
In those red gates of hell?
England, in her proud history, proudly enrolls them,
And the deep night in her remembering skies
With purer glory
Shall blazon their grim story.
There were no throngs to applaud that hushed adventure.
They were one to a thousand on that fierce emprise.
The shores they sought
Were armoured, past all thought.
O, they knew fear, be assured, as the brave must know it,
With youth and its happiness bidding their last good-byes;
Till thoughts, more dear
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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The Young Friar
When leaves broke out on the wild briar,
And bells for matins rung,
Sorrow came to the old friar
– Hundreds of years ago it was! –
And May came to the young.
The old was ripening for the sky,
The young was twenty-four.
The Franklin's daughter passed him by,
Reading a painted missal-book,
Beside the chapel door.
With brown cassock and sandalled feet,
And red Spring wine for blood;
The very next noon he chanced to meet
The Franklin's daughter, in a green May twilight,
Walking through the wood.
Pax vobiscum – to a maid
The crosiered ferns among!
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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The Old Gentleman With The Amber Snuff-Box
_The old gentleman, tapping his amber snuff-box
(A heart-shaped snuff-box with a golden clasp)
Stared at the dying fire. 'I'd like them all
To understand, when I am gone,' he muttered.
'But how to do it delicately! I can't
Apologize. I'll hint at it ... in verse;
And, to be sure that Rosalind reads it through,
I'll make it an appendix to my will!'
--Still cynical, you see. He couldn't help it.
He had seen much, felt much. He snapped the snuff box,
Shook his white periwig, trimmed a long quill pen,
And then began to write, most carefully,
These couplets, in the old heroic style:--_
O, had I known in boyhood, only known
The few sad truths that time has made my own,
I had not lost the best that youth can give,
Nay, life itself, in learning how to live.
This laboring heart would not be tired so soon,
This jaded blood would jog to a livelier tune:
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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A Song of Sherwood
Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?
Grey and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake,
Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn,
Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn.
Robin Hood is here again: all his merry thieves
Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering through the leaves,
Calling as he used to call, faint and far away,
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.
Merry, merry England has kissed the lips of June:
All the wings of fairyland were here beneath the moon,
Like a flight of rose-leaves fluttering in a mist
Of opal and ruby and pearl and amethyst.
Merry, merry England is waking as of old,
With eyes of blither hazel and hair of brighter gold:
For Robin Hood is here again beneath the bursting spray
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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Old Japan
In old Japan, by creek and bay,
The blue plum-blossoms blow,
Where birds with sea-blue plumage gay
Through sea-blue branches go:
Dragons are coiling down below
Like dragons on a fan;
And pig-tailed sailors lurching slow
Through streets of old Japan.
There, in the dim blue death of day
Where white tea roses grow,
Petals and scents are strewn astray
Till night be sweet enow;
Then lovers wander whispering low
As lovers only can,
Where rosy paper lanterns glow
Through streets of old Japan.
From Wonderland to Yea-or-Nay
The junks with painted prow
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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Sherwood
Sherwood in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake?
Grey and ghostly shadows are gliding through the brake;
Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn,
Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn.
Robin Hood is here again: all his merry thieves
Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering through the leaves,
Calling as he used to call, faint and far away,
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.
Merry, merry England has kissed the lips of June:
All the wings of fairyland were here beneath the moon;
Like a flight of rose-leaves fluttering in a mist
Of opal and ruby and pearl and amethyst.
Merry, merry England is waking as of old,
With eyes of blither hazel and hair of brighter gold:
For Robin Hood is here again beneath the bursting spray
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.
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poem by Alfred Noyes
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