For love I, too, could die (she said) nor fear it,

Such love as some of the dead queens have had
Whose sorrow matched their beauty. I could bear it,
And I think die too, to have been so glad.
With the sweet wonder in a great light lying
I would not e'en upbraid the deadly dart,
But gazing in the eyes of my Love, dying,
Passion my beauty in his aching heart.
Beyond the shadow of my own renewal
So to have set my beauty like a flame,
Quivering as Helen's — ah! that Trojan jewel,
Where all love's pride and sorrow has a name —
I, too, would take time's grandeur to the dust,
And haply in Hades smile as lovers must.

poem by Robert Crawford
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Song #5.

Never remember what love's been,
That is the sorrow the world knows;
Forget it, or the heart too keen
Will ache and ache to the weary close.
Harden the heart even to love,
Or the change in the tender eyes
Will more than hate or passion move
The tears to fall, the wrath to rise.
Once the change comes, dare to forget
The sweetest truth you've dreamed of her,
Or the heart will so fret and fret
That it will have no comforter.
Turn not on love in the heart's despair,
For e'en her smiles were bitter then,
When all her faith is light as air,
And all her ways are hers again.

poem by Robert Crawford
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Life's Eden.

'Tis in sooth life's Eden,
We within it;
Love put all the seed in
To begin it,
Made the air to fan it,
Light illumine,
Then put on the planet
Man and woman —
Us with our twin-nature
Dreamy framéd,
One with every creature
Thought has naméd.
Though the fiend find Eden,
Shall he find us?
In the heart so hidden
Love has shrined us,
By no earthly portal
May they enter
Where the life immortal
Has its centre —

[...] Read more

poem by Robert Crawford
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Shakespeare?

And what think ye of Shakespeare? 'Twas not he
Of Stratford is the lord of England's lyre;
Ay, not the rustic lad, whoe'er it be,
Momentous in his doing and desire.
But little Latin and less Greek? Ah, no!
It was a teeming scholar who enwrought
The wondrous pages where the wisest go
For th' culmination of the life of thought.
No jovial actor, no mere Shakescene who
Found it so hard his dear name to indite,
The marvellous pictures of our nature drew
And limned the universe in his delight.
We do not know the man; but 'twas not Will
Whose hand is on the lyre of England still.

poem by Robert Crawford
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The Sea Of Time.

On that strange sea
Where Man's bark moves as toward eternity,
What sails put forth that are not seen again!
.... Joyous it may be, or in pain,
The mariner doth drive still on and on
Beneath no mortal star,
And to no mortal port — as one
Who may but anchor somewhere so afar,
Not himself recks if he shall reach no more
In that tremendous sea another shore:
He is so like a wave himself at last,
He would toss through the future as the past —
But tethered as a whale is to a wave,
So he might still the one life have
Through all the changes that may be
On that tremendous sea!

poem by Robert Crawford
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Love's Reveller.

Hard have you won her, and must hold as fast!
She is Love's reveller — those tawny eyes
Are up and down still in warm passion cast,
And woe betide the soul whom they surprise!
Yet is she yours — you deem not for a while.
But have you felt the fiery stress of her?
It is a woman's, yet a serpent's smile
A Cleopatra yields her worshipper.
The cruel sweetness of her beauty lurks
In all her lovers' ruin; none may dare
To toy with her but love like poison works
To madness or the sorrow of despair: —
And you — the Antony of her desire?
Her love is still as a consuming fire.

poem by Robert Crawford
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The Hill.

The holy lamps of Evening shine
Sheer in the West — the air is still —
As I sit with this heart of mine
At the foot of Parnassus' hill.
Through my life's day I've reached to this —
To see where the immortals trod,
Winding up the dark height, I wis,
Till they came on the light of God.
Ah! I, a pilgrim with tired feet,
Have touched the verge of their renown,
As I look up on Homer's seat
And know the bards may not come down.
Still on those peaks, as powers apart,
They breathe the air now breathed by me,
For each has climbed the human heart —
The deathless hill of Poesy!

poem by Robert Crawford
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Youth's Inexperience.

He is too young yet to know life's demands;
Being no natural philosopher,
He must from cause and custom draw that art
Which some of Nature have, the primal gift
Of all her treasury — the open thought
That climates in all circumstances, and breathes
A native ease in everything; fear-proof,
Even as a wild bird's weather-proof, being born
And bred light as the leaves he habits in;
Unlike his brother housed and finely reared
With magisterial care, whom every change
Affects like a distemper, as if he
Had lost his nature's ancient art, and grew
Like an exotic with a borrowed life.

poem by Robert Crawford
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Old-Fashioned Child.

He was born old; they who got him were grey,
And quaint as things that long had seasoned here
When that he came — a too true vintage of
The lateness of the brewing blood and brain;
Even as in their whims and ways he had
Existed, an imaginary thing,
Twin-lived in him and her e'en long before
They were united in the dream of love.
And therefore comes it that his young life wears
So old a countenance, that he in sooth
Is so too grown-up in his ways and whims;
Unlike the youngling of an early pair,
Who's ta'en the freshness of their favour on,
And is as frisky as the youth of love.

poem by Robert Crawford
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Toward the Close

Time grows upon us until we exhaust
Hope's possibilities, and then we die
Who thus of life each make a holocaust
Till all we have in nature is put by.
No one survives himself, and none can so
Reclaim the sentiment of youth that he
Would like a fallen leaf re-budded grow
On the bare bough of joy's mortality.
Oh! in what charms may death himself reveal
When the life-instinct turns at last to him
For supreme succour, for the power to heal
That sickness of our days when all grows dim!
More fragrant then than roses, sweeter far,
The airs that come from the old darkness are.

poem by Robert Crawford
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