In Verona.

Juliet will never rise
In her passion's paradise;
Dust is in her ears and eyes.
And time too, as all men know,
Has put by, with beauty's woe,
What remains of Romeo.
In that grave within the green
Since the dawn of death was seen
Nothing has been changed, I ween;
Nor shall their praise be unsown,
Like a bud each year new-blown
While Verona's name is known;
And the hearts of men shall come
To where Love has made his home
In their beauty's martyrdom.
Ah! the two that are so one
Since the dream of life was done: —
Would another life begun
With its dream for them too be
Mid the world's humanity

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poem by Robert Crawford
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Dream-Death

There is a breath at midnight that comes in
Sad as a sigh, for then the day is dead
And the young morrow doth his course begin,
Sowing new dreams in many a dreamer's head.
And there are two have waked in one dark bed
Just as the last stroke fades in lonely air,
And having whispered, half-awake, have sped
With silent feet into sleep's poppied lair.
She with the morning wakes, but he is gone;
Her tears and kisses are of no avail--
Perchance it was his good-bye murmured on
The midnight in death's visionary dale.
Ah, woe! she thought 'twas in sleep's fairyland
When in the dark he pressed her warm, soft hand.

poem by Robert Crawford
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Morality.

Evil itself may be but good disguised,
As many a virtue now was once a vice,
Or held to be such by the moralists;
Or as even in the eyes of foreigners
Our virtues may be vices, theirs to us
As vicious too. We make us new laws still,
And hold that finable and barred to-day
That was but yesterday allowable.
Our neighbours haply no such laws enact,
And privilege what we make punitive.
So right and wrong are still conditional,
And there's no absolute morality
In all the world; for conscience herself is
Full oft but Custom's creature, whom he keeps,
Who sees with him, and hears with him, and acts
As by his power of attorney still.

poem by Robert Crawford
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Barbarians.

As the crinoid star-fish to the sea-base
By his stem fixed draws bare subsistence in
His straitened sphere, as in the sunless ooze
He turns on his long jointed pedicle,
So are half-bruted men, barbarian-brained,
Endued with scarce more power to see and hear
The visions and the rumours of the world,
So poorly apt to think and feel and know,
As each turns on his dark time-pivot in
A universal ignorance, as it were
Far back in the beginning of the world;
Disjointed and dismembered in the mind,
And in the spirit so confused and foul,
With no sign of truth's authenticity,
As nature in their origin had jarred
The primal tone of man.

poem by Robert Crawford
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Before Actium.

Life is up and takes the morning;
Why should love still lie abed?
Lo! the charms of slumber scorning,
Tramps the troop that must be led.
Thousands come from hill and valley
Loud the town with clamour fill;
Why must then their leader dally,
Couched with Cleopatra still?
Life's awake — let Duty waken!
Love's a snare at such a time,
When Mars' harness should be taken
And the hearts of heroes chime.
Let the leader leave the lady!
Cupid is not lord of these,
Now the War-god ranks them ready
To post over land and seas.
Done with power's imperial pity,
Oh the hearts to-day must die —
Romans in an alien city
Pledged to death for Antony!

poem by Robert Crawford
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An Aspiration.

Music, with the tears in it,
Through my soul is ringing,
Moods like bodies flame and flit
Through the spirit's singing;
Dream-birds half-articulate,
Which no charms can capture,
Come by twos and nest and mate
In a moment's rapture.
Now I seem to be upborne
On a starry pinion
Where the poet's hope forlorn
Has divine dominion —
Where he sees the clouds of earth
Gather light and cluster,
As babes on the dawn of Birth
Watch the visions muster!
All that thought and feeling share
In a soul's possession
To my singing seems to bear
A divine confession;

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poem by Robert Crawford
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Sleep And Death.

Sleep puts sin by, as the grave life's despair;
And though bad dreams in sleep may come, the soul
Is tainted not with error, being then
Beyond the body's shade, as in a sphere
Like that to which death may remove us when
The flesh itself is past pollution too.
It is the waking thought that we must answer,
When the whole man is up, and the will has play;
Not any drowsy essence that contrives
As with an ultramundane faculty
To act within us when the reason's gone,
And that, our temporal government, laid aside,
Our kingdom is left open, as it were,
Without a deputy, to all the worlds,
Whose mystic coursers may by stealth enact
Their wills upon us.

poem by Robert Crawford
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Song #8.

I wonder if, when done with
Is all earth's pain and care,
When we at length are one with
The Dead, and with them bear
Our part in the new life that
Is now beyond our ken —
If we shall then remember
Our loves, or love again.
Will, when the flesh is over
And all its needs are gone,
The souls of loved and lover
As in a dream love on?
Or will they live, but mingle
No more in the new sphere,
As they had done for ever
With all that they were here?
Will father then and mother,
Or lover then and friend,
Be nothing to each other
When here we make an end

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poem by Robert Crawford
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Good And Evil.

Good thoughts, 'tis said, are no more than good dreams
Save they be into action put, and that
On opportunity depends. Alas!
If place and power cohered, what good were done
Which else, a babe still-born, has no way here,
But in the womb of good intention fails,
The heart's abortion! Ay, and thuswise too,
Full many a foul intent in that it has
No power or place of action is debarred
A monstrous birth. So nature haply does
In some mysterious way we do not know
Still hold the balance 'tween the good and ill
Of thought in action here, and we become
(In spite of our own selves full oft indeed)
Dispensers of a higher equity
Than the bare law of reason would allow.

poem by Robert Crawford
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The Retreat.

Against my lonely latter years
I'll build a faery home for me —
Proof against sorrow with its fears,
And age with its adversity.
Within a region bosomed high
Above the ways of worldly men,
In a demesne where by-and-by
I oft shall come and go again.
Ah! there my home in a green nook
Shall sweetly stand the siege of time,
Where Thought may read his riddle-book
As to the murmur of old rhyme.
And faery footings still shall lead
My feet among mesmeric ways,
Where life is like a dream indeed,
And all the days are summer days.
But sylphs and fays and simple things
Shall murmur in my pensive ear,
Until the change shall come that brings
Me and my world to ruin here.

poem by Robert Crawford
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