Interludes

THE gray arch crumbles,
And totters, and tumbles;
The bat has built in the banquet hall.
In the donjon-keep
Sly mosses creep;
The ivy has scaled the southern wall.
No man-at-arms
Sounds quick alarms
Atop of the cracked martello tower,
The drawbridge chain
Is broken in twain;
The bridge will neither rise nor lower.
Not any manner
Of broidered banner
Flaunts at a blazoned herald’s call.
Lilies float
In the stagnant moat;
And fair they are, and tall.

Here, in the old
Forgotten springs,
Was wassail held by queens and kings;
Here at the board
Sat clown and lord,
Maiden fair and lover bold,
Baron fat and minstrel lean,
The prince with his stars,
The knight with his scars,
The priest in his gabardine.

Where is she
Of the fleur-de-lys,
And that true knight who wore her gages?
Where are the glances
That bred wild fancies
In curly heads of my lady’s pages?
Where are those
Who, in steel or hose,
Held revel here, and made them gay?
Where is the laughter
That shook the rafter —
Where is the rafter, by the way?
Gone is the roof,
And perched aloof
Is an owl, like a friar of orders gray.
(Perhaps ’t is the priest
Come back to feast —
He had ever a tooth for capon, he!
But the capon’s cold,
And the steward ’s old,
And the butler ’s lost the larder-key!)

The doughty lords
Sleep “the sleep of swords.”
Dead are the dames and damosels.
The king in his crown
Hath laid him down,
And the jester with his bells.

All is dead here:
Poppies are red here,
Vines in my lady’s chamber grow
If ’t was her chamber
Where they clamber
Up from the poisonous weeds below.
All is dead here,
Joy is fled here;
Let us hence. 'T is the end of all!
The gray arch crumbles,
And totters, and tumbles,
And Silence sits in the banquet hall.

IN scarlet clusters o’er the gray stone wall
The barberries lean in thin autumnal air:
Just when the fields and garden-plots are bare,
And ere the green leaf takes the tint of fall,
They come, to make the eye a festival!
Along the road, for miles, their torches flare
Ah, if your deep-sea coral were but rare
(The damask rose might envy it withal),
What bards had sung your praises long ago,
Called you fine names in honey-worded books, —
The rosy tramps of turnpike and of lane,
September’s blushes, Ceres’ lips aglow,
Little Red Ridinghoods, — for your sweet looks!
But your plebeian beauty is in vain.

ONCE he sang of summer,
Nothing but the summer;
Now he sings of winter,
Of winter bleak and drear:
Just because there ’s fallen
A snow-flake on his forehead,
He must go and fancy
’T is winter all the year'

You by the Arno shape your marble dream,
Under the cypress and the olive trees,
While I, this side the wild, wind-beaten seas,
Unrestful by the Charles’s placid stream,
Long once again to catch the golden gleam
Of Brunelleschi’s dome, and lounge at ease
In those pleached gardens and fair galleries.
And yet, perhaps, you envy me, and deem
My star the happier, since it holds me here.
Even so, one time, beneath the cypresses
My heart turned longingly across the sea,
Aching with love for thee, New England dear!
And I’d have given all Titian’s goddesses
For one poor cowslip or anemone.

“ HONEST Iago.” When his breath was fled,
Doubtless those words were carven at his head.
Such lying epitaphs are like a rose
That in unlovely earth takes root and grows.

To him that hath, we are told,
Shall be given. Yes, by the Cross!
To the rich man fate sends gold,
To the poor man loss on loss.

MANOAH’S son, in his blind rage malign,
Tumbling the temple down upon his foes,
Did no such feat as yonder delicate vine
That day by day untired holds up a rose.

TOUCHED with the delicate green of early May,
Or later, when the rose unveils her face,
The world hangs glittering in star-strewn space,
Fresh as a jewel found but yesterday.
And yet ’t is very old; what tongue may say
How old it is? Race follows upon race,
Forgetting and forgotten; in their place
Sink tower and temple; nothing long may stay.
We build on tombs, and live our day, and die;
From out our dust new towers and temples start;
Our very name becomes a mystery.
What cities no man ever heard of lie
Under the glacier, in the mountain’s heart,
In violet glooms beneath the moaning sea!