A Satyr Song

I know by the stir of the branches

The way

she went;

And at times I can see where a stem

Of the grass is bent.

She's the secret and light of my life, She allures to elude;

But I follow the spell of her beauty, Whatever the mood.

I have followed all night in the hills, And breath is deep,

my

But she flies on before like a voice

In the vale of sleep.

I follow the print of her feet
In the wild river bed,

And lo, she calls gleefully down

From a cliff overhead.

Grim, grim, grim,

Is the road we go to the dead;

Yet we must on, for a Something dim

Pushes the soul ahead.

Where, where, where,

Through the dust and shadow of things, Will the fleeing Fates with their wild manes

bear

These tribes of slaves and kings?

One secret night I stood where ocean pours Eternal waters on the yellow shores,

And saw the drift of fays that Prosper saw: (Their feet had no more sound than blowing

straw.)

And little hands held light in little hands They chased a fleeing billow down the sands, But turned in the nick o' time, and mad with

glee

In Death Valley

There came gray stretches of volcanic plains,
Bare, lone and treeless, then a bleak lone hill,
Like to the dolorous hill that Dobell saw.
Around were heaps of ruins piled between
The Burn o' Sorrow and the Water o' Care;
And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls
One pillar rose up dark against the moon.
There was a nameless Presence everywhere;
In the gray soil there was a purple stain,
And the gray reticent rocks were dyed with
blood-

Blood of a vast unknown Calamity.

It was the mark of some ancestral grief—
Grief that began before the ancient Flood.

Just then the branches lightly stirred.
See, out o' the apple boughs a bird
Bursts music-mad into the blue abyss:
Rothschild would give his gold for this-
The wealth of nations, if he knew:
(And find a profit in the business, too.)