POETRY.
YOKOHAMA GARLAND. I BEGGED my young love to meet me, But she would not come.
She has a jacket of blue velvet That in a dim room looks lute evening sky, There are buttons of glass upon it, Her yellow cap is plumed with a coiling feather ; But of her own beauty, Tinge of brow, tender eye, modest tongue, Let speech be diffident : What the voice cannot utter fills the mind with echoes.
I waited, but she did not come ; I begged my love, but she, in fear of me, Denied not, nor consented.
There is a folly in fear that has no fear of folly.
'Tis true, ungentle love.
Pride and its circumstance Tie a pert sinew to much barren bone ; The laughter of her companions, The scorn of her father, Whose apophthegms hopped about us 'like truculent Heal, Was gall to that wound of fear.
Her elderly brother's grand appearance shamed me, Though he had much to hide and so little to disclose. Her young sister loved me kindly With tenderness that waved about me like faint A heaven immediate ; but the desire in my love's own breast, Quiet as a bird in its sanctuary bush, Hid and was mute, alien, trembling, chill.
'X begged my young love to meet me,
But she did not come: beep down, slow sun, your are of beauty shone bn unseen stars and heavens no eye beholds Now or for ever ; day's last bird rejoiced ; Night came, the shepherd moon, the coy flock, and a bat with trickling flight above the dim road ; My heart was a hesitant moth that fluttered by a lighted door.
The half-moon, cold and placid as a virtue, Surveyed me with its adamantine eye ; The stars poured out their glow serene and jubilant Upon my empty world, my world Void as time was but like time's self complacent, So endlessly complacent That I longed for heaven to crack to its own last judgment, The moon to become a dancing triangle Or a flaring oven to scorch this crawling orb, Instead of that dumb flame in its chalice of blue oil.
I had a rose, a heavy crimson thing.
I got from the farrier's mate for a screw of tobacco : crushed the clumsy flower in a hole in a wall ;And left it there.
0 innocence and beauty That I can never speak of without tears, Long I have waited. . . .
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