Five Songs for Voice and Pianoforte , opus 165

Comes one: "Here is a tower."
Comes one: "A sack of gold."
The third holds out a sprig of brier,
Just plucked from the young mould.

Now, shall I take the tower —
So strange a thing Life goes —
The gold all bursting out the sack?
Or shall I take the rose?

I love a prayer-book;
I love a thorn-tree
That blows in the grass
As white as can be.

I love an old house
Set down in the sun,
And the windy old roads
That thereabout run.

I love blue, thin frocks;
Green stones one and all;
A sky full of stars,
A rose at the fall.

A lover I love;
Oh, had I but one,
I would give him all these,
Myself, and the sun!

To fast from wines, silks, anything,
Will spread you feasts indeed;
Still you possess the spring,
And still
The little, wealthy daffodil.

To choose and keep the straitened way,
You serve, not without wage,
Your God, your race, your day;
You hold
Fast in your hand the ghostly gold.

I stoop and pluck the tansy's gold,
Stacked in the gusts along my lane;
A shadowy hand plucks there with me;
Some dead man claims his own again.

Not anything is wholly mine,
Platter, or book, or stretch of clod;
The hurt in the dusk's tumbling red;
Or even the texture of my God.

And when the wind limps by my sill,
And heaps the village dust, and goes,
Whose phantom cloak is left behind,
Or whose great ship, or long-gone rose?

She was of Herrick's golden kind,
Clear Devon to the end;
Each trick of jest was in her blood
And hers to save or spend.

So gay a thing! Now low in dust
The loveliness of her;
In lane, in house, her laughter yet
Makes a frail, tender stir.

Hers were the very quips of spring;
And often we looked about,
To see, if somewhere, all at once,
A cherry-tree were out.

With Herrick of the daffodils,
With them of old renown,
She wanders in a happier place
Than Devon, or this town.