William Watson Poems

April, April,
Laugh thy girlish laughter;
Then, the moment after,
Weep thy girlish tears!
...

APRIL, April,
Laugh thy girlish laughter;
Then, the moment after,
Weep thy girlish tears!
...

SHE stands, a thousand-wintered tree,
By countless morns impearled;
Her broad roots coil beneath the sea,
Her branches sweep the world;
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Thou burden of all songs the earth hath sung,
Thou retrospect in Time's reverted eyes,
Thou metaphor of everything that dies,
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Last night the seawind was to me
A metaphor of liberty,
And every wave along the beach
A starlit music seemed to be.
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A beckoning spirit of gladness seemed afloat,
That lightly danced in laughing air before us:
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To the eye and the ear of the Dreamer
This Dream out of darkness flew,
Through the horn or the ivory portal,
But he wist not which of the two.
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Here, peradventure, in this mirror glassed,
Who gazes long and well at times beholds
Some sunken feature of the mummied Past,
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Westward a league the city lay, with one
Cloud's imminent umbrage o'er it: when behold,
The incendiary sun
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That beauty such as thine
Can die indeed,
Were ordinance too wantonly malign:
No wit may reconcile so cold a creed
...