PAGE 13

He Never Expected Much

Well, World, you have kept faith with me,
Kept faith with me;
Upon the whole you have proved to be
Much as you said you were.
Since as a child I used to lie
Upon the leaze and watch the sky,
Never, I own, expected I
That life would all be fair.

'Twas then you said, and since have said,
Times since have said,
In that mysterious voice you shed
From clouds and hills around:
"Many have loved me desperately,
Many with smooth serenity,
While some have shown contempt of me
Till they dropped underground.

"I do not promise overmuch,
Child; overmuch;
Just neutral-tinted haps and such,"
You said to minds like mine.
Wise warning for your credit's sake!
Which I for one failed not to take,
And hence could stem such strain and ache
As each year might assign.

-o0o- 

Inscriptions for a Peal of Bells
 (After a Restoration )

I.
Thomas Tremble new-made me
Eighteen hundred and fifty-three;
Why he did I fail to see.

II.
I was well-honed by William Brine,
Seventeen hundred and twenty-nine;
Now, re-cast, I weakly whine!

III.
Fifteen hundred used to be
My date, but since they melted me
'Tis only eighteen fifty-three.

IV.
Henry Hopkins got me made,
And I summon folk as bade;
Not to much purpose, I'm afraid!

V.
I likewise; for I bang and bid
In commoner metal than I did,
Some of me being stolen and hid.

VI.
I, too, since in a mould they flung me,
Drained my silver, and re-hung me,
So that in tin-like tones I tongue me.

VII.
In nineteen hundred, so 'tis said,
They cut my canon off my head,
And made me look scalped, scraped and dead.

VIII.
I'm the peal tenor still, but rue it!
Once it took two to swing me through it;
Now I'm re-hung, one dolt can do it.

o0o-

When I set out for Lyonnesse

When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away.

What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there
No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there.

When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!

-o0o-

Seventy-four and Twenty

Here goes a man of seventy-four,
Who sees not what life means for him,
And here another in years a score
Who reads its very figure and trim.

The one who shall walk today with me
Is not the youth who gazes far,
But the breezy wight who cannot see
What Earth's ingrained conditions are.

-o0o-