Cover image for

The Singing Man

Subtitle A Book of Songs and Shadows
Categories Poetry, Music
Language English
Word count 9,775
Excerpt

ry blasphemes the sacred young!
Mute outcry, most, of those
Small suffering hands defrauded of their rose;
Faces the daylight shuns;
Ruinous faces of the little ones,--
Pale witness, unaware.
Starved lips, and withering blood--
O broken in the bud!--
Blank eyes, and blighted hair._

(_O golden, golden tree!
Bear yet awhile with me._)

So is it, haply, when
Dull eyes look up, and then
Dull eyes look down again.
Waste no vain holiday on such as these;
For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.

V

For them there is no joy in blossomed trees.
And with what eye-shut ease
We leave them, at the last, for company,
The Tree,
Whose two stark boughs no springtime yet unfurled,
Ever, since time began;
Nor bloom so strange to see!--
Behold, the Man,
With His two arms outstretched to fold the world.

_O, do you remember?--How it came to be?
Far, golden windows gazing from the shore;
Golden ebb o