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قراءة كتاب Songs for a Little House
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اللغة: English
الصفحة رقم: 6
old
And caked with soot;
My wife remarks:
"How can you put
That horrid relic,
So unclean,
Inside your mouth?
The nicotine
Is strong enough
To stupefy
A Swedish plumber."
I reply:
"This is the kind
Of pipe I like:
I fill it full
Of Happy Strike,
Or Barking Cat
Or Cabman's Puff,
Or Brooklyn Bridge
(That potent stuff)
Or Chaste Embraces,
Knacker's Twist,
Old Honeycomb
Or Niggerfist.
I clamp my teeth
Upon its stem—
It is my bliss,
My diadem.
Whatever Fate
May do to me,
This is my favourite
BBB.
For this dear pipe
You feign to scorn
I smoked the night
The boy was born."
TO A GRANDMOTHER
| At six o'clock in the evening, The time for lullabies, My son lay on my mother's lap With sleepy, sleepy eyes! (O drowsy little manny boy, With sleepy, sleepy eyes!) I heard her sing, and rock him, And the creak of the swaying chair, And the old dear cadence of the words Came softly down the stair. And all the years had vanished, All folly, greed, and stain— The old, old song, the creaking chair, The dearest arms again! (O lucky little manny boy, To feel those arms again!) |
A HANDFUL OF SONNETS
I
| I have no hope to make you live in rhyme Or with your beauty to enrich the years— Enough for me this now, this present time; The greater claim for greater sonneteers. But O how covetous I am of NOW— Dear human minutes, marred by human pains— I want to know your lips, your cheek, your brow, And all the miracles your heart contains. I wish to study all your changing face, Your eyes, divinely hurt with tenderness; I hope to win your dear unstinted grace For these blunt rhymes and what they would express. Then may you say, when others better prove:— "Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love." |
II
| When all my trivial rhymes are blotted out, Vanished our days, so precious and so few, If some should wonder what we were about And what the little happenings we knew: I wish that they might know how, night by night, My pencil, heavy in the sleepy hours, Sought vainly for some gracious way to write How much this love is ours, and only ours. How many evenings, as you drowsed to sleep, I read to you by tawny candle-glow, And watched you down the valley dim and deep Where poppies and the April flowers grow. Then knelt beside your pillow with a prayer, And loved the breath of pansies in your hair. |
PEDOMETER
| My thoughts beat out in sonnets while I walk, And every evening on the homeward street I find the rhythm of my marching feet Throbs into verses (though the rhyme may balk.) I think the sonneteers were walking men: The form is dour and rigid, like a clamp, But with the swing of legs the tramp, tramp, tramp Of syllables begins to thud, and then— Lo! while you seek a rhyme for hook or crook Vanished your shabby coat, and you are kith To all great walk-and-singers—Meredith, And Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Rupert Brooke! Free verse is poor for walking, but a sonnet— O marvellous to stride and brood upon it! |
ARS DURA
| How many evenings, walking soberly Along our street all dappled with rich sun, I please myself with words, and happily Time rhymes to footfalls, planning how they run; And yet, when midnight comes, and paper lies Clean, white, receptive, all that one can ask, Alas for drowsy spirit, weary eyes And traitor hand that fails the well loved task! Who ever learned the sonnet's bitter craft But he had put away his sleep, his ease, The wine he loved, the men with whom he laughed, To brood upon such thankless tricks as these? And yet, such joy does in that craft abide He greets the paper as the groom the bride! |
O. HENRY—APOTHECARY