ion, he is dead!

How our dreams would glow and shine,
Wits and wastrels, friends of wine,
Ere the drab Hour came that said:
King Pandion, he is dead!

DAVID TO BATHSHEBA

VERY red are the roses of Sharon,
But redder thy mouth,
There is nard, there is myrrh, in En Gedi,
From the uplands of Lebanon, heavy
With balsam, the winds
Drift freighted and scented and cedarn--
But thy mouth is more precious than spices!

Thy breasts are twin lilies of Kedron;
White lilies, that sleep
In the shallows where loitering Kedron
Broadens out and is lost in the Jordan;
Globed lilies, so white
That David, thy King, thy beloved
Declareth them meet for his gardens.

Under the stars very strangely
The still waters gleam;
Deep down in the waters of Hebron

The soul of the starlight is sunken,
But deep in thine eyes
Stirs a more wonderful secret
Than pools ever learn of the starlight.

THE JESTERS

A TOAST to the Fools!
Pierrot, Pantaloon,
Harlequin, Clown,
Merry-Andrew, Buffoon--
Touchstone and Triboulet--all of the tribe.--
Dancer and jester and singer and scribe.
We sigh over Yorick--(unfortunate fool,
Ten thousand Hamlets have fumbled his skull!)--
But where is the Hamlet to weep o'er the biers
Of his brothers?
And where is the poet solicits our tears
For the others?
They have passed from the world and left never
a sign,
And few of us now have the courage to sing
That their whimsies made life a more livable
thing--
We, that are left of the line,
Let us drink to the jesters--in gooseberry wine!

Then here's to the Fools!
Flouting the sages
Through history's pages
And driving the dreary old seers into rages--
The humbugging Magis
Who prate that the wages
Of Folly are Death--toast the Fools of all ages!
They have ridden like froth down the whirlpools
of time,
They have jingled their caps in the councils of
state,
They have snared half the wisdom of life in a
rhyme,
And tripped into nothingness grinning at fate--
Ho, brothers mine,
Brim up the glasses with gooseberry wine!

Though the prince with his firman,
The judge in his ermine,
Affirm and determine
Bold words need the whip,
Let them spare us the rod and remit us the
sermon,
For Death has a quip

Of the tomb and the vermin
That will silence at las