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 yo