Form: a quarterly of the arts (1.1916/1917)

Poems by Francis Burrows

OONRISE

WHEN all was dark except for her,
The moon arose above the sea;

She cast a moving causey there
With flames of gold, and carried me
Towards her prisoner.

And grieved at first, I cried out thus:—

“ So wast thou lovely ere our birth,

So mad’st the same sea tremulous.

Thus wilt thou rise, when we are earth,

On others, not on us.”

But suddenly my fear was gone,

When aught within me bowed my soul
To worship at what seemed her throne.

Maybe ’twas his who does control
Her orbit and our own.

REQUIEM

HE storm is scattered and
the rain

Which with one fury
levelled all.

The pulse of nature throbs
again

In simple protest at her
fall.

The flowers fold up their heads in slumber,

The day hath flower-like closed its eye.

The stars are shining without number,

The fire-rent moon swims in the sky.

And he who journeyed without cover
Throughout the storm, was overcome.

And now its fury is blown over,

Is left subservient and dumb.

Through all his crushed expanse of soul
And forests of imagination,

One humble flower remaineth whole
Surviving still by resignation—

“Friend diethoualso. Neither fear nor grieve to die.
All that is pleasant, noble, lovely, springs from earth
Doomed to destruction by resistless spear at hand,
Or by secret arrow none hath knowledge whence
or when.

For its very beauty lies in its mortality.

Thou supplicatest mercy kneeling at my feet,
Fearing the impendence of my spear? Nay, wrong
me not.

Though morethan mortal is my parentage,and they

Men called immortal are my kindred, yet my doom

Is awhile to linger, only take thou thyself,

Home-seeking, homeless, filled with unfulfilled
desire,

Then with my kindred to the unhallowed place
and void

To pass forgotten; while the seasons change on
earth,

While night precedes day ,while the years as hitherto

Wheel on in task hereafter. Seek no longer life;

They must, who doomed thee, also die. Consider
them

Unwilling judges. Only speechless fate abides.”

T A SYMPHONY

Silence, O beloved, O imperishable
instruments,

Rend us thus no longer with your
overwhelming eloquence;

Let the noble melodist who roused you also bid
you cease

And yield again to our sun-smitten storm-wracked
cloud-borne spirits peace.

For you have dragged them from their caverns
where they comfortably lay,

To fling them in the bleaching tempest and the
brightness of the day,

From their bodies torn with violence, and with
rapture borne afar,

And driven headlong with the speed of light that
shoots from star to star.

Plunged in meteoric splendours, gathered to
cyclonic streams,

Borne on stranger pinions than are fancied in un-
quiet dreams.

It is enough to satisfy us, more than this none
living knows,

That the character in human kind embodied shines
and glows

With a wealth of light and heat sufficient for our
daily needs;

It is nothing to us whither it departs or whence
proceeds.

When you adumbrate the existence thus of souls
beyond our sense,

Beyond our power to conceive them; human with
this difference

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