Fireflies

I SAW, one sultry night above a swamp,

The darkness throbbing with their golden pomp!

And long my dazzled sight did they entrance

With the weird chaos of their dizzy dance!

Quicker than yellow leaves, when gales despoil,

Quivered the brilliance of their mute turmoil,

Within whose light was intricately blent

Perpetual rise, perpetual descent.

As though their scintillant flickerings had met

In the vague meshes of some airy net!

And now mysteriously I seemed to guess,

While watching their tumultuous loveliness,

What fervor of deep passion strangely thrives

In the warm richness of those tragic lives,

Whose wings can never tremble but they show

Those hearts of living fire that beat below!

Edgar Fawcett

Two Worlds

A FIERY young world, in far voids of sky,

    Called to an old world growing dark and chill:

"Now that you hear the hour you must die,

    Tell me what mighty memories haunt you still!"

Then from the old sad world this answer fell:

    "Vast peoples rose and vanished where I swing....

But all my poor tired soul remembers well

    Are the great songs my poets used to sing!"

Edgar Fawcett

Water-Lilies

UP in the loftier leafage, dense and dim,

     Of pines that slope to meet the lifeless pool,

And with still spicy coverts clothe its rim,

     The silvery fitful breeze comes fluting cool;

But rarely does it steal to this grave spot,

Dank with foul mire and rank with woody rot.

From half-sunk logs the sluggish turtles peer,

     The flabby emerald bull-frogs leap and pause;

The erratic dragon-flies float there and here,

     With rosy flashes in their wings of gauze;

And now a snake its sinuous way will thread,

With flickering tongue and small dark lifted head.

But out upon the central pool there blow

     The lily-legions these dull waters hold,

With hollowed petals dropping curves of snow

     Back from the large fragrant stars of mossy gold,

All gleaming stainless on the unbroken sheen

Of heart-shaped leaves, in blended bronze and green.

And as I watch them, in serene array,

     And muse, while scenting their delicious balm,

Of how they burst from soilure and decay,

     In taintlessness of alabaster calm,

And blossoming from this grim half-stagnant lake,

What sweet pure incongruity they make,

I dream of gloomy souls within whose deeps

     Crawls many a cold uncanny reptile thought;

Where black hate lurks and torpid envy sleeps,

     And yet wherein some saving grace has wrought

Some heavenly touch that all their darkness dowers

With the chaste charm of these immaculate flowers!

Edgar Fawcett

Darkness

I HAD a dream of a wild-lit place

Where three dark spirits met face to face.

One said: "I am darkest; I had birth

In the central blackness of mid-earth."

With a sneer one said, below his breath:

"I am still more dark, for I am Death."

But the third, with voice that bleaker pealed

Than freezing wind on a houseless field,

Cried, where he stood from the rest apart,

"I am that darkness which fills man's heart

"When it aches and yearns and burns for one

It has loved as the meadow loves the sun!"

Now I gazed on him from earth's mid-reach,

And now on the spirit of death; and each,

Though dark with a darkness to affright,

Beside that third was a shape of light.

Edgar Fawcett

A Sad Case

I CAN'T understand why we don't like the things

   It's wholesome and proper to eat;

I wish that I just hated candies and cakes,

   And cared for potatoes and meat.

It frightens me sometimes, to think what I'd do,

   If only I had my own way

In a candy-shop or a baker-shop,

   Witn no one to watch me, some day.

For if any one left me alone with a lot

   Of candies and cakes at my side,

I firmly believe I should eat, and should eat,

   And should eat, and should eat, till I died.

Edgar Fawcett