TO MINNIE HE red room with the giant bed ΤΗ Where none but elders laid their head; The little room where you and I Did for awhile together lie And pleasant there to lie in bed The grinning guns along the wall, The plunging ships, the bleating sheep, The happy children ankle-deep And laughing as they wade: All these are vanished clean away, It wears an altered face Below the yew it still is there And I can hear them call and say: Ah, far enough, my dear, I do not know - perchance you might The eternal dawn, beyond a doubt, Shall break on hill and plain, And put all stars and candles out Ere we be young again. To you in distant India, these I send across the seas, For which of us forgets The bones of antelope, the wings of alba tross, The pied and painted birds and beans, And the loud-humming, twisted shells! Was honest, homely, Scottish shore; Reach down a hand, my dear, and take TO MY NAME-CHILD OME day soon this rhyming volume, if SOME you learn with proper speed, Little Louis Sanchez, will be given you to read. Then shall you discover, that your name was printed down By the English printers, long before, in London town. In the great and busy city where the East and West are met, All the little letters did the English printer set; While you thought of nothing, and were still too young to play, Foreign people thought of you in places far away. Ay, and while you slept, a baby, over all the English lands Other little children took the volume in their hands; Other children questioned, in their homes across the seas: Who was little Louis, won't you tell us, mother, please? Now that you have spelt your lesson, lay it down and go and play, Seeking shells and seaweed on the sands of Monterey, Watching all the mighty whalebones, lying buried by the breeze, Tiny sandy-pipers, and the huge Pacific seas. And remember in your playing, as the seafog rolls to you, Long ere you could read it, how I told you what to do; And that while you thought of no one. nearly half the world away Some one thought of Louis on the beach of Monterey! |