Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By Innocencies (1905). V. To the MotherKatharine Tynan Hinkson (18611931)
I
Dotted with red roofs high and steep,
With just one gray stone church-tower keeping sentry
Over the quiet dead asleep.
Grey skies and greyer dunes, as grey as duty,
Grey sands where grey gulls flew.
And I said in my passionate heart, they know not beauty,
Beloved, who know not you.
And the pale moon’s path on the sea;
I thought of your clouds with their wild magnificent onset,
Your eagles screaming free.
I thought of your mild kind mountains, angel-bosomed,
Quiet in dusk and dew.
What flower of beauty that ever in Paradise blossomed,
Love, was denied to you?
Dear, I shall not forget
Nights when your skies were full of the flying roses,
Millions and millions yet.
All your still lakes and your rivers broad and gracious,
Dear mountain glens I knew;
When the trump of judgment sounds and the world’s in ashes
I shall remember you.
By bog-lands brown and bare,
Where every little pool is the blue sky’s brother,
Your wild larks spring in the air.
Land of my heart! smiling I heard their praises,
Smiling and sighing too.
I would give this gray French land for a handful of daisies
Plucked from the breast of you.