THE LAST RHYME OF TRUE THOMAS

'My hounds they bay unto the death,

The buck has couched beyond the burn, My love she waits at her window

To wash my hands when I return.

'For that I live am I content

(Oh! I have seen my true love's eyes) To stand wi' Adam in Eden-glade,

And run in the woods o' Paradise!'

'Twas naked sky and nodding grass,
'Twas running flood and wastrel wind,
Where, checked against the open pass,
The red deer turned to wait the hind.

True Thomas laid his harp away,

And louted low at the saddle-side;
He has taken stirrup and hauden rein,
And set the King on his horse o' pride.

'Sleep ye or wake,' True Thomas said,
"That sit so still, that muse so long;
Sleep ye or wake?-till the latter sleep
I trow ye'll not forget my song.

'I ha' harpit a shadow out o' the sun
To stand before your face and cry;
I ha' armed the earth beneath your heel,
And over your head I ha' dusked the sky.

'I ha' harpit ye up to the throne o' God,

I ha' harpit your midmost soul in three;
I ha' harpit ye down to the Hinges o' Hell,
And-ye-would-make-a Knight o' me!'

IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE

(1895)

N the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt;

I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of
Man,

And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove; And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg

Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival, of Solutre, told the tribe my style was outre'Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell.

And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart

Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,

And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;

And I wiped my mouth and said, 'It is well that they are dead,

For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.'

IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine

he came,

And he told me in a vision of the night:

"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right!'

Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me

Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail;

And I stepped beneath Time's finger, once again a tribal singer

[And a minor poet certified by Tr―ll].

Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on

the snow,

When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn; When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses, And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,

Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk; Still we let our business slide-as we dropped the halfdressed hide

To show a fellow-savage how to work.

Still the world is wondrous large,-seven seas from marge to marge,—

And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;

And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khat

mandhu,

And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

Here's my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the

moose

And the red deer roared where Paris roars to-night:There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal

lays,

And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right!

O

THE STORY OF UNG

(1894)

NCE, on a glittering ice-field, ages and ages ago,
Ung, a maker of pictures, fashioned an image of

snow.

Fashioned the form of a tribesman-gaily he whistled and sung,

Working the snow with his fingers. Read ye the Story of Ung!

Pleased was his tribe with that image-came in their hundreds to scan

Handled it, smelt it, and grunted: 'Verily, this is a man! Thus do we carry our lances-thus is a war-belt slung. Lo! it is even as we are. Glory and honour to Ung!'

Later he pictured an aurochs-later he pictured a bear— Pictured the sabre-tooth tiger dragging a man to his lairPictured the mountainous mammoth, hairy, abhorrent, alone

Out of the love that he bore them, scribing them clearly on bone.

Swift came the tribe to behold them, peering and pushing and still

Men of the berg-battered beaches, men of the boulderhatched hill—