The South Seas

Mutability

Clouds

Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research

A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence)

One Day

Waikiki

Hauntings

He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her

Doubts

There's Wisdom in Women

Fafaia

Heaven

The Great Lover

Retrospect

Tiare Tahiti

 

Hauntings

In the grey tumult of these after years
   Oft silence falls; the incessant wranglers part;
And less-than-echoes of remembered tears
   Hush all the loud confusion of the heart;
And a shade, through the toss'd ranks of mirth and crying
   Hungers, and pains, and each dull passionate mood, --
Quite lost, and all but all forgot, undying,
   Comes back the ecstasy of your quietude.

So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams,
Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams,
   Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men,
Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible,
   And light on waving grass, he knows not when,
And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell.

The Pacific, 1914.