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THE SINGING MAN

A Book of Songs and
Shadows

By JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY

[Illustration]

BOSTON and NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

1911

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY JOSEPHINE PEABODY MARKS

Published November 1911

NOTE

Thanks are especially due to the editors of The American Magazine,Scribner's, The Atlantic Monthly, and to Messrs. Harper and Brothers,for their courteous permission to reprint certain of the poems includedin this volume.

FOREWORD

We make our songs as we must, from fragments of the joy and sorrow ofliving. What Life itself may be, we cannot know till all men share thechance to know.

Until the day of some more equal portion, there is no human brightnessunhaunted by this black shadow: the thought of those unnumbered who payall the heavier cost of life, to live and die without knowledge thatthere is any Joy of Living.

No song could face such blackness, but for the will to share, and forhope of the day of sharing.

Upon that hope and that mindfulness, the poems in this book are linkedtogether.

J.P.M.

4 October, 1911.

CONTENTS

THE SINGING MAN 3

THE TREES 15

O, do you remember? How it came to be? 21

RICH MAN, POOR MAN 23

But we did walk in Eden 29

THE FOUNDLING 31

Love sang to me. And I went down the stair 35

THE FEASTER 37

Belovèd, if the moon could weep 43

THE GOLDEN SHOES 45

NOON AT PÆSTUM 47

VESTAL FLAME 48

The dark had left no speech save hand-in-hand 51

THE PROPHET 53

THE LONG LANE 56

Ah but, Belovèd, men may do 59

ALISON'S MOTHER TO THE BROOK 61

You, Four Walls, wall not in my heart! 65

CANTICLE OF THE BABE 67

And thou, Wayfaring Woman whom I meet 73

GLADNESS 75

THE NIGHTINGALE UNHEARD 81

Envoi 87

THE SINGING MAN

AN ODE OF THE PORTION OF LABOR

'The profit