Page:The Poems of Henry Kendall (1920).djvu/103

 Ay, count your beads deftly, and keep your ways wary,

For the sake of the Saviour and sweet Mother Mary.

Pray for your peace in these perilous places,

And pray for the laying of horrible faces.

One starts, with a forehead wrinkled and livid,

Aghast at the lightnings sudden and vivid;

One telleth, with curses, the gold that they drew there

(Ah! cross your breast humbly) from him whom they slew there:

The stranger, who came from the loved, the romantic

Island that sleeps on the moaning Atlantic,

Leaving behind him a patient home, yearning

For the steps in the distance—never returning;

Who was left in the forest, shrunken and starkly,

Burnt by his slayers (so men have said, darkly),

With the half-crazy sheep-dog, who cowered beside there,

And yelled at the silence, and marvelled, and died there.

Yea, cross your breast humbly and hold your breath tightly,

Or fly for your life from those shadows unsightly,

From the set staring features (cold, and so young, too),

And the death on the lips that a mother hath clung to.

I tell you—that bushman is braver than most men

Who even in daylight doth go through the Ghost Glen,

Although in that hollow, unholy and lonely,

He sees the dank sawpits and bloody logs only.

! Ladon's daughter, Daphne! Set thyself in silver light,

Take thy thoughts of fairest texture, weave them into words of white—

Weave the rhyme of rose-lipped Daphne, nymph of wooded stream and shade,

Flying love of bright Apollo,—fieeting type of faultless maid!

She, when followed from the forelands by the lord of lyre and lute,

Sped towards far-singing waters, past deep gardens flushed with fruit;