The Jester

T

Margaret Widdemer

Margaret Widdemer

I have known great gold Sorrows:

Majestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully

Through the slow-pacing morrows:

I have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing

Dim endless voices cried of suffering

Vibrant and far in broken litany:

Where white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly

Pulsed their regretful sweets along the air-—

All things most tragical, most fair,

Have still encompassed me . . .

I dance where in the screaming market-place

The dusty world that watches buys and sells,

With painted merriment upon my face,

Whirling my bells,

Thrusting my sad soul to its mockery.

I have known great gold Sorrows . . .

Shall they not mock me, these pain-haunted ones,

If it shall make them merry, and forget

That grief shall rise and set

With the unchanging, unforgetting suns

Of their relentless morrows?

Rating:

Comment form:

Similar Poems:

Book 6, Epigram 7: In prophanationem nominis Dei. by Thomas Bastard

Thomas Bastard

God’s name is bare of honour in our hearing,
And even worn out with our blasphemous swearing.
Between the infant and the aged, both
The first and last they utter, is an oath.
Oh hellish manners of our profane age.
Jehovah’s fear is scoffed upon the stage,
The Mimicking jester, names it every day;
Unless God is blashphem’d, it is no play.

111

Rating:

By the Waters of Babylon by Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus

Little Poems in Prose I. The Exodus. (August 3, 1492.)

120

Rating:

The Cap and Bells by William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

The jester walked in the garden:
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,
When owls began to call:
It had grown wise-tongued by thinking
Of a quiet and light footfall;

138

Rating: