[edit] Life

Creation's mystic beam am I

My home move's o'er the hills on feet

While sacred in its one small room

My heart - its warm hearthfire doth beat.

Two windows has this shaky hut

Soft with special thinking light;

I often pull both blinds tight down

And peer into the infinite.



Beneath this scanty grey old thatch

Doth shine my wondrous telescope,

And, fixed behind in magic dusk

The worried, small bright eyes of hope.

Out to the last star’s dying beams

I speed thought's silent thinking fires

A falling star in God's vast void

Pale intellect in dark expires.

 
 
 
 


Yet conscious Universe am I

Eternity shut in, with sight,

Since I do know I nothing am

Beyond a sense of borrowed light.

Death from the woods will creep one night,

Relentless deal one fate-swung stroke,

And puff! - my hearthfire will away

All vanish - in a little smoke.



The swallows will come back again.

My hut be dark, drawn dowm each blind,

And o'er its roof the wind and rain

Will beat - and I not there confined.

But oh! to rent that little house

Again, and at its window sit

to watch birds wing where waves carouse,

The sun, the moon o’et- the heaven flit.

And o'er the threshold Paradise

Step in - Love's own sweet anxious eyes.

     

       The poetry book is very small - about three inches by four and a half inches - and resembles one of those very small poetry books that were produced as keepsakes in the Edwardian era. It is maroon in colour with gold dust on the edge of the pages. Inscribed on the inside cover of this copy is ‘To Dear Rosie, from her affectionate brother, A.S Middleton

April 11, 1911.

The book includes ‘A Voice from the Stokehole’ ‘The Cabin Boy ‘The Dream and ‘Life”