Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke

Andrew Lang (1844–1912)

Pen and Ink

YE wanderers that were my sires,

Who read men’s fortunes in the hand,

Who voyaged with your smithy fires

From waste to waste across the land,

Why did you leave for garth and town

Your life by heath and river’s brink,

Why lay your gipsy freedom down

And doom your child to Pen and Ink?

You wearied of the wild-wood meal

That crowned, or failed to crown, the day;

Too honest or too tame to steal

You broke into the beaten way:

Plied loom or awl like other men,

And learned to love the guineas’ chink—

Oh, recreant sires, who doomed me then

To earn so few—with Pen and Ink!

Where it hath fallen the tree must lie;

’Tis over late for me to roam,

Yet the caged bird who hears the cry

Of his wild fellows fleeting home

May feel no sharper pang than mine,

Who seem to hear, whene’er I think,

Spate in the stream, and wind in pine,

Call me to quit dull Pen and Ink.

For then the spirit wandering,

That slept within the blood, awakes;

For then the summer and the spring

I fain would meet by streams and lakes;

But ah! my birthright long is sold,

But custom chains me, link on link,

And I must get me, as of old,

Back to my tools, to Pen and Ink.