The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Singing Man, by Josephine Preston Peabody

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Title: The Singing Man

Author: Josephine Preston Peabody
A Book of Songs and Shadows

Release Date: December 30, 2004 [EBook #14531]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 included
in this volume.

FOREWORD

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

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

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

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

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

_Beloved, if the moon could weep_ 43

THE GOLDEN SHOES 45

NOON AT PAESTUM