Tonight I thought I would share a couple poems from one of my Grandma’s scrapbooks.

Here are a couple poems about singing.

Here is the first poem transcribed:

Why I Sing

I sing because I love to sing,

Because instinctive fancies move;

Because it hurts no earthly thing,

Because it pleases some I love.

 

Because with peals of happy words

I could exorcise morbid care;

Because a touch of deeper chords

May tune a heart to love and prayer.

 

Because of sounds of human fate

Within my heart an echo find;

Because whate’er is good or great

Lets loose the music of my mind.

Author Unknown

This poem definitely shows some reasons to sing for both yourself and the benefit of others.

The second poem is by Alfred James Waterhouse who published Some Homely Little Songs in 1899. The book contained a collection of poems, but I do not know if this was one of them.

Here is the second poem transcribed:

The Old, Old Songs

Oh, the old, old songs, and the dear dead songs,

And the songs that we hear no more,

Like a phantom race they haunt the place,

And the scenes that were loved of yore,

And their voice still waits down forgotten trails

Of the camps of the long ago,

Where the miners met when the eve had set

Its dusk on the vales below.

 

 Sweet “Annie Laurie,” one health to her,

Maid of our visions kind,

Forever her face assumes the grace

Of “The Girl I Left Behind.”

Another, another, till dawn paints red

The east ‘neath its starlit dome;

Then a final glass and the dream shall pass

To the shadows in “Home, Sweet Home.”

 

Oh, the old, old songs; I can hear them yet,

When the weary world is asleep

‘Neath its comfort gray, with the stars away

Their ward o’er its dream to keep;

And I see the faces — now worn and gray,

Or touched by the Spectre King —

And the miners sit where the shadows flit,

And the old, old songs they sing.

A. J. Waterhouse

Steven