Death

1.
Fairest of the Destinies,
Disarray thy dazzling eyes:
Keener far thy lightnings are
Than the winged [bolts] thou bearest,
And the smile thou wearest
Wraps thee as a star
Is wrapped in light.

2.
Could Arethuse to her forsaken urn
From Alpheus and the bitter Doris run,
Or could the morning shafts of purest light
Again into the quivers of the Sun
Be gathered - could one thought from its wild flight
Return into the temple of the brain
Without a change, without a stain, -
Could aught that is, ever again
Be what it once has ceased to be,
Greece might again be free!

3.
A star has fallen upon the earth
Mid the benighted nations,
A quenchless atom of immortal light,
A living spark of Night,
A cresset shaken from th...

Ah, stranger! if thy pilgrim footsteps love,
By meditation led, to wander here,
A suff'ring husband may thy pity move,
Who weeps the loss of all his soul holds dear!

Cold as this mourning marble is that heart,
Which Virtue warm'd with pure and gen'rous heat,
Which to each checquer'd scene could joy impart,
Nor ceas'd to love until it ceas'd to beat.

Yet, gentle spirit! o'er thine early grave
Shall Consolation, like a seraph, prove,
When Sickness clos'd thy faultless life, she gave
Another angel to the realms above!

Wirastrua, wirastrua, woe to me that you are dead!
The corpse has spoken from out his bed,
“Yesternight my burning brain
Throbbed and beat on the strings of pain:
Now I rest, all my dreaming’s done,
In the world behind the sun.
Yesterday I toiled full sore,
To-day I ride in a coach and four.
Yesternight in the streets I lay,
To-night with kings, and as good as they.”
Wirastrua! wirastrua! would I were lying as cold as you.

Hadst thou liv'd in days of old,
O what wonders had been told
Of thy lively countenance,
And thy humid eyes that dance
In the midst of their own brightness;
In the very fane of lightness.
Over which thine eyebrows, leaning,
Picture out each lovely meaning:
In a dainty bend they lie,
Like to streaks across the sky,
Or the feathers from a crow,
Fallen on a bed of snow.
Of thy dark hair that extends
Into many graceful bends:
As the leaves of Hellebore
Turn to whence they sprung before.
And behind each ample curl
Peeps the richness of a pearl.
Downward too flows many a tress
With a glossy waviness;
Full, and round like globes that rise
From the censer to the skies
Through sunny air. Add too, the sweetness
Of thy honied voice; the...

By the impulse of my will,
    By the red flame in my blood,
By me nerves' electric thrill,
    By the passion of my mood,
My concentrated desire,
    My undying, desperate love,
I ignore Fate, I defy her,
    Iron-hearted Death I move.
When the town lies numb with sleep,
    Here, round-eyed I sit; my breath
Quickly stirred, my flesh a-creep,
    And I force the gates of death.
I nor move nor speak - you'd deem
    From my quiet face and hands,
I were tranced - but in her dream,
    SHE responds, she understands.
I have power on what is not,
    Or on what has ceased to be,
From that deep, earth-hollowed spot,
    I can lift her up to me.
And, or ere I am aware
    Through the closed and curtained door,
Comes my lady white and fa...

I.

Light, warmth, and sprouting greenness, and o’er all
Blue, stainless, steel-bright ether, raining down
Tranquillity upon the deep-hushed town,
The freshening meadows, and the hillsides brown;
Voice of the west-wind from the hills of pine,
And the brimmed river from its distant fall,
Low hum of bees, and joyous interlude
Of bird-songs in the streamlet-skirting wood,
Heralds and prophecies of sound and sight,
Blessed forerunners of the warmth and light,
Attendant angels to the house of prayer,
With reverent footsteps keeping pace with mine,
Once more, through God’s great love, with you I share
A morn of resurrection sweet and fair
As that which saw, of old, in Palestine,
Immortal Love uprising in fresh bloom
From the dark night and winter of the to...

Let all the flowers wake to life;
    Let all the songsters sing;
Let everything that lives on earth
    Become a joyous thing.

Wake up, thou pansy, purple-eyed,
    And greet the dewy spring;
Swell out, ye buds, and o'er the earth
    Thy sweetest fragrance fling.

Why dost thou sleep, sweet violet?
    The earth has need of thee;
Wake up and catch the melody
    That sounds from sea to sea.

Ye stars, that dwell in noonday skies,
    Shine on, though all unseen;
The great White Throne lies just beyond,
    The stars are all between.

Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
    And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth--
    Ring out the stains of sin.

O banners wide, that sweep the sky,
    ...

    So soon he fell, the world will never know
    What possibilities within him lay,
What hopes irradiated his young life,
With high ambition and with ardor rife;
    But ah! the speedy summons came, and so
        He passed away.

    So soon he fell, there lie unfinished plans
    By others misapplied, misunderstood;
And doors are barred that wait the master-key -
That wait his magic Open Sesame! -
    To that assertive power that commands
        The multitude.

    Too soon he fell! Was he not born to prove
    What manhood and integrity might be -
How one from all base elements apart
Might walk serene, in purity of heart,
    His face the bright transparency of love
        And sympathy?

    The student ranks are closed, there i...

The old remain, the young are gone.
The farm dreams lonely on the hill:
From early eve to early dawn
A cry goes with the whippoorwill
"The old remain, the young are gone."

Where run the roads they wander on?
The young, whose hearts romped shouting here:
Whose feet thrilled rapture through this lawn,
Where sadness walks now all the year.
The old remain, the young are gone.

To what far glory are they drawn?
And do they weary of the quest?
And serve they now a king or pawn
There in the cities of unrest?
The old remain, the young are gone.

They found the life here gray and wan,
Too kind, too poor, too full of peace:
The great mad world of brain and brawn
Called to their young hearts without cease.
The old remain, the young are gone...

As I lay awake at night-time
In an ancient country barrack known to ancient cannoneers,
And recalled the hopes that heralded each seeming brave and bright time
Of my primal purple years,

Much it haunted me that, nigh there,
I had borne my bitterest loss - when One who went, came not again;
In a joyless hour of discord, in a joyless-hued July there -
A July just such as then.

And as thus I brooded longer,
With my faint eyes on the feeble square of wan-lit window frame,
A quick conviction sprung within me, grew, and grew yet stronger,
That the month-night was the same,

Too, as that which saw her leave me
On the rugged ridge of Waterstone, the peewits plaining round;
And a lapsing twenty years had ruled that - as it were to grieve me -
I should near ...

Pale season, watcher in unvexed suspense,
Still priestess of the patient middle day,
Betwixt wild March's humored petulence
And the warm wooing of green kirtled May,
Maid month of sunny peace and sober grey,
Weaver of flowers in sunward glades that ring
With murmur of libation to the spring:

As memory of pain, all past, is peace,
And joy, dream-tasted, hath the deepest cheer,
So art thou sweetest of all months that lease
The twelve short spaces of the flying year.
The bloomless days are dead, and frozen fear
No more for many moons shall vex the earth,
Dreaming of summer and fruit laden mirth.

The grey song-sparrows full of spring have sung
Their clear thin silvery tunes in leafless trees;
The robin hops, and whistles, and among
The silver-tass...

    Hail Poesie! thou Nymph reserv'd!
    In chase o' thee, what crowds hae swerv'd
    Frae common sense, or sunk enerv'd
        'Mang heaps o' clavers;
    And och! o'er aft thy joes hae starv'd
        Mid a' thy favours!

    Say, Lassie, why thy train amang,
    While loud the trump's heroic clang,
    And sock or buskin skelp alang,
        To death or marriage;
    Scarce ane has tried the shepherd-sang
        But wi' miscarriage?

    In Homer's craft Jock Milton thrives;
    Eschylus' pen Will Shakspeare drives;
    Wee Pope, the knurlin, 'till him rives
        Horatian fame;
    In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives
        Even Sappho's flame.

    But thee, Theocritus, wha matches?
    They're no herd's ballats, Mar...

When I was small, a woman died.
To-day her only boy
Went up from the Potomac,
His face all victory,

To look at her; how slowly
The seasons must have turned
Till bullets clipt an angle,
And he passed quickly round!

If pride shall be in Paradise
I never can decide;
Of their imperial conduct,
No person testified.

But proud in apparition,
That woman and her boy
Pass back and forth before my brain,
As ever in the sky.

I saw sweet Poetry turn troubled eyes
On shaggy Science nosing in the grass,
For by that way poor Poetry must pass
On her long pilgrimage to Paradise.
He snuffled, grunted, squealed; perplexed by flies,
Parched, weatherworn, and near of sight, alas,
From peering close where very little was
In dens secluded from the open skies.

But Poetry in bravery went down,
And called his name, soft, clear, and fearlessly;
Stooped low, and stroked his muzzle overgrown;
Refreshed his drought with dew; wiped pure and free
His eyes: and lo! laughed loud for joy to see
In those grey deeps the azure of her own.

The big teetotum twirls,
And epochs wax and wane
As chance subsides or swirls;
But of the loss and gain
The sum is always plain.
Read on the mighty pall,
The weed of funeral
That covers praise and blame,
The -isms and the -anities,
Magnificence and shame:-
'O Vanity of Vanities!'

The Fates are subtile girls!
They give us chaff for grain.
And Time, the Thunderer, hurls,
Like bolted death, disdain
At all that heart and brain
Conceive, or great or small,
Upon this earthly ball.
Would you be knight and dame?
Or woo the sweet humanities?
Or illustrate a name?
O Vanity of Vanities!

We sound the sea for pearls,
Or drown them in a drain;
We flute it with the merles,
Or tug and sweat and strain;
We grovel, o...

Thou art home at last, my darling one,
    Flushed and tired with thy play,
From morning dawn until setting sun
    Hast thou been at sport away;
And thy steps are weary - hot thy brow,
    Yet thine eyes with joy are bright, -
Ah! I read the riddle, show me now
    The treasures thou graspest tight.

A pretty pebble, a tiny shell,
    A feather by wild bird cast,
Gay flowers gathered in forest dell,
    Already withering fast,
Four speckled eggs in a soft brown nest,
    Thy last and thy greatest prize,
Such the things that fill with joy thy breast,
    With laughing light thine eyes.

Ah! my child, what right have I to smile
    And whisper, too dearly bought,
By wand'ring many a weary mile -
    Dust, heat, and toilsome thought?

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay,
It hath not been my use to pray
With moving lips or bended knees;
But silently, by slow degrees,
My spirit I to Love compose,
In humble trust mine eyelids close,
With reverential resignation,
No wish conceived, no thought expressed,
Only a sense of supplication;
A sense o'er all my soul impressed
That I am weak, yet not unblessed,
Since in me, round me, every where
Eternal strength and wisdom are.

But yester-night I prayed aloud
In anguish and in agony,
Up-starting from the fiendish crowd
Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me:
A lurid light, a trampling throng,
Sense of intolerable wrong,
And whom I scorned, those only strong!
Thirst of revenge, the powerless will
Still baffled, and yet burning sti...

The grave my little cottage is,
Where, keeping house for thee,
I make my parlor orderly,
And lay the marble tea,

For two divided, briefly,
A cycle, it may be,
Till everlasting life unite
In strong society.