Death

For Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill,
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl,
there is no money in his wor...

Under black yew-trees, in the shade,
The owls have kept themselves apart;
Like strange divinities, they dart
The red eye, as they meditate.

They stand like statues, silent, straight
Up to the melancholy time
When, shouldering the sun aside,
Darkness establishes his state.

They teach the sage a lesson here,
That in the world he ought to fear
All movement, uproar, turbulence;

But, drunk on shadows, our strange race
Carries within the punishment
Of having yearned for change of place.

Soules ioy, bend not those morning starres from me
Where Vertue is made strong by Beauties might;
Where Loue is chasteness, Paine doth learn delight,
And Humbleness growes one with Maiesty.
Whateuer may ensue, O let me be
Copartner of the riches of that sight.
Let not mine eyes be hel-driu'n from that light;
O look, O shine, O let me die, and see.
For though I oft myself of them bemone
That through my heart their beamie darts be gone,
Whose cureless wounds euen now most freshly bleed,
Yet since my death-wound is already got,
Deere killer, spare not thy sweete-cruell shot:
A kinde of grace it is to slaye with speed.

That is solemn we have ended, --
Be it but a play,
Or a glee among the garrets,
Or a holiday,

Or a leaving home; or later,
Parting with a world
We have understood, for better
Still it be unfurled.

The sloe was lost in flower,
The April elm was dim;
That was the lover’s hour,
The hour for lies and him.

If thorns are all the bower,
If north winds freeze the fir,
Why, ‘tis another’s hour,
The hour for truth and her.

I never could find a good reason
    Why sorrow unbidden should stay,
And all the bright joys of life's season
    Be driven unheeded away.
Our cares would wake no more emotion,
    Were we to our lot but resigned,
Than pebbles flung into the ocean,
    That leave scarce a ripple behind.

The world has a spirit of beauty,
    Which looks upon all for the best,
And while it discharges its duty,
    To Providence leaves all the rest:
That spirit's the beam of devotion,
    Which lights us through life to its close,
And sets, like the sun in the ocean,
    More beautiful far than it rose.

I

Veteran memories rally to muster
Here at the call of the old battle days:
Cavalry clatter and cannon's hoarse bluster:
All the wild whirl of the fight's broken maze:
Clangor of bugle and flashing of sabre,
Smoke-stifled flags and the howl of the shell,
With earth for a rest place and death for a neighbor,
And dreams of a charge and the deep rebel yell.
Stern was our task in the field where the reaping
Spared the ripe harvest, but laid our men low:
Grim was the sorrow that held us from weeping:
Awful the rush of the strife's ebb and flow.
Swift came the silence - our enemy hiding
Sudden retreat in the cloud-muffled night:
Swift as a hawk-pounce our hill-and-dale riding;
Hundreds on hundreds we caught in their flight!
Hard and incessant the danger a...

Where lies the truth? has Man, in wisdom's creed,
A pitiable doom; for respite brief
A care more anxious, or a heavier grief?
Is he ungrateful, and doth little heed
God's bounty, soon forgotten; or indeed,
Must Man, with labour born, awake to sorrow
When Flowers rejoice and Larks with rival speed
Spring from their nests to bid the Sun good morrow?
They mount for rapture as their songs proclaim
Warbled in hearing both of earth and sky;
But o'er the contrast wherefore heave a sigh?
Like those aspirants let us soar our aim,
Through life's worst trials, whether shocks or snares,
A happier, brighter, purer Heaven than theirs.

For A. W. B.



She sought the Studios, beckoning to her side
An arch-designer, for she planned to build.
He was of wise contrivance, deeply skilled
In every intervolve of high and wide -
Well fit to be her guide.

"Whatever it be,"
Responded he,
With cold, clear voice, and cold, clear view,
"In true accord with prudent fashionings
For such vicissitudes as living brings,
And thwarting not the law of stable things,
That will I do."

"Shape me," she said, "high halls with tracery
And open ogive-work, that scent and hue
Of buds, and travelling bees, may come in through,
The note of birds, and singings of the sea,
For these are much to me."

"An idle whim!"
Broke forth from him
Whom nought could warm to gallantries...

"Scorn not the sonnet," though its strength be sapped,
    Nor say malignant its inventor blundered;
The corpse that here in fourteen lines is wrapped
    Had otherwise been covered with a hundred.

Peace should not come along this foul, earth way.
Peace should not come, until we cleanse the path.
God waited for us; now in awful wrath
He pours the blood of men out day by day
To purify the highroad for her feet.
Why, what would Peace do, in a world where hearts
Are filled with thoughts like poison-pointed darts?
It were not meet, surely it were not meet
For Peace to come, and with her white robes hide
These industries of death - these guns and swords, -
These uniformed, hate-filled, destructive hordes, -
These hideous things, that are each nation's pride.
So long as men believe in armed might
Let arms be brandished.    Let not Peace be sought
Until the race-heart empties out all thought
Of blows and blood, as arguments for Right.
The world has never had en...

'Tis gone, and for ever, the light we saw breaking,
    Like Heaven's first dawn o'er the sleep of the dead--
When Man, from the slumber of ages awaking,
    Looked upward, and blest the pure ray, ere it fled.
'Tis gone, and the gleams it has left of its burning
But deepen the long night of bondage and mourning,
That dark o'er the kingdoms of earth is returning,
    And darkest of all, hapless Erin, o'er thee.

For high was thy hope, when those glories were darting
    Around thee, thro' all the gross clouds of the world;
When Truth, from her fetters indignantly starting,
    At once, like a Sun-burst, her banner unfurled.[1]
Oh! never shall earth see a moment so splendid!
Then, then--had one Hymn of Deliverance blended
The tongues of all nations--how sw...

    Take any life you choose and study it:
    It gladdens, troubles, changes many lives.
    The life goes out, how many things result?
    Fate drops a stone, and to the utmost shores
    The circles spread.

    Now, such a book were endless,
    If every circle, riffle should be traced
    Of any life - and so of Elenor Murray,
    Whose life was humble and whose death was tragic.
    And yet behold the riffles spread, the lives
    That are affected, and the secrets gained
    Of lives she never knew of, as for that.
    For even the world could not contain the books
    That should be written, if all deeds were traced,
    Effects, results, gains, losses, of her life,
    And of her death.

    Concretely said, in brief,
    A man and woma...

I

He walked under the shadow of the Hill
Where men are fed into the fires
And walled apart...
Unarmed and alone,
He summoned his mates from the pit's mouth
Where tools rested on the floors
And great cranes swung
Unemptied, on the iron girders.
And they, who were the Lords of the Hill,
Were seized with a great fear,
When they heard out of the silence of wheels
The answer ringing
In endless reverberations
Under the mountain...

So they covered up their faces
And crept upon him as he slept...
Out of eye-holes in black cloth
They looked upon him who had flung
Between them and their ancient prey
The frail barricade of his life...
And when night - that has connived at so much -
Was heavy with the unborn day,
They haled h...

Before she has her floor swept
    Or her dishes done,
Any day you'll find her
    A-sunning in the sun!

It's long after midnight
    Her key's in the lock,
And you never see her chimney smoke
    Till past ten o'clock!

She digs in her garden
    With a shovel and a spoon,
She weeds her lazy lettuce
    By the light of the moon,

She walks up the walk
    Like a woman in a dream,
She forgets she borrowed butter
    And pays you back cream!

Her lawn looks like a meadow,
    And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
    And the Queen Anne's lace!

'Tis a land where no hurricane falls,
But the infinite azure regards
Its waters for ever, its walls
Of granite, its limitless swards;
Where the fens to their innermost pool
With the chorus of May are aring,
And the glades are wind-winnowed and cool
With perpetual spring;

Where folded and half withdrawn
The delicate wind-flowers blow,
And the bloodroot kindles at dawn
Her spiritual taper of snow;
Where the limits are met and spanned
By a waste that no husbandman tills,
And the earth-old pine forests stand
In the hollows of hills.

'Tis the land that our babies behold,
Deep gazing when none are aware;
And the great-hearted seers of old
And the poets have known it, and there
Made halt by the well-heads of truth
On their difficu...

Here are old trees, tall oaks and gnarled pines,
That stream with gray-green mosses; here the ground
Was never trenched by spade, and flowers spring up
Unsown, and die ungathered. It is sweet
To linger here, among the flitting birds
And leaping squirrels, wandering brooks, and winds
That shake the leaves, and scatter, as they pass,
A fragrance from the cedars, thickly set
With pale blue berries. In these peaceful shades,
Peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old,
My thoughts go up the long dim path of years,
Back to the earliest days of liberty.

Oh FREEDOM! thou art not, as poets dream,
A fair young girl, with light and delicate limbs,
And wavy tresses gushing from the cap
With which the Roman master crowned his slave
When he took off the gyves. A bearded man...

Nothing remains of unrecorded ages
    That lie in the silent cemetery of time;
Their wisdom may have shamed our wisest sages,
    Their glory may have been indeed sublime.
How weak do seem our strivings after power,
    How poor the grandest efforts of our brains,
If out of all we are, in one short hour
        Nothing remains.

Nothing remains but the Eternal Spaces,
    Time and decay uproot the forest trees.
Even the mighty mountains leave their places,
    And sink their haughty heads beneath strange seas;
The great earth writhes in some convulsive spasm
    And turns the proudest cities into plains.
The level sea becomes a yawning chasm -
        Nothing remains.

Nothing remains but the Eternal Forces,
    The sad seas cease complaining a...