Death

Silence! Oh, well are Death and Sleep and Thou
Three brethren named, the guardians gloomy-winged
Of one abyss, where life, and truth, and joy
Are swallowed up - yet spare me, Spirit, pity me,
Until the sounds I hear become my soul,
And it has left these faint and weary limbs,
To track along the lapses of the air
This wandering melody until it rests
Among lone mountains in some...

    The time is all so short. One week is much
        To be without your deep and peaceful eyes,
    Your soft and all-contenting cheek, the touch
        Of well-caressing hands.    O were we wise
    We would not love too strongly, would not bind
        Life into life so inextricably,
    That the dumb body suffers with the mind
        In a sad partnership this agony.
    For death will come and swallow up us two,
        You there, I here, and we shall lie apart,
    Out of the houses and the woods we knew.
        Then in the lonely grave, my dust-choked heart
    Out of the dust will raise, if it can speak,
    A threnody for this lost, lovely week.

I come from nothing; but from where
Come the undying thoughts I bear?
    Down, through long links of death and birth,
    From the past poets of the earth.
My immortality is there.

I am like the blossom of an hour.
But long, long vanished sun and shower
    Awoke my breath i' the young world's air.
    I track the past back everywhere
Through seed and flower and seed and flower.

Or I am like a stream that flows
Full of the cold springs that arose
    In morning lands, in distant hills;
    And down the plain my channel fills
With melting of forgotten snows.

Voices, I have not heard, possessed
My own fresh songs; my thoughts are blessed
    With relics of the far unknown.
    And mixed with memories not my own
The sweet streams...

Why should we dream of days gone by?
    Why should we wait and wonder?
Sweet summer days have come and gone,
    The leaves are falling yonder.

The wee sweet flowers we loved the best,
    The king of frost has chosen;
And now the sun looks sadly down
    Upon his darlings frozen.

Ah! summer sun and autumn frost,
    You are at war forever;
For all the ties that one would make
    The other fain would sever.

With autumn days remembrance comes
    Of golden glories fleeting;
Of pleasures gone and sorrows come--
    Of parting and of meeting.

Oh! summer days, why haunt us still?
    Remembrance is a sorrow;
And all the dreams we dream to-day
    Will fade upon the morrow.

Each life has some sweet summer-time,

When the sad word, "Adieu," from my lip is nigh falling,
    And with it, Hope passes away,
Ere the tongue hath half breathed it, my fond heart recalling
    That fatal farewell, bids me stay,
For oh! 'tis a penance so weary
    One hour from thy presence to be,
That death to this soul were less dreary,
    Less dark than long absence from thee.

Thy beauty, like Day, o'er the dull world breaking.
    Brings life to the heart it shines o'er,
And, in mine, a new feeling of happiness waking,
    Made light what was darkness before.
But mute is the Day's sunny glory,
While thine hath a voice, on whose breath,
    More sweet than the Syren's sweet story,
My hopes hang, through life and through death!

Night on the prairies;
The supper is over - the fire on the ground burns low;
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets:
I walk by myself - I stand and look at the stars, which I think now I never realized before.

Now I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death, and test propositions.

How plenteous! How spiritual! How resumé!
The same Old Man and Soul - the same old aspirations, and the same content.

I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough, till there sprang out so noiseless around me myriads of other globes.

Now, while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me, I will measure myself by them;
And now, touch'd with the lives of other globes, arrived as far along as those o...

Died at Hartford, August 4th, 1861; and his wife, Mrs. ELIZA STORRS TRUMBULL, the night after his funeral.


Death's shafts fly thick, and love a noble mark.
--And one hath fallen who bore upon his shield
The name and lineage of an honor'd race
Who gave us rulers in those ancient days
Where truth stood first and gain was left behind.

--His was the type of character that makes
Republics strong,--unstain'd fidelity,--
A dignity of mind that mark'd unmov'd
The unsought honors clustering round his path,
And chang'd them into duties. With firm step
On the high places of the earth he walk'd,
Serving his Country, not to share her spoils,
Nor pamper with exciting eloquence
A parasite ambition.
                    With clear eye
And cautious speech, and...

We set no right above hers,
No earthly light nor star,
She hath had many lovers,
But not as lovers are:
They all were gallant fellows
And died all deaths for her,
And never one was jealous
But comrades true they were.

Oh! each one is a brother,
Though all the lands they claim,
For her or for each other
They’ve died all deaths the same
Young, handsome, old and ugly,
Free, married or divorced,
Where springtime bard or Thug lie
Her lover’s feet have crossed.

’Mid buttercups and daisies
With fair girls by their side,
Young poets sang her praises
While day in starlight died.
In smoke and fire and dust, and
With red eyes maniac like,
Those same young poets thrust and,
Wrenched out the reeking pike!

She is as ...

I wish I were as in the years of old
While yet the blessed daylight made itself
Ruddy thro’ both the roofs of sight, and woke
These eyes, now dull, but then so keen to seek
The meanings ambush’d under all they saw,
The flight of birds, the flame of sacrifice,
What omens may foreshadow fate to man
And woman, and the secret of the Gods.
My son, the Gods, despite of human prayer,
Are slower to forgive than human kings.
The great God, Arês, burns in anger still
Against the guiltless heirs of him from Tyre
Our Cadmus, out of whom thou art, who found
Beside the springs of Dircê, smote, and still’d
Thro’ all its folds the multitudinous beast
The dragon, which our trembling fathers call’d
The God’s own son.
A tale, that told to me,
When but thine age, by age...

Old winter was gone
In his weakness back to the mountains hoar,
And the spring came down
From the planet that hovers upon the shore

Where the sea of sunlight encroaches
On the limits of wintry night; -
If the land, and the air, and the sea,
Rejoice not when spring approaches,
We did not rejoice in thee,
Ginevra!

She is still, she is cold
On the bridal couch,
One step to the white deathbed,
And one to the bier,
And one to the charnel - and one, oh where?
The dark arrow fled
In the noon.

Ere the sun through heaven once more has rolled,
The rats in her heart
Will have made their nest,
And the worms be alive in her golden hair,
While the Spirit that guides the sun,
Sits throned in his flaming chair,
She shall sl...

"Oh! Autumn winds, what means this plaintive wailing
    Around the quiet homestead where we dwell?
Whence come ye, say, and what the story mournful
    That your weird voices ever seek to tell -
Whispering or clamoring, beneath the casements,
    Rising in shriek or dying off in moan,
But ever breathing, menace, fear, or anguish
    In every thrilling and unearthly tone?"

"We come from far off and from storm-tossed oceans,
    Where vessels bravely battle with fierce gale, -
Mere playthings of our stormy, restless power,
    We rend them quickly, shuddering mast and sail;
And with their, stalwart, gallant crews we hurl them
    Amid the hungry waves that for them wait,
Nor leave one floating spar nor fragile taffrail
    To tell unto the world their dreary f...

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,
I had a beautiful friend
And dreamed that the old despair
Would end in love in the end:
She looked in my heart one day
And saw your image was there;
She has gone weeping away.

By the walk of the willows I pour'd out my theme,
The breath of the evening scarce dimpled the stream;
By the waters I stood, like an image of Woe,
And my tears, like the tide, seem'd to tremble and flow.

Ye green scatter'd reeds, that half lean to the wave,
In your plaintive, your musical, sighs, could ye save
But one note of my charmer, to soften my doom,
I would stay till these willows should arch me a tomb!

For ye know, when I pour'd out my soul on the lute,
How she hung down her head, so expressively mute!
From my hand she would take it, still breathing my pain;
She would touch it - return it - and smile at the strain.

Ye wild blooming flow'rs, that enamel this brink,
Like me could ye feel, and like me could ye think,
How sadly would droop ev'ry b...

With the thirty pieces of silver,
They bought the Potter's Field;
For none would have the blood-money
And the interest it might yield.

The Place of Blood for the Price of Blood,
And that was meet, I ween,
For there they would bury the dead who died
In frowardness and sin.

And the first man they would bury there
Was Judas Iscariot;
And that was as dreadful a burying
As ever was, I wot.

For the sick earth would not keep him;
Each time it thrust him out,
And they that would have buried him
Stood shuddering round about.

And others they would bury
In that unhallowed spot,
But honest earth would none of them,
Because of Iscariot.

And oh, it was a fell, fell place,
With dead black trees all round,
And a quag...

As Life's unending column pours,
Two marshalled hosts are seen, -
Two armies on the trampled shores
That Death flows black between.

One marches to the drum-beat's roll,
The wide-mouthed clarion's bray,
And bears upon a crimson scroll,
"Our glory is to slay."

One moves in silence by the stream,
With sad, yet watchful eyes,
Calm as the patient planet's gleam
That walks the clouded skies.

Along its front no sabres shine,
No blood-red pennons wave;
Its banner bears the single line,
"Our duty is to save."

For those no death-bed's lingering shade;
At Honor's trumpet-call,
With knitted brow and lifted blade
In Glory's arms they fall.

For these no clashing falchions bright,
No stirring battle-cry;
The bloodle...

On the beach, at night,
Stands a child, with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower, sullen and fast, athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends, large and calm, the lord-star Jupiter;
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate brothers, the Pleiades.

From the beach, the child, holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower, victorious, soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears;
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sk...

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.

Where are the songs of Summer? - With the sun,
Opening the dusky eyelids of the south,
Till shade and silence waken up as one,
And Morning sings with a warm odorous mouth.
Where are the merry birds? - Away, away,
On panting wings through the inclement skies,
        Lest owls should prey
        Undazzled at noon-day,
And tear with horny beak their lustrous eyes.

Where are the blooms of Summer? - In the west,
Blushing their last ...

The Moon more indolently dreams to-night
Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,
Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.

Upon her silken avalanche of down,
Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
And watches the white visions past her flown,
Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.

And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,

Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,
And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.