Identity

Nay, more than violets
These thoughts of thine, friend!
Rather thy reedy brook--
Taw's tributary--
At midnight murmuring,
Descried them, the delicate
Dark-eyed goddesses,
There by his cressy bed
Dissolved and dreaming
Dreams that distilled into dew
All the purple of night,
All the shine of a planet.

Whereat he whispered;
And they arising--

Of day's forget-me-nots
The duskier sisters--
Descended, relinquished
The orchard, the trout-pool,
Torridge and Tamar,
The Druid circles,
Sheepfolds of Dartmoor,
Granite and sandstone;
By Roughtor, Dozmare,
Down the vale of the Fowey
Moving in silence,
Brushing the nightshade
By bridges cyclopean,
By Trevenna, Treverbyn,
Lawharne and Largin,
By Glyn...

1.

Adieu, thou Hill! [1] where early joy
Spread roses o'er my brow;
Where Science seeks each loitering boy
With knowledge to endow.
Adieu, my youthful friends or foes,
Partners of former bliss or woes;
No more through Ida's paths we stray;
Soon must I share the gloomy cell,
Whose ever-slumbering inmates dwell
Unconscious of the day.

2.

Adieu, ye hoary Regal Fanes,
Ye spires of Granta's vale,
Where Learning robed in sable reigns.
And Melancholy pale.
Ye comrades of the jovial hour,
Ye tenants of the classic bower,
On Cama's verdant margin plac'd,
Adieu! while memory still is mine,
For offerings on Oblivion's shrine,
These scenes must be effac'd.


3

Adieu, ye mountains of the clime<...

Gold, with an innermost speck
Of silver, singing afloat
    Beneath the night,
Like balls of thistle-down
Wandering up and down
Over the whispering town
    Seeking where to alight!

Slowly, above the street
Above the ebb of feet
    Drifting in flight;
Still, in the purple distance
The gold of their strange persistence
As they cross and part and meet
    And pass out of sight!

The seed-ball of the sun
Is broken at last, and done
    Is the orb of day.
Now to the separate ends
Seed after day-seed wends
    A separate way.

No sun will ever rise
Again on the wonted skies
    In the midst of the spheres.
The globe of the day, over-ripe,
Is shattered at last beneath the stripe
Of the wind, and its onene...

In the fair days when God
By man as godlike trod,
And each alike was Greek, alike was free,
God’s lightning spared, they said,
Alone the happier head
Whose laurels screened it; fruitless grace for thee,
To whom the high gods gave of right
Their thunders and their laurels and their light.

Sunbeams and bays before
Our master’s servants wore,
For these Apollo left in all men’s lands;
But far from these ere now
And watched with jealous brow
Lay the blind lightnings shut between God’s hands,
And only loosed on slaves and kings
The terror of the tempest of their wings.

Born in those younger years
That shone with storms of spears
And shook in the wind blown from a dead world’s pyre,
When by her back-blown hair
Napoleon caught the fair<...

At the moon's down-going let it be
On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree.

The red-rock road of the underbrush,
Where the woman came through the summer hush.

The sumac high and the elder thick,
Where we found the stone and the ragged stick.

The trampled road of the thicket, full
Of footprints down to the quarry pool.

The rocks that ooze with the hue of lead,
Where we found her lying stark and dead.

The scraggy wood; the negro hut,
With its doors and windows locked and shut.

A secret signal; a foot's rough tramp;
A knock at the door; a lifted lamp.

An oath; a scuffle; a ring of masks;
A voice that answers a voice that asks.

A group of shadows; the moon's red fleck;
A running noose and a man's bared neck...

When I have ceased to break my wings
Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each hardly opened gate,
When I have looked Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange, my youth.

(Moon Poems for the Children/Fairy-tales for the Children)

    Hungry for music with a desperate hunger
    I prowled abroad, I threaded through the town;
    The evening crowd was clamoring and drinking,
    Vulgar and pitiful - my heart bowed down -
    Till I remembered duller hours made noble
    By strangers clad in some surprising grace.
    Wait, wait, my soul, your music comes ere midnight
    Appearing in some unexpected place
    With quivering lips, and gleaming, moonlit face.

    Muse, you have opened like a flower.

        *    *    *    *    *

    Long ago I knew that brown integument,
    Like a dead husk, had dormant life within it,
    And waited till a first white point appeared
    Which shot into a naked stiff pale spike
    That grew.
    I knew this was not all;
    Nothing I said as greener you grew and taller,
    But dreamed alone of the day when your bud would unsheathe,
    And silently swell, and at last your crown would break
    Filling the air with clouds of colour and fragrance,
    Radiant waves, odours of immortality.

        *    *    *    *    *

    In a pot of earth I watered and tended you,
    Breaking the clods and soaking the earth with water
    That fed your roots and eased you...

Ah, Almon Keefer! what a boy you were,
With your back-tilted hat and careless hair,
And open, honest, fresh, fair face and eyes
With their all-varying looks of pleased surprise
And joyous interest in flower and tree,
And poising humming-bird, and maundering bee.

The fields and woods he knew; the tireless tramp
With gun and dog; and the night-fisher's camp -
No other boy, save Bee Lineback, had won
Such brilliant mastery of rod and gun.
Even in his earliest childhood had he shown
These traits that marked him as his father's own.
Dogs all paid Almon honor and bow-wowed
Allegiance, let him come in any crowd
Of rabbit-hunting town-boys, even though
His own dog "Sleuth" rebuked their acting so
With jealous snarls and growlings.

    But the best

How good some years of life may be!
Ah, once it was not guessed by me,
Past years would shine, like some bright sea,
In golden dusks of memory.

Ere then the music of the dawn
From me had long since surged away;
And in the disillusioned day
Of chill mid-life I plodded on.

Anon a fuller music thrilled
My world with meaning undertones,
That elegized our vanished ones,
And told how Lethe's banks are filled

With wordless calm, and wistful rest,
And sweet large silence, solemn sleep,
And brooding shadows cool and deep,
And grand oblivions, undistressed.

No more 'twas "Lethe rolling doom,"
But Lethe calling, "Come to me,
And wash away all memory
And taint of what precedes the tomb;

And know the changeless afterthought...

What! five long acts and all to make us wiser!
Our authoress sure has wanted an adviser.
Had she consulted 'me', she should have made
Her moral play a speaking masquerade;
Warm'd up each bustling scene, and in her rage
Have emptied all the green-room on the stage.
My life on't, this had kept her play from sinking;
Have pleas'd our eyes, and sav'd the pain of thinking.
Well! since she thus has shown her want of skill,
What if I give a masquerade?    I will.
But how? ay, there's the rub! ('pausing')    I've got my cue:
The world's a masquerade! the maskers, you, you, you.
('To Boxes, Pit, and Gallery'.)
____, what a group the motley scene discloses!
False wits, false wives, false virgins, and false spouses!
Statesmen with bridles on; and, close beside 'em,
Patri...

THE MOTHER'S GHOST

Svend Dyring he rideth adown the glade;
    I myself was young!
There he hath wooed him so winsome a maid;
    Fair words gladden so many a heart.

Together were they for seven years,
And together children six were theirs.

Then came Death abroad through the land,
And blighted the beautiful lily-wand.

Svend Dyring he rideth adown the glade,
And again hath he wooed him another maid,

He hath wooed him a maid and brought home a bride,
But she was bitter and full of pride.

When she came driving into the yard,
There stood the six children weeping so hard.

There stood the small children with sorrowful heart;
From before her feet she thrust them apart.

She gave to them neither ale nor bread;
"...

I

Over the broken world, the dark gone by,
Horror of outcast darkness torn with wars;
And timeless agony
Of the white fire, heaped high by blinded Stars,
Unfaltering, unaghast;--
Out of the midmost Fire
At last,--at last,--
Cry! ...
O darkness' one desire,--
O darkness, have you heard?--
Black Chaos, blindly striving towards the Word?
--The Cry!

Behold thy conqueror, Death!
Behold, behold from whom
It flutters forth, that triumph of First-Breath,
Victorious one that can but breathe and cling,--
This pulsing flower,--this weaker than a wing,
Halcyon thing!--
Cradled above unfathomable doom.


II

Under my feet, O Death,
Under my trembling feet!
Back, through the gates of hell, now give me way.
I...

Though the whole heaven be one-eyed with the moon,
Though the dead landscape seem a thing possessed,
Yet I go singing through that land oppressed
As one that singeth through the flowers of June.

No more, with forest-fingers crawling free
O'er dark flint wall that seems a wall of eyes,
Shall evil break my soul with mysteries
Of some world-poison maddening bush and tree.

No more shall leering ghosts of pimp and king
With bloody secrets veiled before me stand.
Last night I held all evil in my hand
Closed: and behold it was a little thing.

I broke the infernal gates and looked on him
Who fronts the strong creation with a curse;
Even the god of a lost universe,
Smiling above his hideous cherubim.

And pierced far down in his soul's crypt unri...

I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, its convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how hes shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles w...

TO J. FOX, JR.


You remember how the mist,
When we climbed to Devil's Den,
Pearly in the mountain glen,
And above us, amethyst,
Throbbed or circled? then away,
Through the wildwoods opposite,
Torn and scattered, morning-lit,
Vanished into dewy gray? -
Vague as in romance we saw,
From the fog, one riven trunk,
Talon-like with branches shrunk,
Thrust a monster dragon claw.
And we climbed for hours through
The dawn-dripping Jellicoes,
To a wooded rock that shows
Undulating leagues of blue
Summits; mountain-chains that lie
Dark with forests; bar on bar,
Ranging their irregular
Purple peaks beneath a sky
Soft as slumber. Range on range
Billow their enormous spines,
Where the rocks and priestly pines
Sit eternal, wi...

Silent was I, and so still,
As day followed day.
Imprisoned until
King Frost worked his will.
Held fast like a vice,
In his cold hand of ice,
For fear kept me silent, and lo
He had wrapped me around and about
with a mantle of snow.

But sudden there spake
One greater than he.
Then my heart was awake,
And my spirit ran free.

At His bidding my bands fell apart, He had burst them asunder.
I can feel the swift wind rushing by me, once more the old wonder
Of quickening sap stirs my pulses -- I shout in my gladness,
Forgetting the sadness,
For the Voice of the Lord fills the air!

And forth through the hollow I go, where in glad April weather,
The trees of the forest break out into singing together.
And here the frail windflowers ...

I.

The City Child.


Dainty little maiden, whither would you wander?
Whither from this pretty home, the home where mother dwells?
‘Far and far away,’ said the dainty little maiden,
‘All among the gardens, auriculas, anemones,
Roses and lilies and Canterbury-bells.’

Dainty little maiden, whither would you wander?
Whither from this pretty house, this city-house of ours?
‘Far and far away,’ said the dainty little maiden,
‘All among the meadows, the clover and the clematis,
Daisies and kingcups and honeysuckle-flowers.’

II.

Minnie and Winnie.


Minnie and Winnie
Slept in a shell.
Sleep, little ladies!
And they slept well.

Pink was the shell within,
Silver without;
Sounds of the great sea
Wa...