Identity

It seems a day
(I speak of one from many singled out)
One of those heavenly days that cannot die;
When, in the eagerness of boyish hope,
I left our cottage-threshold, sallying forth
With a huge wallet o’er my shoulders slung,
A nutting-crook in hand; and turned my steps
Tow’rd some far-distant wood, a Figure quaint,
Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds
Which for that service had been husbanded,
By exhortation of my frugal Dame,
Motley accoutrement, of power to smile
At thorns, and brakes, and brambles,, and, in truth,
More ragged than need was! O’er pathless rocks,
Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets,
Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook
Unvisited, where not a broken bough
Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign
...

Is there room for the poet, fair Canada's sons.
To live his strange life, and to warble his songs,
To follow each current of thought as it runs,
And to sing of your victories, glories and wrongs?

Is there room for the poet, ye senators grave?
Ye orators, statesmen and law-makers, say;
May he of the calling so gentle e'er crave
Your patronage, and of your kindness a ray?

Ye toilers in cities, ye workers in fields,
Who handle the hammer, the pen or the plow,
Can the poet implicitly trust, as he yields
His heart, and his hopes, and his name to you now?

Wilt thou pardon his follies, forgive him his faults
In manners, in habits, in distance and time?
For when on his charger, Pegasus, he vaults,
He rises o'er reason's safe, temperate clime.

H...

        Oh, I am weary, weary, weary
            Of Pan and oaten quills
        And little songs that, from the dictionary,
            Learn lore of streams and hills,
        Of studied laughter, mocking what is merry,
            And calculated thrills!

        Are we grown old and past the time of singing?
            Is ardor quenched in art
        Till art is but a formal figure, bringing
            A money-measured heart,
        Procrustean cut, and, with old echoes, ringing
            Its bells about the mart?

        The race moves on, and leaves no wildernesses
            Where rugged voices cry;
        It reads its prayer, and with set phrase it blesses
            The souls of men who die,
        And step by even step its rank p...

"--the music of the moon
Sleeps in the plain eggs of the nightingale."
Aylmer's Field.


Five geese,--a landscape damp and wild,--
A stunted, not too pretty, child,
Beneath a battered gingham;
Such things, to say the least, require
A Muse of more-than-average Fire
Effectively to sing 'em.

And yet--Why should they? Souls of mark
Have sprung from such;--e'en Joan of Arc
Had scarce a grander duty;
Not always ('tis a maxim trite)
From righteous sources comes the right,--
From beautiful, the beauty.

Who shall decide where seed is sown?
Maybe some priceless germ was blown
To this unwholesome marish;
(And what must grow will still increase,
Though cackled round by half the geese
And ganders in the parish.)

Maybe th...

Burn, O evening hearth, and waken
    Pleasant visions, as of old!
Though the house by winds be shaken,
    Safe I keep this room of gold!

Ah, no longer wizard Fancy
    Builds her castles in the air,
Luring me by necromancy
    Up the never-ending stair!

But, instead, she builds me bridges
    Over many a dark ravine,
Where beneath the gusty ridges
    Cataracts dash and roar unseen.

And I cross them, little heeding
    Blast of wind or torrent's roar,
As I follow the receding
    Footsteps that have gone before.

Naught avails the imploring gesture,
    Naught avails the cry of pain!
When I touch the flying vesture,
    'T is the gray robe of the rain.

Baffled I return, and, leaning
    O'er the parapets ...

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it, it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars, on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

I.

A Being, a Form, an Idea
Having fallen from out of the blue
Into the Stygian slough
Where no eye of the sky ever sees;

An impetuous Angel, allured
By the love of the twisted and mean,
In the depths of a nightmarish dream
Like a swimmer who struggles for shore,

Contending in wretched distress
With a whirlpool that swivels along
Singing a madman's song,
Performing its dark pirouettes;

A bewildered man, miserably
Attempting a groping escape
Out of a place full of snakes,
Lacking the lamp and the key;

A damned soul fumbling down steps
Of an infinite stair without rails
At the edge of a gulf, with a smell
Betraying the clammy depths,

Where monsters watch below,
Whose eyeballs' glowing light
M...

I.

                'Tis a legend of a lover,
                'Tis a ballad to be sung,
                In the gloaming, - under cover, -
                By a minstrel who is young;
    By a singer who has passion, and who sways us with his tongue.


II.

                I, who know it, think upon it,
                Not unhappy, tho' in tears,
                And I gather in a sonnet
                All the glory of the years;
    And I kiss and clasp a shadow when the substance disappears.


III.

                Ah! I see her as she faced me,
                In the sinless summer days,
                When her little hands embraced me,
                And I saddened at her gaze,
    Thinking, Sweet One! will she love ...

I have seen her limpid eyes
Large with gradual laughter rise
Through wild-roses' nettles,
Like twin blossoms grow and stare,
Then a hating, envious air
Whisked them into petals.

I have seen her hardy cheek
Like a molten coral leak
Through the leafage shaded
Of thick Chickasaws, and then,
When I made more sure, again
To a red plum faded.

I have found her racy lips,
And her graceful finger-tips,
But a haw and berry;
Glimmers of her there and here,
Just, forsooth, enough to cheer
And to make me merry.

Often on the ferny rocks
Dazzling rimples of loose locks
At me she hath shaken,
And I've followed - 'twas in vain -
They had trickled into rain
Sun-lit on the braken.

Once her full limbs flashed on me,<...

The fields which with covetous spirit we sold,
Those beautiful fields, the delight of the day,
Would have brought us more good than a burthen of gold,
Could we but have been as contented as they.

When the troublesome Tempter beset us, said I,
"Let him come, with his purse proudly grasped in his hand;
But, Allan, be true to me, Allan, we'll die
Before he shall go with an inch of the land!"

There dwelt we, as happy as birds in their bowers;
Unfettered as bees that in gardens abide;
We could do what we liked with the land, it was ours;
And for us the brook murmured that ran by its side.

But now we are strangers, go early or late;
And often, like one overburthened with sin,
With my hand on the latch of the half-opened gate,
I look at the fields, but I...

When I had dreamed and dreamed what woman's beauty was,
And how that beauty seen from unseen surely flowed,
I turned and dreamed again, but sleeping now no more:
My eyes shut and my mind with inward vision glowed.

"I did not think!" I cried, seeing that wavering shape
That steadied and then wavered, as a cherry bough in June
Lifts and falls in the wind--each fruit a fruit of light;
And then she stood as clear as an unclouded moon.

As clear and still she stood, moonlike remotely near;
I saw and heard her breathe, I years and years away.
Her light streamed through the years, I saw her clear and still,
Shape and spirit together mingling night with day.

Water falling, falling with the curve of time
Over green-hued rock, then plunging to its pool
Far, far b...

The poet's song, and the bird's,
    And the waters' that chant as they run
And the waves' that kiss the beach,
    And the wind's--they are but one.
He who may read their words,
And the secret hid in each,
May know the solemn monochords
That breathe in vast still places;
And the voices of myriad races,
    Shy, and far-off from man,
That hide in shadow and sun,
    And are seen but of him who can
To him the awful face is shown
Swathed in a cloud wind-blown
Of Him, who from His secret throne,
In some void, shadowy, and unknown land
Comes forth to lay His mighty hand
On the sounding organ keys,
    That play deep thunder-marches,
Like the rush and the roar of seas,
    And fill the cavernous arches
Of antique wildernesses hoary,
  ...

I.

So far as our story approaches the end,
Which do you pity the most of us three?
My friend, or the mistress of my friend
With her wanton eyes, or me?

II.

My friend was already too good to lose,
And seemed in the way of improvement yet,
When she crossed his path with her hunting-noose
And over him drew her net.

III.

When I saw him tangled in her toils,
A shame, said I, if she adds just him
To her nine-and-ninety other spoils,
The hundredth for a whim!

IV.

And before my friend be wholly hers,
How easy to prove to him, I said,
An eagle’s the game her pride prefers,
Though she snaps at a wren instead!

V.

So, I gave her eyes my own eyes to take,
My hand sought hers as in earnest n...

        I shouldn't like to say, I'm sure,
            I shouldn't like to say,
        Why I think of you more, and more, and more
            As day flits after day.
        Nor why I see in the Summer skies
        Only the beauty of your sweet eyes,
            The power by which you sway
        A kingdom of hearts, that little you prize
            I shouldn't like to say.

        I shouldn't like to say, I'm sure,
            I shouldn't like to say
        Why I hear your voice, so fresh and pure,
            In the dash of the laughing spray.
        Nor why the wavelets that all the while,
        In many a diamond-glittering file,
            With truant sunbeams play,
        Should make me remember your rippling smile
            I shou...

The mind, with its own eyes and ears,
May for these others have no care;
No matter where this body is,
The mind is free to go elsewhere.
My mind can be a sailor, when
This body's still confined to land;
And turn these mortals into trees,
That walk in Fleet Street or the Strand.

So, when I'm passing Charing Cross,
Where porters work both night and day,
I ofttimes hear sweet Malpas Brook,
That flows thrice fifty miles away.
And when I'm passing near St Paul's,
I see, beyond the dome and crowd,
Twm Barlum, that green pap in Gwent,
With its dark nipple in a cloud.

Qual paura ho, quando mi torna a mente.

MELANCHOLY RECOLLECTIONS AND PRESAGES.


    O Laura! when my tortured mind
The sad remembrance bears
Of that ill-omen'd day,
When, victim to a thousand doubts and fears,
I left my soul behind,
That soul that could not from its partner stray;
In nightly visions to my longing eyes
Thy form oft seems to rise,
As ever thou wert seen,
Fair like the rose, 'midst paling flowers the queen,
But loosely in the wind,
Unbraided wave the ringlets of thy hair,
That late with studious care,
I saw with pearls and flowery garlands twined:
On thy wan lip, no cheerful smile appears;
Thy beauteous face a tender sadness wears;
Placid in pain thou seem'st, serene in grief,
As conscious of thy fate, and h...

(1829-1896)



Spring at her height on a morn at prime,
Sails that laugh from a flying squall,
Pomp of harmony, rapture of rhyme -
Youth is the sign of them, one and all.
Winter sunsets and leaves that fall,
An empty flagon, a folded page,
A tumble-down wheel, a tattered ball -
These are a type of the world of Age.

Bells that clash in a gaudy chime,
Swords that clatter in onsets tall,
The words that ring and the fames that climb -
Youth is the sign of them, one and all.
Hymnals old in a dusty stall,
A bald, blind bird in a crazy cage,
The scene of a faded festival -
These are a type of the world of Age.

Hours that strut as the heirs of time,
Deeds whose rumour's a clarion-call,
Songs where the singers their souls subli...

A Rouseabout of rouseabouts, from any land, or none,
I bear a nick-name of the bush, and I’m, a woman’s son;
I came from where I camp’d last night, and, at the day-dawn glow,
I rub the darkness from my eyes, roll up my swag, and go.

Some take the track for bitter pride, some for no pride at all,
(But, to us all the world is wide when driven to the wall)
Some take the track for gain in life, some take the track for loss,
And some of us take up the swag as Christ took up the Cross.

Some take the track for faith in men, some take the track for doubt,
Some flee a squalid home to work their own salvation out.
Some dared not see a mother’s tears nor meet a father’s face,
Born of good Christian families some leap, head-long, from Grace.

Oh we are men who fought and ros...