Identity

So, friend, your shop was all your house!
Its front, astonishing the street,
Invited view from man and mouse
To what diversity of treat
Behind its glass, the single sheet!

What gimcracks, genuine Japanese:
Gape-jaw and goggle-eye, the frog;
Dragons, owls, monkeys, beetles, geese;
Some crush-nosed human-hearted dog:
Queer names, too, such a catalogue!

I thought “And he who owns the wealth
Which blocks the window’s vastitude,
Ah, could I peep at him by stealth
Behind his ware, pass shop, intrude
On house itself, what scenes were viewed!

“If wide and showy thus the shop,
What must the habitation prove?
The true house with no name a-top,
The mansion, distant one remove,
Once get him off his traffic-groove!

“Pictures he l...

A winter sky of pale blue and pale gold,
Bare trees, a wind that made the wood-path cold,
And one slow-moving figure, gray and old.

We met where the soft path falls from the wood
Down to the village. As I came near she stood
And answered when I spoke, drawing the hood

Back from her face. I saw only her eyes,
Large and sad. I could not bear those eyes.
They were like new graves. I could not bear her eyes.

But what we said as each passed on is gone.
We looked and spoke and passed like strangers on,
I to the high wood, she towards the paling sun.

And there, where the clear-heavened small pool lies,
And the tallest beeches brush the bending skies,
In pool and tree I saw again her eyes.

As I lie at rest on a patch of clover
In the Western Park when the day is done,
I watch as the wild black swans fly over
With their phalanx turned to the sinking sun;
And I hear the clang of their leader crying
To a lagging mate in the rearward flying,
And they fade away in the darkness dying,
Where the stars are mustering one by one.

O ye wild black swans, 'twere a world of wonder
For a while to join in your westward flight,
With the stars above and the dim earth under,
Through the cooling air of the glorious night.
As we swept along on our pinions winging,
We should catch the chime of a church-bell ringing,
Or the distant note of a torrent singing,
Or the far-off flash of a station light.

From the northern lakes with the reeds and rushes,
Wh...

I.
I WAS the chief of the race—he had stricken my father dead—
But I gather’d my fellows together, I swore I would strike off his head.
Each of them look’d like a king, and was noble in birth as in worth,
And each of them boasted he sprang from the oldest race upon earth.
Each was as brave in the light as the bravest hero of song,
And each of them liefer had died than have done one another a wrong.
He lived on an isle in the ocean—we sail’d on a Friday morn—
He that had slain my father the day before I was born.

II.
And we came to the isle in the ocean, and there on the shore was he.
But a sudden blast blew us out and away thro’ a boundless sea.

III.
And we came to the Silent Isle that we never had touch’d at before,
Where a silent ocean always broke on a si...

On a background of pale gold
I would trace with quaint design,
    Penciled fine,
Brilliant-colored, Moorish scenes,
Mosques and crescents, pages, queens,
    Line on line,
That the prose-world of to-day
Might the gorgeous Past's array
    Once behold.


On the magic painted shield
Rich Granada's Vega green
    Should be seen;
Crystal fountains, coolness flinging,
Hanging gardens' skyward springing
    Emerald sheen;
Ruddy when the daylight falls,
Crowned Alhambra's beetling walls
    Stand revealed;


Balconies that overbrow
Field and city, vale and stream.
    In a dream
Lulled the drowsy landscape basks;
    Mark the gleam
Silvery of each white-swathed peak!
Mountain-airs caress the cheek,
   ...

1.
That time is dead for ever, child!
Drowned, frozen, dead for ever!
We look on the past
And stare aghast
At the spectres wailing, pale and ghast,
Of hopes which thou and I beguiled
To death on life's dark river.

2.
The stream we gazed on then rolled by;
Its waves are unreturning;
But we yet stand
In a lone land,
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee
In the light of life's dim morning.

In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.


In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.


Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.

Hollow rang the house when I knocked on the door,
And I lingered on the threshold with my hand
Upraised to knock and knock once more:
Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor,
Hollow re-echoed my heart.

The low-hung lamps stretched down the road
With shadows drifting underneath,
With a music of soft, melodious feet
Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet
The low-hung light of her eyes.

The golden lamps down the street went out,
The last car trailed the night behind;
And I in the darkness wandered about
With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt
In the dying lamp of my love.

Two brown ponies trotting slowly
Stopped at a dim-lit trough to drink:
The dark van drummed down the distance slowly;
While the city stars so dim...

'Jessie, Jessie Cameron,
    Hear me but this once,' quoth he.
'Good luck go with you, neighbor's son,
    But I'm no mate for you,' quoth she.
Day was verging toward the night
    There beside the moaning sea,
Dimness overtook the light
    There where the breakers be.
'O Jessie, Jessie Cameron,
    I have loved you long and true.' -
'Good luck go with you, neighbor's son,
    But I'm no mate for you.'

She was a careless, fearless girl,
    And made her answer plain,
Outspoken she to earl or churl,
    Kindhearted in the main,
But somewhat heedless with her tongue,
    And apt at causing pain;
A mirthful maiden she and young,
    Most fair for bliss or bane.
'Oh, long ago I told you so,
    I tell you so to-day:
Go you your...

Home! Home!
Man may roam
While the blood of life is brimming,
While the head's with glory swimming;
But, when Love and Life are over,
Bring him to the village clover,
Home! Home!

Home! Home!
Bring him home,
Where the songs of sad hearts shrive him,
Where remorse no more shall rive him,
Where the ever weeping willow
Moults to make its leaves his pillow,
Home! Home!

Home! Home!
He is home,
Where his song was ever sounding,
Where his blood was ever bounding,
Here, at last, he leaves his madness,
All his love and all his sadness,
Home! Home!

How profitless the relics that we cull,
Troubling the last holds of ambitious Rome,
Unless they chasten fancies that presume
Too high, or idle agitations lull!
Of the world's flatteries if the brain be full,
To have no seat for thought were better doom,
Like this old helmet, or the eyeless skull
Of him who gloried in its nodding plume.
Heaven out of view, our wishes what are they?
Our fond regrets tenacious in their grasp?
The Sage's theory? the Poet's lay?
Mere Fibulae without a robe to clasp;
Obsolete lamps, whose light no time recalls;
Urns without ashes, tearless lacrymals!

My thoughts, my grief! are without strength
My spirit is journeying towards death
My eyes are as a frozen sea
My tears my daily food;
There is nothing in life but only misery.
My poor heart is torn
And my thoughts are sharp wounds within me,
Mourning the miserable state of Ireland.

Misfortune has come upon us all together
The poor, the rich, the weak and the strong
The great lord by whom hundreds were maintained
The powerful strong man, and the man that holds the plough;
And the cross laid on the bare shoulder of every man.

Our feasts are without any voice of priests
And none at them but women lamenting
Tearing their hair with troubled minds
Keening miserably after the Fenians.

The pipes of our organs are broken
Our harps have lost ...

Warm perfumes like a breath from vine and tree
Drift down the darkness. Plangent, hidden from eyes
Somewhere an 'eukaleli' thrills and cries
And stabs with pain the night's brown savagery.
And dark scents whisper; and dim waves creep to me,
Gleam like a woman's hair, stretch out, and rise;
And new stars burn into the ancient skies,
Over the murmurous soft Hawaian sea.

And I recall, lose, grasp, forget again,
And still remember, a tale I have heard, or known,
An empty tale, of idleness and pain,
Of two that loved, or did not love, and one
Whose perplexed heart did evil, foolishly,
A long while since, and by some other sea.

A Sufi debauchee of dreams
Spake this: From Sodomite to Peri
Earth tablets us; we live and are
Man's own long commentary.

Is one begat in Bassora,
One lies in Damietta dying
The plausibilities of God
All possibles o'erlying.

But burns the lust within the flesh?
Hell's but a homily to Heaven,
Put then the individual first,
And of thyself be shriven.

Neither in adamant nor brass
The scrutinizing eye records it;
The arm is rooted in the heart,
The heart that rules and lords it.

Be that it is and thou art all;
And what thou art so thou hast written
Thee of the lutanists of Love,
Or of the torture-smitten.

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain.

Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the stream
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,
Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,
And where he winds is the day of day.

So forth and brighter fares my stream,--
Who drink it shall not thirst again;
No darkness stains its equal gleam.
And ages drop in ...

The sea swings owre the slants of sand,
All white with winds that drive;
The sea swirls up to the still dim strand,
Where nae man comes alive.
At the grey soft edge of the fruitless surf
A light flame sinks and springs;
At the grey soft rim of the flowerless turf
A low flame leaps and clings.
What light is this on a sunless shore,
What gleam on a starless sea?
Was it earth's or hell's waste womb that bore
Such births as should not be?
As lithe snakes turning, as bright stars burning,
They bicker and beckon and call;
As wild waves churning, as wild winds yearning,
They flicker and climb and fall.
A soft strange cry from the landward rings,
"What ails the sea to shine?"
A keen sweet note from the spray's rim springs,
"What fires are these of thine...

Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frightened thee so oft, is fled or dead:
Save only me
(Nor is it sad to thee!)
Save only me
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.

The gray grass is scarce dappled with the snow;
Its two banks have not shut upon the river;
But it is long ago,
It seems forever,
Since first I saw thee glance,
With all thy dazzling other ones,
In airy dalliance,
Precipitate in love,
Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,
Like a linp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.

When that was, the soft mist
Of my regret hung not on all the land,
And I was glad for thee,
And glad for me, I wist.

Thou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high,
That fate h...

Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte.

DISTANCE AND SOLITUDE.


    From hill to hill I roam, from thought to thought,
With Love my guide; the beaten path I fly,
For there in vain the tranquil life is sought:
If 'mid the waste well forth a lonely rill,
Or deep embosom'd a low valley lie,
In its calm shade my trembling heart's still;
And there, if Love so will,
I smile, or weep, or fondly hope, or fear.
While on my varying brow, that speaks the soul,
The wild emotions roll,
Now dark, now bright, as shifting skies appear;
That whosoe'er has proved the lover's state
Would say, He feels the flame, nor knows his future fate.

On mountains high, in forests drear and wide,
I find repose, and from the throng'd resort
Of man turn fea...