Identity

Three sang of love together: one with lips
    Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,
Flushed to the yellow hair and finger-tips;
    And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow
    Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;
And one was blue with famine after love,
    Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low
The burden of what those were singing of.
One shamed herself in love; one temperately
    Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;
One famished died for love. Thus two of three
    Took death for love and won him after strife;
One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:
    All on the threshold, yet all short of life.

RESIGNATION

There is no flock, however watched and tended,
    But one dead lamb is there!
There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended,
    But has one vacant chair!

The air is full of farewells to the dying,
    And mournings for the dead;
The heart of Rachel, for her children crying,
    Will not be comforted!

Let us be patient!    These severe afflictions
    Not from the ground arise,
But oftentimes celestial benedictions
    Assume this dark disguise.

We see but dimly through the mists and vapors;
    Amid these earthly damps
What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers
    May be heaven's distant lamps.

There is no Death!    What seems so is transition;
    This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysi...

I dwell alone - I dwell alone, alone,
    Whilst full my river flows down to the sea,
Gilded with flashing boats
    That bring no friend to me:
O love-songs, gurgling from a hundred throats,
    O love-pangs, let me be.

Fair fall the freighted boats which gold and stone
    And spices bear to sea:
Slim, gleaming maidens swell their mellow notes,
    Love-promising, entreating -
    Ah! sweet, but fleeting -
    Beneath the shivering, snow-white sails.
    Hush! the wind flags and fails -
Hush! they will lie becalmed in sight of strand -
    Sight of my strand, where I do dwell alone;
Their songs wake singing echoes in my land -
    They cannot hear me moan.

    One latest, solitary swallow flies
    Across the sea, rough autumn-tempest t...

How many bards gild the lapses of time!
A few of them have ever been the food
Of my delighted fancy, I could brood
Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime:
And often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude:
But no confusion, no disturbance rude
Do they occasion; 'tis a pleasing chime.
So the unnumbered sounds that evening store;
The songs of birds the whispering of the leaves
The voice of waters the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound, and thousand others more,
That distance of recognizance bereaves,
Makes pleasing music, and not wild uproar.

Where hast thou been since round the walls of Troy
The sons of God fought in that great emprise?
Why dost thou walk our common earth again?
Hast thou forgotten that impassioned boy,
His purple galley and his Tyrian men
And treacherous Aphrodite's mocking eyes?
For surely it was thou, who, like a star
Hung in the silver silence of the night,
Didst lure the Old World's chivalry and might
Into the clamorous crimson waves of war!

Or didst thou rule the fire-laden moon?
In amorous Sidon was thy temple built
Over the light and laughter of the sea
Where, behind lattice scarlet-wrought and gilt,
Some brown-limbed girl did weave thee tapestry,
All through the waste and wearied hours of noon;
Till her wan cheek with flame of passion burned,
And she rose up th...

Like as a dryad, from her native bole
Coming at dusk, when the dim stars emerge,
To a slow river at whose silent verge
Tall poplars tremble and deep grasses roll,
Come thou no less and, kneeling in a shoal
Of the freaked flag and meadow buttercup,
Bend till thine image from the pool beam up
Arched with blue heaven like an aureole.
See how adorable in fancy then
Lives the fair face it mirrors even so,
O thou whose beauty moving among men
Is like the wind's way on the woods below,
Filling all nature where its pathway lies
With arms that supplicate and trembling sighs.

When breezes are soft and skies are fair,
I steal an hour from study and care,
And hie me away to the woodland scene,
Where wanders the stream with waters of green,
As if the bright fringe of herbs on its brink
Had given their stain to the wave they drink;
And they, whose meadows it murmurs through,
Have named the stream from its own fair hue.

Yet pure its waters, its shallows are bright
With coloured pebbles and sparkles of light,
And clear the depths where its eddies play,
And dimples deepen and whirl away,
And the plane-tree's speckled arms o'ershoot
The swifter current that mines its root,
Through whose shifting leaves, as you walk the hill,
The quivering glimmer of sun and rill
With a sudden flash on the eye is thrown,
Like the ray that streams...

    'Tis ended!
    Welcome! 'tis ended
Oh thou sinner majestic,
All thy terrible part is now played!

Noble abased one!
Thou, of thy race beginner and ender!
Wondrous son of her fearfulest humor,
Mother Nature's blunder sublime!

Through cloud-covered night a radiant gleam!
Hark how behind him the portals are closing!
Night's gloomy jaws veil him darkly in shade!
Nations are trembling,
At his destructive splendor afraid!
Thou art welcome! 'Tis ended!
Oh thou sinner majestic,
All thy terrible part is now played!

    Crumble, decay
In the cradle of wide-open heaven!
Terrible sight to each sinner that breathes,
    When the hot thirst for glory
Raises its barriers over against the dread throne!
See! to eternity shame has ...

    Sing on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough,
        Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain:
        See, aged Winter, 'mid his surly reign,
    At thy blythe carol clears his furrow'd brow.

    So, in lone Poverty's dominion drear,
        Sits meek Content with light unanxious heart,
        Welcomes the rapid moments, bids them part,
    Nor asks if they bring aught to hope or fear.

    I thank Thee, Author of this opening day!
        Thou whose bright sun now gilds yon orient skies!
        Riches denied, Thy boon was purer joys,
    What wealth could never give nor take away.

    Yet come, thou child of poverty and care,
    The mite high Heaven bestow'd, that mite with thee I'll share.

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")

What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he t...

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

I said I stood upon thy grave,
My Mother State, when last the moon
Of blossoms clomb the skies of June.
And, scattering ashes on my head,
I wore, undreaming of relief,
The sackcloth of thy shame and grief.
Again that moon of blossoms shines
On leaf and flower and folded wing,
And thou hast risen with the spring!
Once more thy strong maternal arms
Are round about thy children flung,
A lioness that guards her young!
No threat is on thy closëd lips,
But in thine eye a power to smite
The mad wolf backward from its light.
Southward the baffled robber's track
Henceforth runs only; hereaway,
The fell lycanthrope finds no prey.
Henceforth, within thy sacred gates,
His first low howl shall downward draw
The thunder of thy righteous law.
Not min...

Deep, it is said, under yonder pyramid, has for ages lain concealed the Table of Emerald, on which the thrice-great Hermes engraved, before the flood, the secret of Alchemy that gives gold at will. Epicurean.


That 'Emerald Green of the Pyramid' -
    Were I where it is laid,
I'd ask no king for his heavy crown,
    As its hidden words were said.
The pomp and the glitter of worldly pride
    Should fetter my moments not,
And the natural thought of an open mind,
    Should govern alone my lot.

Would I feast all day? revel all night?
    Laugh with a weary heart?
Would I sleep away the breezy morn?
    And wake till the stars depart?
Would I gain no knowledge, and search no deep
    For the wisdom that sages knew?
Would I run to waste with a h...

Fair little scout, that when the iron year
Changes, and the first fleecy clouds deploy,
Comest with such a sudden burst of joy,
Lifting on winter's doomed and broken rear
That song of silvery triumph blithe and clear;
Not yet quite conscious of the happy glow,
We hungered for some surer touch, and lo!
One morning we awake, and thou art here.
And thousands of frail-stemmed hepaticas,
With their crisp leaves and pure and perfect hues,
Light sleepers, ready for the golden news,
Spring at thy note beside the forest ways -
Next to thy song, the first to deck the hour -
The classic lyrist and the classic flower.

I.

Far in the West, where snow-capt mountains rise,
Like marble shafts beneath Heaven's stooping dome,
And sunset's dreamy curtain drapes the skies,
As if enchantment there would build her home
O'er wood and wave, from haunts of men away
From out the glen, all trembling like a child,
A babbling streamlet comes as if to play
Albeit the scene is savage, lone and wild.
Here at the mountain's foot, that infant wave
'Mid bowering leaves doth hide its rustic birth
Here learns the rock and precipice to brave
And go the Monarch River of the Earth!
Far, far from hence, its bosom deep and wide,
Bears the proud steamer on its fiery wing
Along its banks, bright cities rise in pride,
And o'er its breast their gorgeous image fling.
The Mississippi needs no herald...

Plain Tales From the Hills

Look, you have cast out Love! What Gods are these
You bid me please?
The Three in One, the One in Three?Not so!
To my own Gods I go.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
- Lispeth.

When the earth was sick and the skies were grey,
And the woods were rotted with rain,
The Dead Man rode through the autumn day
To visit his love again.

His love she neither saw nor heard,
So heavy was her shame;
And tho' the babe within her stirred
She knew not that he came.
- The Other Man.

Cry "Murder" in the market-place, and each
Will turn upon his neighbour anxious eyes
Asking: "Art thou the man?" We hunted Cain
Some centuries ago across the world.
This ...

After the wailing had already begun
along the walls, their ruin certain,
the Trojans fidgeted with bits of wood
in the three-ply doors, itsy-bitsy
pieces of wood, fussing with them.
And began to get their nerve back and feel hopeful.

"Old man, upon the green hillside,
With yellow flowers besprinkled o'er,
How long in silence wilt thou bide
At this low stone door?

"I stoop: within 'tis dark and still;
But shadowy paths methinks there be,
And lead they far into the hill?"
"Traveller, come and see."

"'Tis dark, 'tis cold, and hung with gloom;
I care not now within to stay;
For thee and me is scarcely room,
I will hence away."

"Not so, not so, thou youthful guest,
Thy foot shall issue forth no more:
Behold the chamber of thy rest,
And the closing door!"

"O, have I 'scaped the whistling ball,
And striven on smoky fields of fight,
And scaled the 'leaguered city's wall
In the dangerous night;

"And borne my life unharméd still
Through foaming ...