Identity

While I have vision, while the glowing-bodied,
Drunken with light, untroubled clouds, with all this cold sphered sky,
Are flushed above trees where the dew falls secretly,
Where no man goes, where beasts move silently,
As gently as light feathered winds that fall
Chill among hollows filled with sighing grass;
While I have vision, while my mind is borne
A finger's length above reality,
Like that small plaining bird that drifts and drops
Among these soft lapped hollows;
Robed gods, whose passing fills calm nights with sudden wind,
Whose spears still bar our twilight, bend and fill
Wind-shaken, troubled spaces with some peace,
With clear untroubled beauty;
That I may rise not chill and shrilling through perpetual day,
Remote, amazèd, larklike, but may hold
The ho...

Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!
With thy turned-up pantaloons,
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lip, redder still
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face,
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
From my heart I give thee joy,
I was once a barefoot boy!
Prince thou art, the grown-up man
Only is republican.
Let the million-dollared ride!
Barefoot, trudging at his side,
Thou hast more than he can buy
In the reach of ear and eye,
Outward sunshine, inward joy
Blessings on thee, barefoot boy!

Oh for boyhood’s painless play,
Sleep that wakes in laughing day,
Health that mocks the doctor’s rules,
Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee’s morning chase,

What of these tender feet
That have never toddled yet?
What dances shall they beat,
With what red vintage wet?
In what wild way will they march or stray, by what sly paynims met?

The toil of it none may share;
By yourself must the way be won
Through fervid or frozen air
Till the overland journey’s done;
And I would not take, for your own dear sake, one thorn from your track, my son.

Go forth to your hill and dale,
Yet take in your hand from me
A staff when your footsteps fail,
A weapon if need there be;
’Twill hum in your ear when the foeman’s near, athirst for the victory.

In the desert of dusty death
It will point to the hidden spring;
Should you weary and fail for breath,
It will burgeon and branch and swing
Till you sink to...

Storm and strife and stress,
Lost in a wilderness,
Groping to find a way,
Forth to the haunts of day

Sudden a vista peeps,
Out of the tangled deeps,
Only a point--the ray
But at the end is day.

Dark is the dawn and chill,
Daylight is on the hill,
Night is the flitting breath,
Day rides the hills of death.

This shred of song you bid me bring
Is snatched from fancy's embers;
Ah, when the lips forget to sing,
The faithful heart remembers!

Too swift the wings of envious Time
To wait for dallying phrases,
Or woven strands of labored rhyme
To thread their cunning mazes.

A word, a sigh, and lo, how plain
Its magic breath discloses
Our life's long vista through a lane
Of threescore summers' roses!

One language years alone can teach
Its roots are young affections
That feel their way to simplest speech
Through silent recollections.

That tongue is ours. How few the words
We need to know a brother!
As simple are the notes of birds,
Yet well they know each other.

This freezing month of ice and snow
That brings our lives...

Since shunning pain, I ease can never find;
Since bashful dread seeks where he knows me harmed;
Since will is won, and stopped ears are charmed;
Since force doth faint, and sight doth make me blind;
Since loosing long, the faster still I bind;
Since naked sense can conquer reason armed;
Since heart, in chilling fear, with ice is warmed;
In fine, since strife of thought but mars the mind,
I yield, O Love, unto thy loathed yoke,
Yet craving law of arms, whose rule doth teach,
That, hardly used, who ever prison broke,
In justice quit, of honour made no breach:
Whereas, if I a grateful guardian have,
Thou art my lord, and I thy vowed slave.


When Love puffed up with rage of high disdain,
Resolved to make me pattern of his might,
Like foe, whose wits inc...

My crippled sense fares bow'd along
His uncompanioned way,
And wronged by death pays life with wrong
And I wake by night and dream by day.

And the Morning seems but fatigued Night
That hath wept his visage pale,
And the healthy mark 'twixt dark and light
In sickly sameness out doth fail.

And the woods stare strange, and the wind is dumb,
- O Wind, pray talk again -
And the Hand of the Frost spreads stark and numb
As Death's on the deadened window-pane.

Still dumb, thou Wind, old voluble friend?
And the middle of the day is cold,
And the heart of eve beats lax i' the end
As a legend's climax poorly told.

Oh vain the up-straining of the hands
In the chamber late at night,
Oh vain the complainings, the hot demands,
The praye...

    I.

    In youth he wrought, with eyes ablur,
        Lorn-faced and long of hair -
    In youth - in youth he painted her
        A sister of the air -
    Could clasp her not, but felt the stir
        Of pinions everywhere.


    II.

    She lured his gaze, in braver days,
        And tranced him sirenwise;
    And he did paint her, through a haze
        Of sullen paradise,
    With scars of kisses on her face
        And embers in her eyes.


    III.

    And now - nor dream nor wild conceit -
        Though faltering, as before -
    Through tears he paints her, as is meet,
        Tracing the dear face o'er
    With lilied patience meek and sweet
        As Mother Mary wore.

Good morning sweetheart.
Good morning my Saint of a sweetheart.
It has been two year mother
since the boy has sailed
on his mythical journey.
Since he hid within his luggage
the green morning of his homeland
and her stars, and her streams,
and all of her red poppy.
Since he hid in his cloths
bunches of mint and thyme,
and a Damascene Lilac.



I am alone.
The smoke of my cigarette is bored,
and even my seat of me is bored
My sorrows are like flocking birds looking for a grain field in season.
I became acquainted with the women of Europe,
I became acquainted with their tired civilization.
I toured India, and I toured China,
I toured the entire oriental world,
and nowhere I found,
a Lady to comb my golden hair.
A Lady...

        Before the coming of the dark, he dreamed
        An old-world faded story: of a knight,
        Much like in need to him, who was no knight!
        And of a road, much like the road his soul
        Groped over, desperate to meet Her soul.
        Beside the bed Death waited. And he dreamed.


        His limbs were heavy from the fight,
        His mail was dark with dust and blood;
        On his good horse they bound him tight,
        And on his breast they bound the rood
        To help him in the ride that night.

        When he crashed through the wood's wet rim,
        About the dabbled reeds a breeze
        Went moaning broken words and dim;
        The haggard shapes of twilight trees
        Caught with their scrawny ha...

        When merry milkmaids to their cattle call
            At evenfall
            And voices range
        Loud through the gloam from grange to quiet grange,

        Wild waif-songs from long distant lands and loves,
            Like migrant doves,
            Wake and give wing
        To passion dust-dumb lips were wont to sing.

        The new still holds the old moon in her arms;
            The ancient charms
            Of dew and dusk
        Still lure her nomad odors from the musk,

        And, at each day's millennial eclipse,
            On new men's lips,
            Some old song starts,
        Made of the music of millennial hearts,

        Whereto one listens as from long ago
            And learns to know

My father left a park to me,
But it is wild and barren,
A garden too with scarce a tree,
And waster than a warren:
Yet say the neighbours when they call,
It is not bad but good land,
And in it is the germ of all
That grows within the woodland.

O had I lived when song was great
In days of old Amphion,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,
Nor cared for seed or scion!
And had I lived when song was great,
And legs of trees were limber,
And ta'en my fiddle to the gate,
And fiddled in the timber!

'Tis said he had a tuneful tongue,
Such happy intonation,
Wherever he sat down and sung
He left a small plantation;
Wherever in a lonely grove
He set up his forlorn pipes,
The gouty oak began to move,
And flounder into hornpipes.

There's a face that beclouds like a shadow my pathway at morn and eve,
There's a form that glides before me which my eyes can never leave,
When I pore above the hearth and heavy thoughts my bosom fill,
I start like a sleeper from dreaming, for it's standing beside me still.

When I stroll in the gloom of the evening is that figure before me cast
With its strange and measured footfall, like the shadow of something past,
All through my summer wandering does it darken the light of the sun,
And it sits like a phantom to mock me when the work of the day is done.

It is ever present with me like an overhanging blight,
Thro' the heaviness of morning and the wakefulness of night,
When I bend within my chamber in the attitude of prayer--
With a look of wrapt devotion is it kneeling--...

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill?
Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill.



If curses be the wage of love,
Hide in thy skies, thou fruitless Jove,
Not to be named:
It is clear
Why the gods will not appear;
They are ashamed.



When wrath and terror changed Jove's regal port,
And the rash-leaping thunderbolt fell short.



Shun passion, fold the hands of thrift,
Sit still and Truth is near:
Suddenly it will uplift
Your eyelids to the sphere:
Wait a little, you shall see
The portraiture of things to be.



The rules to men made evident
By Him who built the day,
The columns of the firmament
Not firmer based than they.



On bravely through the sunshine and the sho...

The groves were God's first temples. Ere man learned
To hew the shaft, and lay the architrave,
And spread the roof above them, ere he framed
The lofty vault, to gather and roll back
The sound of anthems; in the darkling wood,
Amidst the cool and silence, he knelt down,
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks
And supplication. For his simple heart
Might not resist the sacred influences
Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
Mingled their mossy boughs, and from the sound
Of the invisible breath that swayed at once
All their green tops, stole over him, and bowed
His spirit with the thought of boundless power
And inaccessible majesty. Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancien...

O thou, my Muse,
Beside the Kentish River running
Through water-meads where dews
Tossed flashing at thy feet
And tossing flashed again
When the timid herd
By thy swift passing stirred
Up-leapt and ran;

Thou that didst fleet
Thy shadow over dark October hills
By Aston, Weston, Saintbury, Willersey,
Winchcombe, and all the combes and hills
Of the green lonely land;

Thou that in May
Once when I saw thee sunning
Thyself so lovely there
Than the flushed flower more fair
Fallen from the wild apple spray,
Didst rise and sprinkling sunlight with thy hand
Shadow-like disappear in the deep-shadowy hedges
Between forsaken Buckle Street and the sparse sedges
Of young twin-breasted Honeybourne; -

O thou, my Muse,
Scarce ...

(At No. 1, Newgate. Favored by Mr. Wontner.)


O Mary, I believed you true,
And I was blest in so believing;
But till this hour I never knew -
That you were taken up for thieving!

Oh! when I snatch'd a tender kiss,
Or some such trifle when I courted,
You said, indeed, that love was bliss,
But never owned you were transported!

But then to gaze on that fair face -
It would have been an unfair feeling
To dream that you had pilfered lace -
And Flint's had suffered from your stealing!

Or when my suit I first preferred,
To bring your coldness to repentance,
Before I hammer'd out a word,
How could I dream you heard a sentence!

Or when with all the warmth of youth
I strove to prove my love no fiction,
How could I guess ...

In this world, the Isle of Dreams,
While we sit by sorrow's streams,
Tears and terrors are our themes,
Reciting:

But when once from hence we fly,
More and more approaching nigh
Unto young eternity,
Uniting

In that whiter Island, where
Things are evermore sincere:
Candour here, and lustre there,
Delighting:

There no monstrous fancies shall
Out of hell an horror call,
To create, or cause at all
Affrighting.

There, in calm and cooling sleep,
We our eyes shall never steep,
But eternal watch shall keep,
Attending

Pleasures such as shall pursue
Me immortalized, and you;
And fresh joys, as never too
Have ending.