Identity

Remembrance of the past will joy impart
If in that past the conscience was supreme;
But if the soul be made an auction mart,
And thoughts and deeds be sold for what you deem
The price of virtue, then the called-up past
Will be like hooks of steel to hold thee fast.

Or like the stings those nettles left behind
Which I so fondly handled in my play;
I deemed the friend who warned me true and kind,
And in great haste I threw the weeds away,
But soon the burning flesh reminded me
'Twere safer far from all such weeds to flee.

The cloud that flitted o'er the saintly brow
Which now a crown of life so well adorns,
When you by ways and means you know not now,
Did what your soul with holy horror scorns,
Will stay with you long as you live on earth,
And b...

By the walk of the willows I pour'd out my theme,
The breath of the evening scarce dimpled the stream;
By the waters I stood, like an image of Woe,
And my tears, like the tide, seem'd to tremble and flow.

Ye green scatter'd reeds, that half lean to the wave,
In your plaintive, your musical, sighs, could ye save
But one note of my charmer, to soften my doom,
I would stay till these willows should arch me a tomb!

For ye know, when I pour'd out my soul on the lute,
How she hung down her head, so expressively mute!
From my hand she would take it, still breathing my pain;
She would touch it - return it - and smile at the strain.

Ye wild blooming flow'rs, that enamel this brink,
Like me could ye feel, and like me could ye think,
How sadly would droop ev'ry b...

1.

Julia! since far from you I've rang'd,
Our souls with fond affection glow not;
You say 'tis I, not you have chang'd,
I'd tell you why, - but yet I know not.

2.

Your polish'd brow, no cares have crost,
And Julia! we are not much older,
Since trembling first my heart I lost,
Or told my love with hope, grown bolder.

3.

Sixteen was then our utmost age,
Two years have lingering pass'd away, love!
And now new thoughts our minds engage,
At least, I feel disposed to stray, love!

4.

'Tis I, that am alone to blame,
I, that am guilty of love's treason;
Since your sweet breast, is still the same,
Caprice must be my only reason.

5.

I do not, love, suspect your truth,
With jealous doubt m...

    Thro' Erin's Isle,
    To sport awhile,
As Love and Valor wandered,
    With Wit, the sprite,
    Whose quiver bright
A thousand arrows squandered.
    Where'er they pass,
    A triple grass[1]
Shoots up, with dew-drops streaming.
    As softly green
    As emeralds seen
Thro' purest crystal gleaming.
Oh the Shamrock, the green, immortal Shamrock!
    Chosen leaf.
    Of Bard and Chief,
Old Erin's native Shamrock!

    Says Valor, "See,
    "They spring for me,
"Those leafy gems of morning!"--
    Says Love, "No, no,
    "For me they grow,
"My fragrant path adorning."
    But Wit perceives
    The triple leaves,
And cries, "Oh! do not sever
    "A type, that blends
    "Three godlike ...

When I came last to Ludlow
Amidst the moonlight pale,
Two friends kept step beside me,
Two honest lads and hale.

Now Dick lies long in the churchyard,
And Ned lies long in jail,
And I come home to Ludlow
Amidst the moonlight pale.

I.
And Willy, my eldest-born, is gone, you say, little Anne?
Ruddy and white, and strong on his legs, he looks like a man.
And Willy’s wife has written: she never was over-wise,
Never the wife for Willy: he wouldn’t take my advice.

II.
For, Annie, you see, her father was not the man to save,
Hadn’t a head to manage, and drank himself into his grave.
Pretty enough, very pretty! but I was against it for one.
Eh!—but he wouldn’t hear me—and Willy, you say, is gone.

III.
Willy, my beauty, my eldest-born, the flower of the flock;
Never a man could fling him: for Willy stood like a rock.
‘Here’s a leg for a babe of a week!’ says doctor; and he would be bound,
There was not his like that year in twenty parishes round.

IV.
Strong of his hands, and st...

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable--
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us...

Radiant notes
piercing my narrow-chested room,
beating down through my ceiling -
smeared with unshapen
belly-prints of dreams
drifted out of old smokes -
trillions of icily
peltering notes
out of just one canary,
all grown to song
as a plant to its stalk,
from too long craning at a sky-light
and a square of second-hand blue.

Silvery-strident throat -
so assiduously serenading my brain,
flinching under
the glittering hail of your notes -
were you not safe behind... rats know what thickness of... plastered wall...
I might fathom
your golden delirium
with throttle of finger and thumb
shutting valve of bright song.

II

But if... away off... on a fork of grassed earth
socketing an inlet reach of blue water......

Hist! once more!
Listen, Pausanias!—Aye, ’tis Callicles!
I know those notes among a thousand.    Hark!

CALLICLES

(Sings unseen, from below.)

The track winds down to the clear stream,
To cross the sparkling shallows; there
The, cattle love to gather, on their way
To the high mountain pastures, and to stay,
Till the rough cow-herds drive them past,
Knee-deep in the cool ford; for ’tis the last
Of all the woody, high, well-water’d dells
On Etna; and the beam
Of noon is broken there by chestnut boughs
Down its steep verdant sides; the air
Is freshen’d by the leaping stream, which throws
Eternal showers of spray on the moss’d roots
Of trees, and veins of turf, and long dark shoots
Of ivy-plants, and fragrant hanging bells
Of ...

If e'er the sacred poem that hath made
Both heav'n and earth copartners in its toil,
And with lean abstinence, through many a year,
Faded my brow, be destin'd to prevail
Over the cruelty, which bars me forth
Of the fair sheep-fold, where a sleeping lamb
The wolves set on and fain had worried me,
With other voice and fleece of other grain
I shall forthwith return, and, standing up
At my baptismal font, shall claim the wreath
Due to the poet's temples: for I there
First enter'd on the faith which maketh souls
Acceptable to God: and, for its sake,
Peter had then circled my forehead thus.

Next from the squadron, whence had issued forth
The first fruit of Christ's vicars on the earth,
Toward us mov'd a light, at view whereof
My Lady, full of gladness, sp...

Tune - "My love is lost to me."


I.

    O, were I on Parnassus' hill!
    Or had of Helicon my fill;
    That I might catch poetic skill,
        To sing how dear I love thee.
    But Nith maun be my Muse's well;
    My Muse maun be thy bonnie sel':
    On Corsincon I'll glow'r and spell,
        And write how dear I love thee.

II.

    Then come, sweet Muse, inspire my lay!
    For a' the lee-lang simmer's day
    I coudna sing, I coudna say,
        How much, how dear, I love thee.
    I see thee dancing o'er the green,
    Thy waist sae jimp, thy limbs sae clean,
    Thy tempting lips, thy roguish een,
        By heaven and earth I love thee!

III.

    By night, by day, a-field, at hame,

I am the outer gate of life where sit
    Faith and Unfaith, those two interpreters
That spell in diverse ways what God has writ
    In symbols on the archway of the years.

Backward I swing for many feet to pass;
    Some come in stormy haste, some grave and slow,
And all like windy shadows on the grass:
    Beyond my pale I know not where they go.

    I have thrust my fists
    up to ice in the
    galactic mire of lake,
    lured my minnow wriggler
    eyes as bait to ensnare
    inroads, lake bed wreaths,
    across the windchill spine of
    brooding heart.

    I am on the essence of the North
    where latitudes of cold spontaneity
    remind me the nameless lakes
    part not easily with their secrets.

    A man's bones go easily to rot
    in the frigid perspiration
    called primeval ooze,
    precambrian sweat,
    the tertiary stage syphilitic crawl
    of advancing ice.

    All those terms your detractors, analyzers,
    devotees coin to define you: the Boreal,
    taiga, subarctic steppes, white hell,
    recoil under the onslaught, the lustrate mes...

In his lodge beside a river,
Close beside a frozen river,
Sat an old man, sad and lonely.
White his hair was as a snow-drift;
Dull and low his fire was burning,
And the old man shook and trembled,
Folded in his Waubewyon,
In his tattered white-skin-wrapper,
Hearing nothing but the tempest
As it roared along the forest,
Seeing nothing but the snow-storm,
As it whirled and hissed and drifted.
    All the coals were white with ashes,
And the fire was slowly dying,
As a young man, walking lightly,
At the open doorway entered.
Red with blood of youth his cheeks were,
Soft his eyes, as stars in Spring-time,
Bound his forehead was with grasses;
Bound and plumed with scented grasses,
On his lips a smile of beauty,
Filling all the lodge with su...

Three happy children in a darkened room!
What do they gaze on with wide-open eyes?
A dense, dense forest, where no sunbeam pries,
And in its centre a cleared spot.--There bloom
Gigantic flowers on creepers that embrace
Tall trees; there, in a quiet lucid lake
The white swans glide; there, "whirring from the brake,"
The peacock springs; there, herds of wild deer race;
There, patches gleam with yellow waving grain;
There, blue smoke from strange altars rises light,
There, dwells in peace, the poet-anchorite.
But who is this fair lady? Not in vain
She weeps,--for lo! at every tear she sheds
Tears from three pairs of young eyes fall amain,
And bowed in sorrow are the three young heads.
It is an old, old story, and the lay
Which has evoked sad Sîta from the past

Thou orb aloft full-dazzling! thou hot October noon!
Flooding with sheeny light the gray beach sand,
The sibilant near sea with vistas far and foam,
And tawny streaks and shades and spreading blue;
O sun of noon rufulgent! my special word to thee.

Hear me illustrious!
Thy lover me, for always I have loved thee,
Even as basking babe, then happy boy alone by some wood edge, thy touching-distant beams enough,
Or man matured, or young or old, as now to thee I launch my invocation.

(Thou canst not with thy dumbness me deceive,
I know before the fitting man all Nature yields,
Though answering not in words, the skies, trees, hear his voice and thou O sun,
As for thy throes, thy perturbations, sudden breaks and shafts of flame gigantic,
I understand them, I know those fl...

Fair Lady, whose harmonious name the Rheno
Through all his grassy vale delights to hear,
Base were, indeed, the wretch, who could forbear
To love a spirit elegant as thine,
That manifests a sweetness all divine,
Nor knows a thousand winning acts to spare,
And graces, which Love's bow and arrows are,
Temp'ring thy virtues to a softer shine.
When gracefully thou speak'st, or singest gay
Such strains as might the senseless forest move,
Ah then turn each his eyes and ears away,
Who feels himself unworthy of thy love!
Grace can alone preserve him, e'er the dart
Of fond desire yet reach his inmost heart.

The old gentleman, tapping his amber snuff-box
(A heart-shaped snuff-box with a golden clasp)
Stared at the dying fire. "I'd like them all
To understand, when I am gone," he muttered.
"But how to do it delicately! I can't
Apologize. I'll hint at it ... in verse;
And, to be sure that Rosalind reads it through,
I'll make it an appendix to my will!"
--Still cynical, you see. He couldn't help it.
He had seen much, felt much. He snapped the snuff box,
Shook his white periwig, trimmed a long quill pen,
And then began to write, most carefully,
These couplets, in the old heroic style:--

O, had I known in boyhood, only known
The few sad truths that time has made my own,
I had not lost the best that youth can give,
Nay, life itself, in learning how to live....