Identity

Occasion'd by the Insults of the Spaniards, and the present Preparations for War, 1738.


Whence this unwonted Transport in my Breast?
Why glow my Thoughts, and whither would the Muse
Aspire with rapid Wing? Her Country's Cause
Demands her Efforts; at that sacred Call
She summons all her Ardor, throws aside
The trembling Lyre, and with the Warrior Trump
She means to thunder in each British Ear.
And if one Spark of Courage, Sense of Fame,
Disdain of Insult, Dread of Infamy,
One Thought of public Virtue yet survive,
She means to wake it, rouze the gen'rous Flame,
With Patriot Zeal inspirit ev'ry Breast,
And fire each British Heart with British Wrongs.

Alas the vain Attempt! what Influence now
Can the Muse boast? Or what Attention now
Is paid to F...

Shades though you're leafless, save the bramble-spear
Whose weather-beaten leaves, of purple stain,
In hardy stubbornness cling all the year
To their old thorns, till Spring buds new again;
Shades, still I love you better than the plain,
For here I find the earliest flowers that blow,
While on the bare blea bank do yet remain
Old winter's traces, little heaps of snow.
Beneath your ashen roots, primroses grow
From dead grass tufts and matted moss, once more;
Sweet beds of violets dare again be seen
In their deep purple pride; and, gay display'd,
The crow-flowers, creeping from the naked green,
Add early beauties to your sheltering shade.

Adua had never regarded his life as a pantomime. He wanted so much to please. As a dandelion, he thought of himself as little brother to the sun catching her yellow butter in his eyes.

It came as no small surprise, then, when Adua learned of the world's misgivings toward him. Other flowers, far less nobly constructed, seemed held in such greater esteem. The first shred of evidence of this that Adua was indeed not a bountiful plant came when cattle distained his presence. Later, a smelly herbicide was used in his presence and Adua knew all was not well. Most discomforting, however, was the manner in which other flowers measured up in comparison to Adua. Even flowers that Adua considered quite ordinary seemed, tongue in cheek, to fare much more prettily.

"Adua, Adua as the wind blows so do the poppies grow."

Was there even a cause too lost,
Ever a cause that was lost too long,
Or that showed with the lapse of time to vain
For the generous tears of youth and song?

I, an Iroquois brave,
Speak from my forest grave,
Where by Utawa's wave
            I sleep in glory.
Listen, pale faces, then,
Let years roll back again,
While of Iroquois men
            I tell the story,

We were the foremost race,
That roamed the forest space;
None stood before our face,
            Rousing our fierce wrath;
By Stadacona's steep,
Where Santee's waters sleep,
Prairie broad, valley deep,
            Have been our war path.

Eries by inland seas,
Mountain bred Cherokees,
Of us, Hodenosaunees,
            With fear grew frantic;
Feared us who made their home,
Under the pinetrees lone,
Where the winds lash to foam,
            The wild Atlantic.

Tribute from east and west,
Of what we ...

    I was Willie Metcalf.
    They used to call me "Doctor Meyers,"
    Because, they said, I looked like him.
    And he was my father, according to Jack McGuire.
    I lived in the livery stable,
    Sleeping on the floor
    Side by side with Roger Baughman's bulldog,
    Or sometimes in a stall.
    I could crawl between the legs of the wildest horses
    Without getting kicked - we knew each other.
    On spring days I tramped through the country
    To get the feeling, which I sometimes lost,
    That I was not a separate thing from the earth.
    I used to lose myself, as if in sleep,
    By lying with eyes half-open in the woods.
    Sometimes I talked with animals - even toads and snakes -
    Anything that had an eye to look into.
    Once I saw...

    Like a maid on her bridal morn I rise,
With the smile on her lip and the tear in her eyes;
Whilst the breeze my crimson banner unfurls,
I wreathe my locks with the purest pearls;
Brighter diamonds never were seen
Encircling the neck of an Indian queen!
I traverse the east on my glittering wing,
And my smiles awake every living thing;
And the twilight hour like a pilgrim gray,
Follows the night on her weeping way.
I raise the veil from the saffron bed,
Where the young sun pillows his golden head;
He lifts from the ocean his burning eye,
And his glory lights up the earth and sky.

    Ah, I am like that dewy prime,
Ere youth hath shaken hands with time;
Ere the fresh tide of life has wasted low,
And discovered the hidden rocks of woe:
When lik...

O fancy, if thou flyest, come back anon,
    Thy fluttering wings are soft as love's first word,
    And fragrant as the feathers of that bird,
Which feeds upon the budded cinnamon.
I ask thee not to work, or sigh - play on,
    From nought that was not, was, or is, deterred;
    The flax that Old Fate spun thy flights have stirred,
And waved memorial grass of Marathon.
Play, but be gentle, not as on that day
    I saw thee running down the rims of doom
With stars thou hadst been stealing - while they lay
    Smothered in light and blue - clasped to thy breast;
Bring rather to me in the firelit room
    A netted halcyon bird to sing of rest.

She came through shade and shine,
By scarlet trumpetvine
And fragrant buttonbush,
That heaped the wayside hush
And oh!
The orange-red of the butterfly weed,
And pink of the milkweed's plume,
Nodded as if to give her heed
As she passed through gleam and gloom, heigh-ho!
As she passed through gleam and gloom.
Marybud-gold her hair;
And deep as it was fair;
Her eyes a chicory-blue,
Two wildflowers bright with dew
And oh!
The flowers knew, as flowers know,
The one she'd come to find;
They read the secret she hid below
In her maiden heart and mind, heigh-ho!
Her maiden heart and mind.
All day with hearts elate,
They watched him from the gate,
Where in the field he mowed
At the end of the old hill-road
And oh!
They seemed...

I AM always inclined to suspect
The best story under the sun
As soon as by chance I detect
That teller and hero are one.

We're all of us prone to conceit,
And like to proclaim our own glory,
But our purpose we're apt to defeat
As actors in chief of our story.

To prove the truth of what I state
Let me an anecdote relate:
A Gascon with his comrade sat
At tavern drinking. This and that
He vaunted with assertion pat.
From gasconade to gasconade
Passed to the conquests he had made
In love.    A buxom country maid,
Who served the wine, with due attention
Lent patient ear to each invention,
And pressed her hands against her side
Her bursting merriment to hide.
To hear our Gascon talk, no Sue
Nor Poll in town but that he knew;

Have patience, O my sorrow, and be still.
You asked for night: it falls: it is here.
A shadowy atmosphere enshrouds the hill,
to some men bringing peace, to others care.

While the vile human multitude
goes to earn remorse, in servile pleasure’s play,
under the lash of joy, the torturer, who
is pitiless, Sadness, come, far away:

Give me your hand. See, where the lost years
lean from the balcony in their outdated gear,
where regret, smiling, surges from the watery deeps.

Underneath some archway, the dying light
sleeps, and, like a long shroud trailing from the East,
listen, dear one, listen to the soft onset of night.

Seest thou those diamonds which she wears
In that rich carcanet;
Or those, on her dishevell'd hairs,
Fair pearls in order set?
Believe, young man, all those were tears
By wretched wooers sent,
In mournful hyacinths and rue,
That figure discontent;
Which when not warmed by her view,
By cold neglect, each one
Congeal'd to pearl and stone;
Which precious spoils upon her
She wears as trophies of her honour.
Ah then, consider, what all this implies:
She that will wear thy tears would wear thine eyes.

There came to the beach a poor Exile of Erin,
The dew on his thin robe was heavy and chill:
For his country he sign'd, when at twilight repairing
To wander alone by the wind-beaten hill.

But the day-star attracted his eye's sad devotion,
For it rose o'er his own native isle fo the ocean,
Where once, in the fire of his youthful emotion.
He sang the bold anthem of Erin go bragh.

Sad is my fate! said the heart-broken stranger;
The wild deer and wolf to a covert can flee,
But I have no refuge from famine and danger,
A home and a country remain not to me.

Never again, in my green sunny bowers,
Where my forefathers lived, shall I spend the sweet hours,
Or cover my harp with the wild-woven flowers,
And strike to the numbers of Erin go bragh!

E...

Half-awake I walked
A dimly-seen sweet hawthorn lane
Until sleep came;
I lingered at a gate and talked
A little with a lonely lamb.
He told me of the great still night,
Of calm starlight,
And of the lady moon, who'd stoop
For a kiss sometimes;
Of grass as soft as sleep, of rhymes
The tired flowers sang:
The ageless April tales
Of how, when sheep grew old,
As their faith told,
They went without a pang
To far green fields, where fall
Perpetual streams that call
To deathless nightingales.
    And then I saw, hard by,
A shepherd lad with shining eyes,
And round him gathered one by one
Countless sheep, snow-white;
More and more they crowded
With tender cries,
Till all the field was full
Of voices and of coming sheep.

Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill,
Complain no more; for these, O heart,
Direct the random of the will
As rhymes direct the rage of art.

The lute's fixt fret, that runs athwart
The strain and purpose of the string,
For governance and nice consort
Doth bar his wilful wavering.

The dark hath many dear avails;
The dark distils divinest dews;
The dark is rich with nightingales,
With dreams, and with the heavenly Muse.

Bleeding with thorns of petty strife,
I'll ease (as lovers do) my smart
With sonnets to my lady Life
Writ red in issues from the heart.

What grace may lie within the chill
Of favor frozen fast in scorn!
When Good's a-freeze, we call it Ill!
This rosy Time is glacier-born.

Of fret, of dark, of thorn...

The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
And its choke cherries lips to kiss good-bye,
Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.
Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall
(She's making her cross-country in the fall).
Her great weight creaks the barbed-wire in its staples
As she flings over and off down through the maples,
Leaving on one wire moth a lock of hair.
Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage
That all day fights a nervous inward rage
His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.
He paces back and forth and never rests
The me-nail click and shuffle of his feet,
The telesco...

I.

Teach me the secret of thy loveliness,
That, being made wise, I may aspire to be
As beautiful in thought, and so express
Immortal truths to Earth's mortality;
Though to my soul ability be less
Than 'tis to thee, O sweet anemone.

II.

Teach me the secret of thy innocence,
That in simplicity I may grow wise;
Asking of Art no other recompense
Than the approval of her own just eyes;
So may I rise to some fair eminence,
Though less than thine, O cousin of the skies.

III.

Teach me these things; through whose high knowledge, I,
When Death hath poured oblivion through my veins,
And brought me home, as all are brought, to lie
In that vast house, common to serfs and thanes,
I shall not die, I shall not utterly die,
For...

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light, and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race, of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.

The wind-flower and the...