Life

Looking for placer pangar,
    Loafing about in the hills,
Getting your grub with a rifle,
    Taking your drink from rills.
Getting your bed from the spruce tree,
    Taking your course by your dreams,
Just camping alone in the mountains,
    Siwashing along the streams.

Locating the hind sight on Nature,
    Traveling alone and far,
Thinking with no one to guide you,
    Digesting the things that are.
Back trailing the life that's past you,
    Peeping at what's in store,
Pondering over life's mistakes,
    Wondering, how many more.

Dreaming alone of childhood days,
    Regretting some things that are past,
Recalling lost opportunities,
    And chances too good to last.
Living your whole life over,
    Recalling the daily...

I

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?

II

Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn’d?
Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned,
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take what ever’s offered
And dream that all the world’s a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are you...

Even the bravest that are slain
Shall not dissemble their surprise
On waking to find valor reign,
Even as on earth, in paradise;
And where they sought without the sword
Wide fields of asphodel fore'er,
To find that the utmost reward
Of daring should be still to dare.

The light of heaven falls whole and white
And is not shattered into dyes,
The light forever is morning light;
The hills are verdured pasture-wise;
The angle hosts with freshness go,
And seek with laughter what to brave;
And binding all is the hushed snow
Of the far-distant breaking wave.

And from a cliff-top is proclaimed
The gathering of the souls for birth,
The trial by existence named,
The obscuration upon earth.
And the slant spirits trooping by
In streams ...

I hate the pen, the foolscap fair,
The poet’s corner, and the page,
For Grief and Death are written there,
In every land and every age.
The poets sing and play their parts,
Their daring cheers, their humour shines,
But, ah! my friends! their broken hearts
Have writ in blood between the lines.

They fought to build a Commonwealth,
They write for women and for men,
They give their youth, we give their health
And never prostitute the pen.
Their work in other tongues is read,
And when sad years wear out the pen,
Then they may seek their happy dead
Or go and starve in exile then.

A grudging meed of praise you give,
Or, your excuse, the ready lie,
(O! God, you don’t know how they live!
O! God, you don’t know how they die!)
The poetess,...

                Once as the aureole
                Day left the earth,
                Faded, a twilight soul,
                Memory, had birth:
Young were her sister souls, Sorrow and Mirth.

                Dark mirrors are her eyes:
                Wherein who gaze
                See wan effulgencies
                Flicker and blaze -
Lorn fleeting shadows of beautiful days.

                Scan those deep mirrors well
                After long years:
                Lo! what aforetime fell
                In rain of tears,
In radiant glamour-mist now reappears.

                See old wild gladness
                Tamed now and coy;
                Grief that was madness
                Turned into joy.
Fate cannot harr...

A TALE OF TRANSFORMATIONS.


A little Brook, that babbled under grass,
Once saw a Poet pass--
A Poet with long hair and saddened eyes,
Who went his weary way with woeful sighs.
And on another time,
This Brook did hear that Poet read his rueful rhyme.
Now in the poem that he read,
This Poet said--
"Oh! little Brook that babblest under grass!
(Ah me! Alack! Ah, well-a-day! Alas!)
Say, are you what you seem?
Or is your life, like other lives, a dream?
What time your babbling mocks my mortal moods,
Fair Naïad of the stream!
And are you, in good sooth,
Could purblind poesy perceive the truth,
A water-sprite,
Who sometimes, for man's dangerous delight,
Puts on a human form and face,
To wear them with a superhuman grace?

'The Dream'

    All round the knoll, on days of quietest air,
    Secrets are being told; and if the trees
    Speak out - let them make uproar loud as drums -
    'Tis secrets still, shouted instead of whisper'd.

        There must have been a warning given once:
    No tree, on pain of withering and sawfly,
    To reach the slimmest of his snaky toes
    Into this mounded sward and rumple it;
    All trees stand back: taboo is on this soil. -

        The trees have always scrupulously obeyed.
    The grass, that elsewhere grows as best it may
    Under the larches, countable long nesh blades,
    Here in clear sky pads the ground thick and close
    As wool upon a Southdown wether's back;
    And as in Southdown wool, your hand must sink
  ...

Love and thy vain employs, away
From this too oft deluded breast!
No longer will I court thy stay,
To be my bosom's teazing guest.
Thou treacherous medicine, reckoned pure,
Thou quackery of the harassed heart,
That kills what it pretends to cure,
Life's mountebank thou art.

With nostrums vain of boasted powers,
That, ta'en, a worse disorder leave;
An asp hid in a group of flowers,
That bites and stings when few perceive;
Thou mock-truce to the troubled mind,
Leading it more in sorrow's way,
Freedom, that leaves us more confined,
I bid thee hence away.

Dost taunt, and deem thy power beyond
The resolution reason gave?
Tut! Falsity hath snapt each bond,
That kept me once thy quiet slave,
And made thy snare a spider's thread,
W...

Now those days arrive when, stem throbbing,
each flower sheds its fragrance like a censer:
sounds and scents twine in the evening air:
languorous dizziness, Melancholy dancing!


Each flower sheds its fragrance like a censer:
the violin quivers, a heart that’s suffering:
languorous dizziness, Melancholy dancing!
the sky is lovely, sad like a huge altar.


The violin quivers, a heart that’s suffering:
a heart, hating the vast black void, so tender!
the sky is lovely, sad like a huge altar:
the sun is drowned, in its own blood congealing.


A heart, hating the vast black void, so tender:
each trace of the luminous past it’s gathering!
The sun is drowned, in its own blood congealing
A vessel of the host, your memory shines there.

Staying home,
I caught naughty elves
watering my piano,
growling inside my head.

Faucet drops
beating out in harmony a drum tatoo
to the tune of a plugged drain,
the careless postures of indifference
retold lives lived on spindle shanks
caught on the obligatory
insipid train
of obliging a pantry full
of ones you love.

Mæcenas, I propose to fly
To realms beyond these human portals;
No common things shall be my wings,
But such as sprout upon immortals.

Of lowly birth, once shed of earth,
Your Horace, precious (so you've told him),
Shall soar away; no tomb of clay
Nor Stygian prison-house shall hold him.

Upon my skin feathers begin
To warn the songster of his fleeting;
But never mind, I leave behind
Songs all the world shall keep repeating.

Lo! Boston girls, with corkscrew curls,
And husky westerns, wild and woolly,
And southern climes shall vaunt my rhymes,
And all profess to know me fully.

Methinks the West shall know me best,
And therefore hold my memory dearer;
For by that lake a bard shall make
My subtle, hidden meanings clearer.

Few and precious are the words which the lips of Wisdom utter:
To what shall then' rarity be likened? What price shall count their worth?
Perfect and much to be desired, and giving joy with riches.
No lovely tiling on earth can picture all their beauty.
They be chance pearls, flung among the rocks by the sullen waters of Oblivion,
Which Diligence loveth to gather, and hang around the neck of Memory;
They be white-winged seeds of happiness, wafted from the islands of the blessed.
Which Thought carefully tendeth, in the kindly garden of the heart;

They be sproutings of an harvest for eternity, bursting through the tilth of time,
Green promise of the golden wheat, that yieldeth angels' food;
They be drops of the crystal dew, which the wings of seraphs scatter,
When on some brighter...

A senseless school, where we must give
Our lives that we may learn to live!
A dolt is he who memorizes
Lessons that leave no time for prizes.

16 W. P. V., 1866.

My lady love lives far away,
And oh my heart is sad by day,
And ah my tears fall fast by night,
What may I do in such a plight.

Why, miles grow few when love is fleet,
And love, you know, hath flying feet;
Break off thy sighs and witness this,
How poor a thing mere distance is.

My love knows not I love her so,
And would she scorn me, did she know?
How may the tale I would impart
Attract her ear and storm her heart?

Calm thou the tempest in my breast,
Who loves in silence loves the best,
But bide thy time, she will awake,
No night so dark but morn will break.

But though my heart so strongly yearn,
My lady loves me not in turn,
How may I win the blest reply
That my void heart shall satisfy.

Love breedeth love, be...

I write my name as one,
On sands by waves o’errun
Or winter’s frosted pane,
Traces a record vain.

Oblivion’s blankness claims
Wiser and better names,
And well my own may pass
As from the strand or glass.

Wash on, O waves of time!
Melt, noons, the frosty rime!
Welcome the shadow vast,
The silence that shall last.

When I and all who know
And love me vanish so,
What harm to them or me
Will the lost memory be?

If any words of mine,
Through right of life divine,
Remain, what matters it
Whose hand the message writ?

Why should the “crowner’s quest”
Sit on my worst or best?
Why should the showman claim
The poor ghost of my name?

Yet, as when dies a sound
Its spectre lingers round,
Ha...

All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death's parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh, inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend.
How soon't may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot's untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my days that's due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know
I have Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
An...

There's a habit I have nurtured,
    From the sentimental time
When my life was like a story,
    And my heart a happy rhyme, -
Of clipping from the paper,
    Or magazine, perhaps,
The idle songs of dreamers,
    Which I treasure as my scraps.

They hide among my letters,
    And they find a cozy nest
In the bosom of my wrapper,
    And the pockets of my vest;
They clamber in my fingers
    Till my dreams of wealth relapse
In fairer dreams than Fortune's
    Though I find them only scraps.

Sometimes I find, in tatters
    Like a beggar, form as fair
As ever gave to Heaven
    The treasure of a prayer;
And words all dim and faded,
    And obliterate in part,
Grow into fadeless meanings
    That are printed on the h...

Forth from the dust and din,
The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare,
The odour and sense of life and lust aflare,
The wrangle and jangle of unrests,
Let us take horse, Dear Heart, take horse and win -
As from swart August to the green lap of May -
To quietness and the fresh and fragrant breasts
Of the still, delicious night, not yet aware
In any of her innumerable nests
Of that first sudden plash of dawn,
Clear, sapphirine, luminous, large,
Which tells that soon the flowing springs of day
In deep and ever deeper eddies drawn
Forward and up, in wider and wider way,
Shall float the sands, and brim the shores,
On this our lith of the World, as round it roars
And spins into the outlook of the Sun
(The Lord's first gift, the Lord's especial charge),
...