Sadness

I come from nothing; but from where
Come the undying thoughts I bear?
    Down, through long links of death and birth,
    From the past poets of the earth.
My immortality is there.

I am like the blossom of an hour.
But long, long vanished sun and shower
    Awoke my breath i' the young world's air.
    I track the past back everywhere
Through seed and flower and seed and flower.

Or I am like a stream that flows
Full of the cold springs that arose
    In morning lands, in distant hills;
    And down the plain my channel fills
With melting of forgotten snows.

Voices, I have not heard, possessed
My own fresh songs; my thoughts are blessed
    With relics of the far unknown.
    And mixed with memories not my own
The sweet streams...

    One summer's morning I heard a lark
    Singing to heaven, a sweet-throated bird;
    One winter's night I was glad in the dark
    Because of the wondrous song I had heard.

    The joy of life, I have heard you say,
    Is my love, my laughter, my smiles and tears;
    When I have gone on the long, strange way,
    Let these stay with you through all the years -

    These be the lark's song. What is love worth
    That cannot crowd, in the time that's given
    To two like us on this gray old earth,
    Such bliss as will last till we reach heaven?

    Dear one, think oft of the full, glad years,
    And, thinking of them, forget to weep.
    Whisper: "Remembrance holds no tears!"
    And kiss my mouth when I fall on sleep.

The patient Pan,
Drunken with nectar,
Sleeps or feigns slumber,
Drowsily humming
Music to the march of time.
This poor tooting, creaking cricket,
Pan, half asleep, rolling over
His great body in the grass,
Tooting, creaking,
Feigns to sleep, sleeping never;
'T is his manner,
Well he knows his own affair,
Piling mountain chains of phlegm
On the nervous brain of man,
As he holds down central fires
Under Alps and Andes cold;
Haply else we could not live,
Life would be too wild an ode.



Come search the wood for flowers,--
Wild tea and wild pea,
Grapevine and succory,
Coreopsis
And liatris,
Flaunting in their bowers;
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn...

If Thou hadst been a Poet! On my heart
The thought dashed. It recoiled, as, with the gift,
Light-blinded, and joy-saddened, so bereft.
And the hot fountain-tears, with sudden start,
Thronged to mine eyes, as if with that same smart
The husk of vision had in twain been cleft,
Its hidden soul in naked beauty left,
And we beheld thee, Nature, as thou art.
O Poet, Poet, Poet! at thy feet
I should have lien, sainted with listening;
My pulses answering aye, in rhythmic beat,
Each parting word that with melodious wing
Moved on, creating still my being sweet;
My soul thy harp, thy word the quivering string.

Besides the autumn poets sing,
A few prosaic days
A little this side of the snow
And that side of the haze.

A few incisive mornings,
A few ascetic eyes, --
Gone Mr. Bryant's golden-rod,
And Mr. Thomson's sheaves.

Still is the bustle in the brook,
Sealed are the spicy valves;
Mesmeric fingers softly touch
The eyes of many elves.

Perhaps a squirrel may remain,
My sentiments to share.
Grant me, O Lord, a sunny mind,
Thy windy will to bear!

        Ask not the cause, why sullen Spring
            So long delays her flowers to bear;
        Why warbling birds forget to sing,
            And winter storms invert the year:
        Chloris is gone, and fate provides
        To make it Spring, where she resides.

        Chloris is gone, the cruel fair;
            She cast not back a pitying eye;
        But left her lover in despair,
            To sigh, to languish, and to die:
        Ah, how can those fair eyes endure
        To give the wounds they will not cure?

        Great God of love, why hast thou made
            A face that can all hearts command,
        That all religions can evade,
            And change the laws of every land?
        Where thou hadst placed such power bef...

An old man planted and dug and tended,
Toiling in joy from dew to dew;
The sun was kind, and the rain befriended;
Fine grew his orchard and fair to view.
Then he said: "I will quiet my thrifty fears,
For here is fruit for my failing years."

But even then the storm-clouds gathered,
Swallowing up the azure sky;
The sweeping winds into white foam lathered
The placid breast of the bay, hard by;
Then the spirits that raged in the darkened air
Swept o'er his orchard and left it bare.

The old man stood in the rain, uncaring,
Viewing the place the storm had swept;
And then with a cry from his soul despairing,
He bowed him down to the earth and wept.
But a voice cried aloud from the driving rain;
"Arise, old man, and plant again!"

King David was a sorrowful man:
No cause for his sorrow had he;
And he called for the music of a hundred harps,
To ease his melancholy.

They played till they all fell silent:
Played-and play sweet did they;
But the sorrow that haunted the heart of King David
They could not charm away.

He rose; and in his garden
Walked by the moon alone,
A nightingale hidden in a cypress-tree
Jargoned on and on.

King David lifted his sad eyes
Into the dark-boughed tree-
''Tell me, thou little bird that singest,
Who taught my grief to thee?'

But the bird in no wise heeded
And the king in the cool of the moon
Hearkened to the nightingale's sorrowfulness,
Till all his own was gone.

And you are the poet, and so you want
Something what is it? a theme, a fancy?
Something or other the Muse won’t grant
To your old poetical necromancy;
Why, one half you poets you can’t deny
Don’t know the Muse when you chance to meet her,
But sit in your attics and mope and sigh
For a faineant goddess to drop from the sky,
When flesh and blood may be standing by
Quite at your service, should you but greet her.

What if I told you my own romance?
Women are poets, if you so take them,
One third poet, the rest what chance
Of man and marriage may choose to make them.
Give me ten minutes before you go,
Here at the window we’ll sit together,
Watching the currents that ebb and flow;
Watching the world as it drifts below
Up the hot Avenue’s dusty glow:<...

The day has been wild and stormy,
    And full of the wind's unrest,
And I sat down alone by the window,
    While the sunset dyed the West;
And the holy rush of twilight,
    As the day went over the hill,
Like the voice of a spirit seemed speaking
    And saying, 'Peace be still.'

Then I thought with sudden longing,
    That it might be so with my woes;
That the life so wild and restless,
    When it reached the eve's repose,
Might glow with a sudden glory,
    And be crowned with peace and rest;
And the holy calm of twilight
    Might come to my troubled breast.

All of the pain and passion
    That trouble my life's long day
As the winds go down at sunset,
    May suddenly pass away.
And the wild and turbulent billows,
 ...

1.

You have asked for a verse: - the request
In a rhymer 'twere strange to deny;
But my Hippocrene was but my breast,
And my feelings (its fountain) are dry.

2.

Were I now as I was, I had sung
What Lawrence has painted so well;[607]
But the strain would expire on my tongue,
And the theme is too soft for my shell.

3.

I am ashes where once I was fire,
And the bard in my bosom is dead;
What I loved I now merely admire,
And my heart is as grey as my head.

4.

My Life is not dated by years -
There are moments which act as a plough,
And there is not a furrow appears
But is deep in my soul as my brow.

5.

Let the young and the brilliant aspire
To sing what I gaze on in...

Scene: AN ENGLISH GARDEN BY STARLIGHT

Persons: A LADY AND A POET


    THE POET

    Dimly I see your face: I hear your breath
    Sigh faintly, as a flower might sigh in death
    And when you whisper, you but stir the air
    With a soft hush like summer's own despair.


    THE LADY (aloud)

    O Night divine, O Darkness ever blest,
    Give to our old sad Earth eternal rest.
    Since from her heart all beauty ebbs away,
    Let her no more endure the shame of day.


    THE POET

    A thousand ages have not made less bright
    The stars that in this fountain shine to-night:
    Your eyes in shadow still betray the gleam
    That every son of man desires in dream.


 ...

    All I could see from where I stood
    Was three long mountains and a wood;
    I turned and looked another way,
    And saw three islands in a bay.
    So with my eyes I traced the line
    Of the horizon, thin and fine,
    Straight around till I was come
    Back to where I'd started from;
    And all I saw from where I stood
    Was three long mountains and a wood.
    Over these things I could not see;
    These were the things that bounded me;
    And I could touch them with my hand,
    Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
    And all at once things seemed so small
    My breath came short, and scarce at all.
    But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
    Miles and miles above my head;
    So here upon my back I'll lie
    And look my f...

    Unaware of its terror,
    And but half aware
    Of the world's beauty near her -
    Of sunlight on the stones,
    And trembling birds in the square,
    Lightly went Madala -
    A rose blown suddenly
    From Spring's gay mouth; part of the Spring was she.
    Warmed to her delicate bones,
    Cool in its linen her skin,
    Her hair up-combed and curled,
    Lightly she flowered on the sin
    And pain of the Spring-struck world.
    Down the street went crazy men,
    The winter misery of their blood
    Budding in new pain
    While beggars whined beside her,
    While the streets' daughters eyed her, -
    Poor flowers that kept midsummer
    With desperate bloom, and thrust
    Stale rose at each newcomer,
    And crime a...

Lyre of the Sonnet, that full many a time
    Amus'd my lassitude, and sooth'd my pains,
    When graver cares forbade the lengthen'd strains,
    To thy brief bound, and oft-returning chime
A long farewell! - the splendid forms of Rhyme
    When Grief in lonely orphanism reigns,
    Oppress the drooping Soul. - DEATH's dark domains
    Throw mournful shadows o'er the Aonian clime;
For in their silent bourne my filial bands
    Lie all dissolv'd; - and swiftly-wasting pour
    From my frail glass of life, health's sparkling sands.
Sleep then, my LYRE, thy tuneful tasks are o'er,
    Sleep! for my heart bereav'd, and listless hands
    Wake with rapt touch thy glowing strings no more!

Down in a valley, by a forest's side,
Near where the crystal Thames rolls on her waves,
I saw a mushroom stand in haughty pride,
As if the lilies grew to be his slaves;
The gentle daisy, with her silver crown,
Worn in the breast of many a shepherd's lass;
The humble violet, that lowly down
Salutes the gay nymphs as they trimly pass:
These, with a many more, methought, complain'd
That Nature should those needless things produce,
Which not alone the sun from others gain'd
But turn it wholly to their proper use:
I could not choose but grieve that Nature made
So glorious flowers to live in such a shade.

One blossoming rose-tree, like a beautiful thought
Nursed in a broken mind, that waits and schemes,
Survives, though shattered, and about it caught,
The strangling dodder streams.

Gaunt weeds: and here a bayonet or pouch,
Rusty and rotting where men fought and slew:
Bald, trampled paths that seem with fear to crouch,
Feeling a bloody dew.

Here nothing that was beauty's once remains.
War left the garden to its dead alone:
And Life and Love, who toiled here, for their pains
Have nothing once their own.

Death leans upon the battered door, at gaze
The house is silent where there once was stir
Of husbandry, that led laborious days,
With Love for comforter.

Now in Love's place, Death, old and halt and blind,
Gropes, searching everywhere ...

I heard a strain of music in the street -
    A wandering waif of sound.    And then straightway
    A nameless desolation filled the day.
The great green earth that had been fair and sweet,
Seemed but a tomb; the life I thought replete
    With joy, grew lonely for a vanished May.
    Forgotten sorrows resurrected lay
Like bleaching skeletons about my feet.

Above me stretched the silent, suffering sky,
    Dumb with vast anguish for departed suns
    That brutal Time to nothingness has hurled.
The daylight was as sad as smiles that lie
    Upon the wistful, unkissed mouths of nuns,
    And I stood prisoned in an awful world.