Sadness

[R]

Mai non vo' più cantar, com' io soleva.

ENIGMAS.


    Never more shall I sing, as I have sung:
For still she heeded not; and I was scorn'd:
So e'en in loveliest spots is trouble found.
Unceasingly to sigh is no relief.
Already on the Alp snow gathers round:
Already day is near; and I awake.
An affable and modest air is sweet;
And in a lovely lady that she be
Noble and dignified, not proud and cold,
Well pleases it to find.
Love o'er his empire rules without a sword.
He who has miss'd his way let him turn back:
Who has no home the heath must be his bed:
Who lost or has not gold,
Will sate his thirst at the clear crystal spring.

I trusted in Saint Peter, not so now;
Let him who can my meaning understand.

Summer is gone on swallows' wings,
And Earth has buried all her flowers:
No more the lark,--the linnet--sings,
But Silence sits in faded bowers.
There is a shadow on the plain
Of Winter ere he comes again,--
There is in woods a solemn sound
Of hollow warnings whisper'd round,
As Echo in her deep recess
For once had turn'd a prophetess.
Shuddering Autumn stops to list,
And breathes his fear in sudden sighs,
With clouded face, and hazel eyes
That quench themselves, and hide in mist.

Yes, Summer's gone like pageant bright;
Its glorious days of golden light
Are gone--the mimic suns that quiver,
Then melt in Time's dark-flowing river.
Gone the sweetly-scented breeze
That spoke in music to the trees;
Gone--for damp and chilly breath,
A...

I cannot write old verses here,
    Dead things a thousand years away,
When all the life of the young year
    Is in the summer day.

The roses make the world so sweet,
    The bees, the birds have such a tune,
There's such a light and such a heat
    And such a joy this June,

One must expand one's heart with praise,
    And make the memory secure
Of sunshine and the woodland days
    And summer twilights pure.

Oh listen rather! Nature's song
    Comes from the waters, beating tides,
Green-margined rivers, and the throng
    Of streams on mountain-sides.

So fair those water-spirits are,
    Such happy strength their music fills,
Our joy shall be to wander far
    And find them on the hills.

Written among the ruins of the Sonnenberg.


Thou who within thyself dost not behold
Ruins as great as these, though not as old,
Can'st scarce through life have travelled many a year,
Or lack'st the spirit of a pilgrim here.
Youth hath its walls of strength, its towers of pride;
Love, its warm hearth-stones; Hope, its prospects wide;
Life's fortress in thee, held these one, and all,
And they have fallen to ruin, or shall fall.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d alone, bare-headed, barefoot,
Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories, sad brother—from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon, late-risen, and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of sickness and love, there in the transparent mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart, never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,
Fro...

Barren age and withered World!
Oh! the dying leaves,
Like a drizzling rain,
Falling round the roof
Pattering on the pane!
Frosty Age and cold, cold World!
Ghosts of other days,
Trooping past the faded fire,
Flit before the gaze.
Now the wind goes soughing wild
O’er the whistling Earth;
And we front a feeble flame,
Sitting round the hearth!
Sitting by the fire,
Watching in its glow,
Ghosts of other days
Trooping to and fro.

.    .    .    .    .

Oh, the nights the nights we’ve spent,
Sitting by the fire,
Cheerful in its glow;
Twenty summers back
Twenty years ago!
If the days were days of toil
Wherefore should we mourn;
There were shadows near the shine,
Flowers with the thorn?
And we still can r...

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.

Strange fits of passion have I known:
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover's ear alone,
What once to me befell.

When she I loved looked every day
Fresh as a rose in June,
I to her cottage bent my way,
Beneath an evening-moon.

Upon the moon I fixed my eye,
All over the wide lea;
With quickening pace my horse drew nigh
Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reached the orchard-plot;
And, as we climbed the hill,
The sinking moon to Lucy's cot
Came near, and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,
Kind Nature's gentlest boon!
And all the while my eye I kept
On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At on...

The sky is swollen with tears and melancholy.
Only far off, where its foul vapors burst,
Green glow pours down.    The houses,
Gray grimaces, are fiendishly bloated with mist.

Yellowish lights are beginning to gleam.
A stout father with wife and children dozes.
Painted women are practicing their dances.
Grotesque mimes strut towards the theater.

Jokers shriek, foul connoisseurs of men:
The day is dead... and a name remains!
Powerful men gleam in girls' eyes.
A woman yearns for her beloved woman.

Along the road I smelt the rose,
The wild-rose in its veil of rain;
And how it was, God only knows,
But with its scent I saw again
A girl's face at a window-pane,
Gazing through tears that fell like rain.

'Tis twelve years now, so I suppose.
Twelve years ago. 'Twas then I thought,
"Love is a burden bitter-sweet.
And he who runs must not be fraught:
Free must his heart be as his feet."

Again I heard myself repeat,
"Love is a burden bitter-sweet."
Yet all my aims had come to nought.
I smelt the rose; I felt the rain
Lonely I stood upon the road.

Of one thing only was I fain
To be delivered of my load.
A moment more and on I strode.
I cared not whither led the road
That led not back to her again.

I know a little garden-close,
Set thick with lily and red rose,
Where I would wander if I might
From dewy morn to dewy night,
And have one with me wandering.

And though within it no birds sing,
And though no pillared house is there,
And though the apple-boughs are bare
Of fruit and blossom, would to God
Her feet upon the green grass trod,
And I beheld them as before.

There comes a murmur from the shore,
And in the close two fair-streams are,
Drawn from the purple hills afar,
Drawn down unto the restless sea:
Dark hills whose heath-bloom feeds no bee,
Dark shore no ship has ever seen,
Tormented by the billows green
Whose murmur comes unceasingly
Unto the place for which I cry.

For which I cry both day and night,
For wh...

In the morning of life, when its cares are unknown,
    And its pleasures in all their new lustre begin,
When we live in a bright-beaming world of our own,
    And the light that surrounds us is all from within;
Oh 'tis not, believe me, in that happy time
    We can love, as in hours of less transport we may;--
Of our smiles, of our hopes, 'tis the gay sunny prime,
    But affection is truest when these fade away.

When we see the first glory of youth pass us by,
    Like a leaf on the stream that will never return;
When our cup, which had sparkled with pleasure so high,
    First tastes of the other, the dark-flowing urn;
Then, then is the time when affection holds sway
    With a depth and a tenderness joy never knew;
Love, nursed among pleasures, is faith...

But one short night between my Love and me!
    I watch the soft-shod dusk creep wistfully
    Through the slow-moving curtains, pausing by
And shrouding with its spirit-fingers free
    Each well-known chair. There is a growing grace
    Of tender magic in this little place.

Comes through half-opened windows, soft and cool
    As Spring's young breath, the vagrant evening air,
    My day-worn soul is hushed. I fain would bear
No burdens on my brain to-night, no rule
    Of anxious thought; the world has had my tears,
    My thoughts, my hopes, my aims these many years;

This is Thy hour, and I shall sink to sleep
    With a glad weariness, to know that when
    The new day dawns I shall lay by my pen
Needed no more. If I, perchance, should weep
   ...

Spring it is cheery,
Winter is dreary,
Green leaves hang, but the brown must fly;
When he's forsaken,
Wither'd and shaken,
What can an old man do but die?

Love will not clip him,
Maids will not lip him,
Maud and Marian pass him by;
Youth it is sunny,
Age has no honey, -
What can an old man do but die?

June it was jolly,
Oh for its folly!
A dancing leg and a laughing eye;
Youth may be silly,
Wisdom is chilly, -
What can an old man do but die?

Friends, they are scanty,
Beggars are plenty,
If he has followers, I know why;
Gold's in his clutches,
(Buying him crutches!)
What can an old man do but die?

        I.

The juice-big apples' sullen gold,
Like lazy Sultans laughed and lolled
'Mid heavy mats of leaves that lay
Green-flatten'd 'gainst the glaring day;
And here a pear of rusty brown,
And peaches on whose brows the down
Waxed furry as the ears of Pan,
And, like Diana's cheeks, whose tan
Burnt tender secresies of fire,
Or wan as Psyche's with desire
Of lips that love to kiss or taste
Voluptuous ripeness there sweet placed.
And down the orchard vistas he, -
Barefooted, trousers out at knee,
Face shadowing from the sloping sun
A hat of straw, brim-sagging broad, -
Came, lowly whistling some vague tune,
Upon the sunbeam-sprinkled road.
Lank in his hand a twig with which
In boyish thoughtlessness he crushed
Rare pennyroyal myri...

The moon is a charring ember
Dying into the dark;
Off in the crouching mountains
Coyotes bark.

The stars are heavy in heaven,
Too great for the sky to hold,
What if they fell and shattered
The earth with gold?

No lights are over the mesa,
The wind is hard and wild,
I stand at the darkened window
And cry like a child.

There is music in the strong
        Deep-throated bush,
Whisperings of song
        Heard in the leaves' hush -
Ballads of the trees
        In tongues unknown -
A reminiscent tone
        On minor keys...

Boughs swaying to and fro
        Though no winds pass...
Faint odors in the grass
        Where no flowers grow,
And flutterings of wings
        And faint first notes,
Once babbled on the boughs
        Of faded springs.

Is it music from the graves
        Of all things fair
Trembling on the staves
        Of spacious air -
Fluted by the winds
        Songs with no words -
Sonatas from the throats
        Of master birds?

One peering through the husk
        Of darkness thrown
May hear it...

"Cross my hands upon my breast,"
Read her last behest.
"Turn my cheek upon the pillow,
As resting from life's stormy billow
With sleep's fine zest!"

"Cross my hands upon my breast,"
Read her last behest,
"That the patient bones may lie
In form of thanks eternally,
Grimly expressed!"

We clasped her hands upon her breast:
Oh mockery at misery's hest!
We hid in flowers her body's grief, -
Counting by many a rose and leaf
Her days unblessed!