War

Dearest, best and brightest,
Come away,
To the woods and to the fields!
Dearer than this fairest day
Which, like thee to those in sorrow,
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow
To the rough Year just awake
In its cradle in the brake.
The eldest of the Hours of Spring,
Into the Winter wandering,
Looks upon the leafless wood,
And the banks all bare and rude;
Found, it seems, this halcyon Morn
In February's bosom born,
Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth,
Kissed the cold forehead of the Earth,
And smiled upon the silent sea,
And bade the frozen streams be free;
And waked to music all the fountains,
And breathed upon the rigid mountains,
And made the wintry world appear
Like one on whom thou smilest, Dear.

Radiant Sister of the Day,

Uplift the ponderous, golden mask of death,
    And let the sun shine on him as it did
How many thousand years agone!    Beneath
    This worm-defying, uncorrupted lid,
Behold the young, heroic face, round-eyed,
Of one who in his full-flowered manhood died;
    Of nobler frame than creatures of to-day,
Swathed in fine linen cerecloths fold on fold,
With carven weapons wrought of bronze and gold,
    Accoutred like a warrior for the fray.


We gaze in awe at these huge-modeled limbs,
    Shrunk in death's narrow house, but hinting yet
Their ancient majesty; these sightless rims
    Whose living eyes the eyes of Helen met;
The speechless lips that ah! what tales might tell
Of earth's morning-tide when gods did dwell
    Amidst a generous-fashioned, god...

Say not the Poet dies!
Though in the dust he lies,
He cannot forfeit his melodious breath,
Unsphered by envious death!
Life drops the voiceless myriads from its roll;
Their fate he cannot share,
Who, in the enchanted air
Sweet with the lingering strains that Echo stole,
Has left his dearer self, the music of his soul!

We o'er his turf may raise
Our notes of feeble praise,
And carve with pious care for after eyes
The stone with "Here he lies;"
He for himself has built a nobler shrine,
Whose walls of stately rhyme
Roll back the tides of time,
While o'er their gates the gleaming tablets shine
That wear his name inwrought with many a golden line!

Call not our Poet dead,
Though on his turf we tread!
Green is the wreath their brows so...

In my thought I see you stand with a path on either hand,
--Hills that look into the sun, and there a river'd meadow-land.
And your lost voice with the things that it decreed across me thrills,
    When you thought, and chose the hills.

'If it prove a life of pain, greater have I judged the gain.
With a singing soul for music's sake, I climb and meet the rain,
And I choose, whilst I am calm, my thought and labouring to be
    Unconsoled by sympathy.'

But how dared you use me so?    For you bring my ripe years low
To your child's whim and a destiny your child-soul could not know.
And that small voice legislating I revolt against, with tears.
    But you mark not, through the years.

'To the mountain leads my way.    If the plains are green to-day,
These my ba...

[14]
Sherman's advance through the Carolinas.
(February, 1865.)


So strong to suffer, shall we be
Weak to contend, and break
The sinews of the Oppressor's knee
That grinds upon the neck?
O, the garments rolled in blood
Scorch in cities wrapped in flame,
And the African - the imp!
He gibbers, imputing shame.

Shall Time, avenging every woe,
To us that joy allot
Which Israel thrilled when Sisera's brow
Showed gaunt and showed the clot?
Curse on their foreheads, cheeks, and eyes -
The Northern faces - true
To the flag we hate, the flag whose stars
Like planets strike us through.

From frozen Maine they come,
Far Minnesota too;
They come to a sun whose rays disown -
May it wither them as the dew!
The ghosts o...

The sunlight glitters keen and bright,
Where, miles away,
Lies stretching to my dazzled sight
A luminous belt, a misty light,
Beyond the dark pine bluffs and wastes of sandy gray.

The tremulous shadow of the Sea!
Against its ground
Of silvery light, rock, hill, and tree,
Still as a picture, clear and free,
With varying outline mark the coast for miles around.

On, on, we tread with loose-flung rein
Our seaward way,
Through dark-green fields and blossoming grain,
Where the wild brier-rose skirts the lane,
And bends above our heads the flowering locust spray.

Ha! like a kind hand on my brow
Comes this fresh breeze,
Cooling its dull and feverish glow,
While through my being seems to flow
The breath of a new life, the healing of the...

    Whose is the speech
That moves the voices of this lonely beech?
Out of the long West did this wild wind come -
Oh strong and silent! And the tree was dumb,
    Ready and dumb, until
The dumb gale struck it on the darkened hill.

    Two memories,
Two powers, two promises, two silences
Closed in this cry, closed in these thousand leaves
Articulate. This sudden hour retrieves
    The purpose of the past,
Separate, apart - embraced, embraced at last.

    "Whose is the word?
Is it I that spake? Is it thou? Is it I that heard?"
"Thine earth was solitary; yet I found thee!"
"Thy sky was pathless, but I caught, I bound thee,
    Thou visitant divine."
"O thou my Voice, the word was thine."
    "Was thine."

Troy Town is covered up with weeds,
The rabbits and the pismires brood
On broken gold, and shards, and beads
Where Priam's ancient palace stood.

The floors of many a gallant house
Are matted with the roots of grass;
The glow-worm and the nimble mouse
Among her ruins flit and pass.

And there, in orts of blackened bone,
The widowed Trojan beauties lie,
And Simois babbles over stone
And waps and gurgles to the sky.

Once there were merry days in Troy,
Her chimneys smoked with cooking meals,
The passing chariots did annoy
The sunning housewives at their wheels.

And many a lovely Trojan maid
Set Trojan lads to lovely things;
The game of life was nobly played,
They played the game like Queens and Kings.

So that, when ...

    Flowers for brave soldiers,
    Flowers for those who gave us
    A Country undivided.
    Flowers for the dead!

    With flags we are marking
    Their last earth-dwelling.
    Our hearts are bending
    In gratitude,
    While we are praying
    That this our Nation
    Pass safe through peril,
    Through deadly war.

    Flowers for brave soldiers -
    Flowers for those who loved us,
    Flowers to their memory,
    This fair spring day!

I

Thy functions are ethereal,
As if within thee dwelt a glancing mind,
Organ of vision! And a Spirit aerial
Informs the cell of Hearing, dark and blind;
Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought
To enter than oracular cave;
Strict passage, through which sighs are brought,
And whispers for the heart, their slave;
And shrieks, that revel in abuse
Of shivering flesh; and warbled air,
Whose piercing sweetness can unloose
The chains of frenzy, or entice a smile
Into the ambush of despair;
Hosannas pealing down the long-drawn aisle,
And requiems answered by the pulse that beats
Devoutly, in life's last retreats!

II

The headlong streams and fountains
Serve Thee, invisible Spirit, with untired powers;
Cheering the wakeful tent o...

One with the ruined sunset,
The strange forsaken sands,
What is it waits and wanders
And signs with desperate hands?

What is it calls in the twilight,
Calls as its chance were vain?
The cry of a gull sent seaward
Or the voice of an ancient pain?

The red ghost of the sunset,
It walks them as its own,
These dreary and desolate reaches . . .
But O that it walked alone!

Lake Winnipesaukee


I. NOON.

White clouds, whose shadows haunt the deep,
Light mists, whose soft embraces keep
The sunshine on the hills asleep!

O isles of calm! O dark, still wood!
And stiller skies that overbrood
Your rest with deeper quietude!

O shapes and hues, dim beckoning, through
Yon mountain gaps, my longing view
Beyond the purple and the blue,

To stiller sea and greener land,
And softer lights and airs more bland,
And skies, the hollow of God’s hand!

Transfused through you, O mountain friends!
With mine your solemn spirit blends,
And life no more hath separate ends.

I read each misty mountain sign,
I know the voice of wave and pine,
And I am yours, and ye are mine.

They will trample our gardens to mire, they will bury our city in fire;
Our women await their desire, our children the clang of the chain.
Our grave-eyed judges and lords they will bind by the neck with cords,
And harry with whips and swords till they perish of shame or pain,
And the great lapis lazuli dome where the gods of our race had a home
Will break like a wave from the foam, and shred into fiery rain.

No more on the long summer days shall we walk in the meadow-sweet ways
With the teachers of music and phrase, and the masters of dance and design.
No more when the trumpeter calls shall we feast in the white-light halls;
For stayed are the soft footfalls of the moon-browed bearers of wine,
And lost are the statues of Kings and of Gods with great glorious wings,
And an empire...

Only a spar from a broken ship
    Washed in by a careless wave;
But it brought back the smile of a vanished lip,
    And his past peered out of the grave.

Only a leaf that an idle breeze
    Tossed at her passing feet;
But she seemed to stand under the dear old trees,
    And life again was sweet.

Only the bar of a tender strain
    They sang in days gone by;
But the old love woke in her heart again,
    The love they had sworn should die.

Only the breath of a faint perfume
    That floated up from a rose;
But the bolts slid back from a marble tomb,
    And I looked on a dear dead face.

Who vaunts the might of a human will,
    When a perfume or a sound
Can wake a Past that we bade lie still,
    And open a long closed w...

In the cedar shadow sleeping,
Where cool grass and fragrant glooms
Oft at noon have lur’d me, creeping
From your darken’d palace rooms:
I, who in your train at morning
Stroll’d and sang with joyful mind,
Heard, at evening, sounds of warning;
Heard the hoarse boughs labour in the wind.

Who are they, O pensive Graces,
For I dream’d they wore your forms
Who on shores and sea-wash’d places
Scoop the shelves and fret the storms?
Who, when ships are that way tending,
Troop across the flushing sands.
To all reefs and narrows wending,
With blown tresses, and with beckoning hands

Yet I see, the howling levels
Of the deep are not your lair;
And your tragic-vaunted revels
Are less lonely than they were.
In a Tyrian galley steering
Fro...

If I had ever thought to write in praise
Of little children and their simple ways,
Far rather had I fashioned cradle verse
To rock to slumber, or the songs a nurse
Might croon above the baby on her breast.
Setting her charge's short-lived woes at rest.
For much more useful are such trifling tasks
Than that which sad misfortune this day asks:
To weep o'er thy deaf grave, dear maiden mine.
And wail the harshness of grim Proserpine.
But now I have no choice of subject: then
I shunned a theme scarce fitting riper men,
And now disaster drives me on by force
To songs unheeded by the great concourse
Of mortals. Verses that I would not sing
The living, to the dead I needs must bring.
Yet though I dry the marrow from my bones,
Weeping another's death, my grief ato...

Helen, in her silent room,
Weaves upon the upright loom;
Weaves a mantle rich and dark,
Purpled over, deep. But mark
How she scatters o'er the wool
Woven shapes, till it is full
Of men that struggle close, complex;
Short-clipp'd steeds with wrinkled necks
Arching high; spear, shield, and all
The panoply that doth recall
Mighty war; such war as e'en
For Helen's sake is waged, I ween.
Purple is the groundwork: good!
All the field is stained with blood -
Blood poured out for Helen's sake;
(Thread, run on; and shuttle, shake!)
But the shapes of men that pass
Are as ghosts within a glass,
Woven with whiteness of the swan,
Pale, sad memories, gleaming wan
From the garment's purple fold
Where Troy's tale is twined and told.
Well may Hele...

Wake: the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying:
Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
"Who'll beyond the hills away?"

Towns and countries woo together,
Forelands beacon, belfries call;
Never lad that trod on leather
Lived to feast his heart with all.

Up, lad: thews that lie and cumber
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight slumber
Were not meant for man alive.

Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will n...