On Yell'Ham Hill


In my loamy nook
As I dig my hole
I observe men look
At a stone, and sigh
As they pass it by
To some far goal.

Something it says
To their glancing eyes
That must distress
The frail and lame,
And the strong of frame
Gladden or surprise.

Do signs on its face
Declare how far
Feet have to trace
Before they gain
Some blest champaign
Where no gins are?

My own heart let me have more pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst's all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
's not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather - as skies
Betweenpie mountains - lights a lovely mile.

("Charle! ô mon fils!")

[March, 1871.]


Charles, Charles, my son! hast thou, then, quitted me?
Must all fade, naught endure?
Hast vanished in that radiance, clear for thee,
But still for us obscure?

My sunset lingers, boy, thy morn declines!
Sweet mutual love we've known;
For man, alas! plans, dreams, and smiling twines
With others' souls his own.

He cries, "This has no end!" pursues his way:
He soon is downward bound:
He lives, he suffers; in his grasp one day
Mere dust and ashes found.

I've wandered twenty years, in distant lands,
With sore heart forced to stay:
Why fell the blow Fate only understands!
God took my home away.

To-day one daughter and one son remain
Of all my goodly show:
Welln...

Piovonmi amare lagrime dal viso.

HIS STATE WHEN LAURA IS PRESENT, AND WHEN SHE DEPARTS.


    Down my cheeks bitter tears incessant rain,
And my heart struggles with convulsive sighs,
When, Laura, upon you I turn my eyes,
For whom the world's allurements I disdain,
But when I see that gentle smile again,
That modest, sweet, and tender smile, arise,
It pours on every sense a blest surprise;
Lost in delight is all my torturing pain.
Too soon this heavenly transport sinks and dies:
When all thy soothing charms my fate removes
At thy departure from my ravish'd view.
To that sole refuge its firm faith approves
My spirit from my ravish'd bosom flies,
And wing'd with fond remembrance follows you.

CAPEL LOFFT.


    Tears, b...

Quel vago, dolce, caro, onesto sguardo.

HE SHOULD HAVE FORESEEN HIS LOSS IN THE UNUSUAL LUSTRE OF HER EYES.


    That glance of hers, pure, tender, clear, and sweet,
Methought it said, "Take what thou canst while nigh;
For here no more thou'lt see me, till on high
From earth have mounted thy slow-moving feet."
O intellect than forest pard more fleet!
Yet slow and dull thy sorrow to descry,
How didst thou fail to see in her bright eye
What since befell, whence I my ruin meet.
Silently shining with a fire sublime,
They said, "O friendly lights, which long have been
Mirrors to us where gladly we were seen,
Heaven waits for you, as ye shall know in time;
Who bound us to the earth dissolves our bond,
But wills in your despite that you shall live ...

    I evaded capture today
    with only a handful of dust
    to escape that Old Sandman Death.

    Certainly, those maroon berries,
    so large & luscious,
    crowded on their fat stems
    had something to do with it
    as did the ground fog
    leaving its burrow as so many boll-weevils
    their crowded nests.

    And there might be something to the fact
    the moonlight sat
    fat & confidant in the night sky
    as surely
    as my head rests on this pillow
    and the poem invites itself
    into my lair of thoughts,
    much as nestlings charge the
    entrance to the runway
    of a tree.

    I walked flat out
    in an instance
    as standing urine
    held its own stench
    an...

In my Autumn garden I was fain
To mourn among my scattered roses;
Alas for that last rosebud which uncloses
To Autumn's languid sun and rain
When all the world is on the wane!
Which has not felt the sweet constraint of June,
Nor heard the nightingale in tune.

Broad-faced asters by my garden walk,
You are but coarse compared with roses:
More choice, more dear that rosebud which uncloses
Faint-scented, pinched, upon its stalk,
That least and last which cold winds balk;
A rose it is though least and last of all,
A rose to me though at the fall.

I have a life that did not become,
that turned aside and stopped,
astonished:
I hold it in me like a pregnancy or
as on my lap a child
not to grow old but dwell on

it is to his grave I most
frequently return and return
to ask what is wrong, what was
wrong, to see it all by
the light of a different necessity
but the grave will not heal
and the child,
stirring, must share my grave
with me, an old man having
gotten by on what was left

when I go back to my home country in these
fresh far-away days, its convenient to visit
everybody, aunts and uncles, those who used to say,
look how hes shooting up, and the
trinket aunts who always had a little
something in their pocketbooks, cinnamon bark
or a penny or nickel, and uncles w...

Over the chimney the night-wind sang
And chanted a melody no one knew;
And the Woman stopped, as her babe she tossed,
And thought of the one she had long since lost,
And said, as her teardrops back she forced,
“I hate the wind in the chimney.”

Over the chimney the night-wind sang
And chanted a melody no one knew;
And the Children said, as they closer drew,
“’Tis some witch that is cleaving the black night through,
’Tis a fairy trumpet that just then blew,
And we fear the wind in the chimney.”

Over the chimney the night-wind sang
And chanted a melody no one knew;
And the Man, as he sat on his hearth below,
Said to himself, “It will surely snow,
And fuel is dear and wages low,
And I’ll stop the leak in the chimney.”

Over the chimney t...

Yes; I write verses now and then,
But blunt and flaccid is my pen,
No longer talkt of by young men
As rather clever:

In the last quarter are my eyes,
You see it by their form and size;
Is it not time then to be wise?
Or now or never.

Fairest that ever sprang from Eve!
While Time allows the short reprieve,
Just look at me! would you believe
'Twas once a lover?

I cannot clear the five-bar gate,
But, trying first its timber's state,
Climb stiffly up, take breath, and wait
To trundle over.

Thro' gallopade I cannot swing
The entangling blooms of Beauty's spring:
I cannot say the tender thing,
Be 't true or false,

And am beginning to opine
Those girls are only half-divine
Whose waists yon wicked boys entwin...

The wind blew words along the skies,
And these it blew to me
Through the wide dusk: "Lift up your eyes,
Behold this troubled tree,
Complaining as it sways and plies;
It is a limb of thee.

"Yea, too, the creatures sheltering round -
Dumb figures, wild and tame,
Yea, too, thy fellows who abound -
Either of speech the same
Or far and strange - black, dwarfed, and browned,
They are stuff of thy own frame."

I moved on in a surging awe
Of inarticulateness
At the pathetic Me I saw
In all his huge distress,
Making self-slaughter of the law
To kill, break, or suppress.

Here is the ancient floor,
Footworn and hollowed and thin,
Here was the former door
Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,
Smiling into the fire;
He who played stood there,
Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;
Blessings emblazoned that day
Everything glowed with a gleam;
Yet we were looking away!

(WRITTEN FOR A FRIEND'S BIRTHDAY.)

"The days of our life are threescore years and ten."


A birthday: - and a day that rose
    With much of hope, with meaning rife -
A thoughtful day from dawn to close:
    The middle day of human life.

In sloping fields on narrow plains,
    The sheep were feeding on their knees
As we went through the winding lanes,
    Strewed with red buds of alder-trees.

So warm the day - its influence lent
    To flagging thought a stronger wing;
So utterly was winter spent,
    So sudden was the birth of spring.

Wild crocus flowers in copse and hedge -
    In sunlight, clustering thick below,
Sighed for the firwood's shaded ledge,
    Where sparkled yet a line of snow.

And crowded...

Sail on, sail on, fair cousin Cloud:
Oh loiter hither from the sea.
Still-eyed and shadow-brow'd,
Steal off from yon far-drifting crowd,
And come and brood upon the marsh with me.

Yon laboring low horizon-smoke,
Yon stringent sail, toil not for thee
Nor me; did heaven's stroke
The whole deep with drown'd commerce choke,
No pitiless tease of risk or bottomry

Would to thy rainy office close
Thy will, or lock mine eyes from tears,
Part wept for traders'-woes,
Part for that ventures mean as those
In issue bind such sovereign hopes and fears.

- Lo, Cloud, thy downward countenance stares
Blank on the blank-faced marsh, and thou
Mindest of dark affairs;
Thy substance seems a warp of cares;
Like late wounds run the wrinkles on thy brow...

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured quietude.
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental c...

Dundrige his issue hath; but is not styl'd,
For all his issue, father of one child.

Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house. The flakes fly! - faster
Shutting indoors that crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house. The flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone!

MAX GATE.

In yonder valley there dwelt, alone,
A youth, whose moments had calmly flown,
Till spells came o'er him, and, day and night,
He was haunted and watched by a Mountain Sprite.

As once, by moonlight, he wander'd o'er
The golden sands of that island shore,
A foot-print sparkled before his sight--
'Twas the fairy foot of the Mountain Sprite!

Beside a fountain, one sunny day,
As bending over the stream he lay,
There peeped down o'er him two eyes of light,
And he saw in that mirror the Mountain Sprite.

He turned, but, lo, like a startled bird,
That spirit fled!--and the youth but heard
Sweet music, such as marks the flight
Of some bird of song, from the Mountain Sprite.

One night, still haunted by that bright look,
The boy, bewildered, hi...