She speaks.
Look at the little darlings in the corn!
The rye is taller than you, who think yourself
So high and mighty: look how the heads are borne
Dark and proud on the sky, like a number of knights
Passing with spears and pennants and manly scorn.

Knights indeed! - much knight I know will ride
With his head held high-serene against the sky!
Limping and following rather at my side
Moaning for me to love him! - Oh darling rye
How I adore you for your simple pride!

And the dear, dear fireflies wafting in between
And over the swaying corn-stalks, just above
All the dark-feathered helmets, like little green
Stars come low and wandering here for love
Of these dark knights, shedding their delicate sheen!

I thank you I do, you happy creatur...

Silent was I, and so still,
As day followed day.
Imprisoned until
King Frost worked his will.
Held fast like a vice,
In his cold hand of ice,
For fear kept me silent, and lo
He had wrapped me around and about
with a mantle of snow.

But sudden there spake
One greater than he.
Then my heart was awake,
And my spirit ran free.

At His bidding my bands fell apart, He had burst them asunder.
I can feel the swift wind rushing by me, once more the old wonder
Of quickening sap stirs my pulses -- I shout in my gladness,
Forgetting the sadness,
For the Voice of the Lord fills the air!

And forth through the hollow I go, where in glad April weather,
The trees of the forest break out into singing together.
And here the frail windflowers ...

Mild arch of promise! on the evening sky
    Thou shinest fair with many a lovely ray
Each in the other melting. Much mine eye
    Delights to linger on thee; for the day,
Changeful and many-weather'd, seem'd to smile
Flashing brief splendor thro' its clouds awhile,
    That deepen'd dark anon and fell in rain:
But pleasant is it now to pause, and view
Thy various tints of frail and watery hue,
    And think the storm shall not return again.
Such is the smile that Piety bestows
    On the good man's pale cheek, when he in peace
Departing gently from a world of woes,
    Anticipates the realm where sorrows cease.

Trudging by Corbie Ridge one winter's night,
(Unless old, hearsay memories tricked his sight),
Along the pallid edge of the quiet sky
He watched a nosing lorry grinding on,
And straggling files of men; when these were gone,
A double limber and six mules went by,
Hauling the rations up through ruts and mud
To trench-lines digged two hundred years ago.
Then darkness hid them with a rainy scud,
And soon he saw the village lights below.

But when he'd told his tale, an old man said
That he'd seen soldiers pass along that hill;
"Poor, silent things, they were the English dead
Who came to fight in France and got their fill."

Its rotting fence one scarcely sees
Through sumac and wild blackberries,
Thick elder and the bramble-rose,
Big ox-eyed daisies where the bees
Hang droning in repose.

The little lizards lie all day
Gray on its rocks of lichen-gray;
And, insect-Ariels of the sun,
The butterflies make bright its way,
Its path where chipmunks run.

A lyric there the redbird lifts,
While, twittering, the swallow drifts
'Neath wandering clouds of sleepy cream,
In which the wind makes azure rifts,
O'er dells where wood-doves dream.

The brown grasshoppers rasp and bound!
Mid weeds and briers that hedge it round;
And in its grass-grown ruts, where stirs
The harmless snake, mole-crickets sound
Their faery dulcimers.

At evening, when the sad wes...

Where the sturdy ocean breeze
Drives the spray of roaring seas,
That the Cliff House balconies
Overlook:
There, in spite of rain that balked,
With his sandals duly chalked,
Once upon a tight-rope walked
Mr. Cooke.

But the jester’s lightsome mien,
And his spangles and his sheen,
All had vanished when the scene
He forsook.
Yet in some delusive hope,
In some vague desire to cope,
One still came to view the rope
Walked by Cooke.

Amid Beauty’s bright array,
On that strange eventful day,
Partly hidden from the spray,
In a nook,
Stood Florinda Vere de Vere;
Who, with wind-disheveled hair,
And a rapt, distracted air,
Gazed on Cooke.

Then she turned, and quickly cried
To her lover at her side,
While he...

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Surprised by joy, impatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transport, Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind,
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss! That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

The World, its hopes and fears, have pass'd away;
No more its trifling thou shalt feel or see;
Thy hopes are ripening in a brighter day,
While these left buds thy monument shall be.
When Rancour's aims have past in nought away,
Enlarging specks discern'd in more than thee,
And beauties 'minishing which few display, -
When these are past, true child of Poesy,
Thou shalt survive - Ah, while a being dwells,
With soul, in Nature's joys, to warm like thine,
With eye to view her fascinating spells,
And dream entranced o'er each form divine,
Thy worth, Enthusiast, shall be cherish'd here, -
Thy name with him shall linger, and be dear.

Your troubles shrink not, though I feel them less
Here, far away, than when I tarried near;
I even smile old smiles with listlessness -
Yet smiles they are, not ghastly mockeries mere.

A thought too strange to house within my brain
Haunting its outer precincts I discern:
- That I will not show zeal again to learn
Your griefs, and sharing them, renew my pain . . .

It goes, like murky bird or buccaneer
That shapes its lawless figure on the main,
And each new impulse tends to make outflee
The unseemly instinct that had lodgment here;
Yet, comrade old, can bitterer knowledge be
Than that, though banned, such instinct was in me!

1866.

I

    I shall rot here, with those whom in their day
    You never knew,
    And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay,
    Met not my view,
Will in your distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

II

    No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower,
    While earth endures,
    Will fall on my mound and within the hour
    Steal on to yours;
One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

III

    Some organ may resound on Sunday noons
    By where you lie,
    Some other thrill the panes with other tunes
    Where moulder I;
No selfsame chords compose our common lullaby.

IV

    The simply-cut memorial at my head
    Perhaps may take
    A Gothic form, and that above your bed
    Be Greek in make;...

To die be given us, or attain!
Fierce work it were, to do again.
So pilgrims, bound for Mecca, pray’d
At burning noon: so warriors said,
Scarf’d with the cross, who watch’d the miles
Of dust that wreath’d their struggling files
Down Lydian mountains: so, when snows
Round Alpine summits eddying rose,
The Goth, bound Rome-wards: so the Hun,
Crouch’d on his saddle, when the sun
Went lurid down o’er flooded plains
Through which the groaning Danube strains
To the drear Euxine: so pray all,
Whom labours, self-ordain’d, enthrall;
Because they to themselves propose
On this side the all-common close
A goal which, gain’d, may give repose.
So pray they: and to stand again
Where they stood once, to them were pain;
Pain to thread back and to renew
Past ...

When I set out for Lyonnesse,
    A hundred miles away,
    The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
    A hundred miles away.

What would bechance at Lyonnesse
    While I should sojourn there
    No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
    While I should sojourn there.

When I came back from Lyonnesse
    With magic in my eyes,
    None managed to surmise
What meant my godlike gloriousness,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
    With magic in my eyes.

    I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
    And played snap-out at Winchester.
    One time we changed partners,
    Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
    And then I found Davis.
    We were married and lived together for seventy years,
    Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
    Eight of whom we lost
    Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
    I spun,
    I wove,
    I kept the house,
    I nursed the sick,
    I made the garden, and for holiday
    Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
    And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
    And many a flower and medicinal weed -
    Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
    At ninety - six I had lived enough, that is all,
    And passed to a ...

Sweet virgin, that I do not set
The pillars up of weeping jet
Or mournful marble, let thy shade
Not wrathful seem, or fright the maid
Who hither at her wonted hours
Shall come to strew thy earth with flowers.
No; know, bless'd maid, when there's not one
Remainder left of brass or stone,
Thy living epitaph shall be,
Though lost in them, yet found in me;
Dear, in thy bed of roses then,
Till this world shall dissolve as men,
Sleep while we hide thee from the light,
Drawing thy curtains round: Good-night.

Emigravit, October Vi., Mdcccxcii.


Grief there will be, and may,
When King Apollo's bay
Is cut midwise;
Grief that a song is stilled,
Grief for the unfulfilled
Singer that dies.

Not so we mourn thee now,
Not so we grieve that thou,
MASTER, art passed,
Since thou thy song didst raise,
Through the full round of days,
E'en to the last.

Grief there may be, and will,
When that the Singer still
Sinks in the song;
When that the wingéd rhyme
Fails of the promised prime,
Ruined and wrong.

Not thus we mourn thee--we--
Not thus we grieve for thee,
MASTER and Friend;
Since, like a clearing flame,
Clearer thy pure song came
E'en to the end.

Nay--nor for thee we grieve
E'en as for those th...

    Loud he sang the song Ta Phershon
    For his personal diversion,
    Sang the chorus U-pi-dee,
    Sang about the Barley Bree.

    In that hour when all is quiet
    Sang he songs of noise and riot,
    In a voice so loud and queer
    That I wakened up to hear.

    Songs that distantly resembled
    Those one hears from men assembled
    In the old Cross Keys Hotel,
    Only sung not half so well.

    For the time of this ecstatic
    Amateur was most erratic,
    And he only hit the key
    Once in every melody.

    If "he wot prigs wot isn't his'n
    Ven he's cotched is sent to prison,"
    He who murders sleep might well
    Adorn a solitary cell.

    But, if no obliging peeler
    Will arrest th...

Another day awakes. And who--
    Changing the world--is this?
He comes at whiles, the Winter through,
    West Wind! I would not miss
His sudden tryst: the long, the new
    Surprises of his kiss.

Vigilant, I make haste to close
    With him who comes my way.
I go to meet him as he goes;
    I know his note, his lay,
His colour and his morning rose;
    And I confess his day.

My window waits; at dawn I hark
    His call; at morn I meet
His haste around the tossing park
    And down the softened street;
The gentler light is his; the dark,
    The grey--he turns it sweet.

So too, so too, do I confess
    My poet when he sings.
He rushes on my mortal guess
    With his immortal things.
I feel, I know him. On I pres...