Poems – Page 12 – Poetry Out Loud

Your head is wild with books, Sybil,

But your heart is good and kind—

I feel a new contentment near you,

A pleasure of the mind.

Glad should I be to sit beside you,

And let long hours glide by,

Reading, through all your sweet narrations,

The language of your eye.

Since the maternal saint I worshipped

Did look and love her last,

No woman o’er my wayward spirit

Such gentle spell has cast.

Oh! tell me of your varied fortunes,

For you know not, from your face

Looks out strange sadness, lit with rapture,

And melancholy grace.

You are a gem, whose native brilliance

Could never wholly reign,

An opal, whose prismatic fire

A white cloud doth restrain.

And thus, the mood to which you move me

Is never perfect, quite,

‘Tis pity, wonderment, and pleasure,

Opacity and light.

Bear me then in your presence, Sybil,

And leave your hand in mine,

For, though human be my nature,

You’ve made it half divine.

Reign did silence o’er the stage
       As night passed on
And destiny fraught with laurels sat,
       Sweet laurels never won,
Till was read aloud her name
       And forth the sweet voiced singer came.
While grim old night worn out with age,
       Listening to the vibrating stage,
Wept because he must pass on.

       But hark! they do applaud her so:
She bows, she smiles and then looks round,
       She opens her lips and lo!
Bursts forth a trembling sea of sound:
       A sea voluptuous in its swell.
The waves rose high and then they fell;
       While beat the etherial shores, the tide,
And ebbing then the waves subside
       To music’s gentler flow.

O’er the vast and blue expanse
       Leaped the merry music on:
Around the universe, the flow
       Of that angelic tone;
Till heaven’s shores, the tidelets lashed
       And wavelets o’er the portals dashed.
The billowy waves break forth the sounds
       Reach the great white throne and rebound
Echoing the song of home.

And there was silence in the pulsing air,
         While in the noon sun fluttered banners gay—
A lull that breathed the courage of despair;
         A hush which meant a pause in which to pray,
There youths whose lives had never known a care
         Confronted veterans with locks of aged gray;
Before the cool glare of the veteran,
The blue-eyed youth stood dauntless, man to man.

Free labor still our country’s hope remains,—
         In this our largest manhood shall be grown;
The spirit of vast woods and vaster plains,—
         Canyons and geysers of the Yellowstone;
Alaskan summits, where bald winter reigns,
         And rests on base of gold his icy throne,—
These all are prophecies of what shall be,
When Freedom’s sons shall leave their brothers free.

Farewell, alas! my native land adored!
         I’ve sung thy praises in a faithful strain;
But westward life’s imperial tides have poured,
         Eddying in towns, and sweeping on again,
While braver hearts have in their strength ignored
         The old South limitations which remain.
And I must leave the land which gave me birth,
Or pine, an alien, on my native hearth.

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming;
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream;
’Tis the star-spangled banner; O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight and the gloom of the grave;
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave!

O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land,
Praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just.
And this be our motto— “In God is our trust;”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

I stood where the contending armies bled—
         A hundred thousand men on either side.
The past returned. Around me rose the dead,
         The brazen bugles rang out far and wide;
The clouds of thund’rous battle round me spread
         O’er lurid fields, where mighty chiefs did ride,
And ranks of serried steel swung into sight,
Flashing afar—an army in its might.

An Old Sailor’s Lament.

(December, 1861.)

I have a feeling for those ships,

  Each worn and ancient one,

 With great bluff bows, and broad in the beam;

  Ay, it was unkindly done.

  But so they serve the Obsolete—

  Even so, Stone Fleet!

You’ll say I’m doting; do but think

  I scudded round the Horn in one—

 The Tenedos, a glorious

  Good old craft as ever run—

  Sunk (how all unmeet!)

  With the Old Stone Fleet.

An India ship of fame was she,

  Spices and shawls and fans she bore;

 A whaler when her wrinkles came—

  Turned off! till, spent and poor,

  Her bones were sold (escheat)!

  Ah! Stone Fleet.

Four were erst patrician keels

  (Names attest what families be),

 The Kensington, and Richmond too,

  Leonidas, and Lee:

  But now they have their seat

  With the Old Stone Fleet.

To scuttle them—a pirate deed—

  Sack them, and dismast;

 They sunk so slow, they died so hard,

  But gurgling dropped at last.

  Their ghosts in gales repeat

  Woe’s us, Stone Fleet!

And all for naught. The waters pass—

  Currents will have their way;

 Nature is nobody’s ally; ’tis well;

  The harbor is bettered—will stay.

  A failure, and complete,

  Was your Old Stone Fleet.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Her life is a luminous banner borne ever ahead of her era, in

lead of the forces of freedom,

Where wrongs for justice call.

High-hearted, far-sighted, she pressed with noble intrepid impatience,

one race and the half of another

To liberate from thrall.

If now in its freedom her spirit mingle with ours and find us

toiling at dusk to finish

The task of her long day,

On ground hard held to the last, gaining her goal for women,

if for her word we hearken,

May we not hear her say:

“Comrades and daughters exultant, let my goal for you be a mile-

stone. Too late have you won it to linger.

Victory flies ahead.

Though women march millions abreast on a widening way to free-

dom, trails there are still for women

Fearless to break and tread.

“Keep watch on power as it passes, on liberty’s torch as it

travels, lest woman be left with a symbol,

No flame in her lamp alive.

In the mine, the mill and the mart where is bartered the bread of

your children, is forged the power you strove for,

For which you still must strive.”

Her spirit like southern starlight at once is afar and around us;

her message an inward singing

Through all our life to run:

“Forward together, my daughters, till born of your faith with

each other and of brotherhood all the world over,

For all is freedom won.”