Poetry content
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
(He Crosses)
He rode across like a cavalier,
Spurs clicking hard and loud;
And where he tarried dropped his tear
On heads he left low-bowed.
But, “Even Stephen,” he cried, and struck
His steed an urgent blow;
He swore by youth he was a buck
With savage oats to sow.
To even up some standing scores,
From every flower bed
He passed, he plucked by threes and fours
Till wheels whirled in his head.
But long before the drug could tell,
He took his anodyne;
With scornful grace, he bowed farewell
And retraversed the line.
I. Apart
One place—one roof—one name—their daily bread
In daily sacrament they break
Together, and together take
Perpetual counsel, such as use has fed
The habit of, in words which make
No lie. For courtesy’s sweet sake
And pity’s, one brave heart whose joy is dead,
Smiles ever, answering words which wake
But weariness; hides all its ache,—
Its hopeless ache, its longing and its dread;
Strong as a martyr at the stake
Renouncing self; striving to slake
The pangs of thirst on bitter hyssop red
With vinegar! O brave, strong heart!
God sets all days, all hours apart,
Joy cometh at his hour appointed.
II. Together
No touch—no sight—no sound—wide continents
And seas clasp hands to separate
Them from each other now. Too late!
Triumphant Love has leagued the elements
To do their will. Hath light a mate
For swiftness? Can it overweight
The air? Or doth the sun know accidents?
The light, the air, the sun, inviolate
For them, do constant keep and state
Message of their ineffable contents
And raptures, each in each. So great
Their bliss of loving, even fate
In parting them, hath found no instruments
Whose bitter pain insatiate
Doth kill it, or their faith abate
In presence of Love’s hourly sacraments.
Not to dance with her
Was such a trivial thing
There were girls more fair than she,––
To-day
Ten girls dressed in white.
Each had a white rose wreath.
They made a dead man’s arch
And ten strong men
Carried a body through.
Not to dance with her
Was a trivial thing.
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
Prisoners are we,
American citizens imprisoned
For daring in the name of Democracy
To protest against the continued denial
Of the right of self-government
To twenty millions of the American people.
We lie in a dungeon
Long ago abandoned and condemned,
Just as politically we are held
Imprisoned in a subjection
Abandoned and condemned
By every other nation of English speech and spirit.
Painfully raising my head,
I look down the long row
Of gray-blanketed heaps.
Under every heap a woman,
Weak, sick, but determined,
Twenty gray fortresses of determination.
Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
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.