The ship that drops behind the rim
Of sea and sky, so pale and dim,
Still sails the seas
With favored breeze,
Where other waves chant ocean's hymn.
The wave that left this shore so wide,
And led away the ebbing tide,
Is with its host
On fairer coast,
Bedecked and plumed in all its pride.
The grub I found encased in clay
When next I came had slipped away
On golden wing,
With birds that sing,
To mount and soar in sunny day.
No thought or hope can e'er be lost--
The spring will come in spite of frost.
Go crop the branch
Of maple stanch,
The root will gain what you exhaust.
The man is formed as ground he tills--
Decay and death lie 'neath his sills.
The storm that beats,
And solar heats,
Have helped to form whereon he builds.
Successive crops that lived and grew,
And drank the air, the light, the dew,
And then deceased,
His soil increased
In strength, and depth, and richness, too.
From slow decay the ages grow,
From blood and crime the centuries blow,
What disappears
Beneath the years,
Will mount again as grain we sow.
These rather commonplace verses, the first showing his love for
comrades, the others his philosophical bent, were the forerunners of
that poem of Mr. Burroughs's--"Waiting"--which has become a household
treasure, often without the ones who cherish it knowing its source.
"Waiting" was Written in the fall of 1862. In response to my inquiry as
to its genesis, its author said:--
I was reading medicine in the office of a country doctor at the time and
was in a rather gloomy and discouraged state of mind. My outlook upon
life was anything but encouraging. I was poor. I had no certain means
of livelihood. I had married five years before, and, at a venture, I had
turned to medicine as a likely solution of my life's problems. The Civil
War was raging and that, too, disturbed me. It sounded a call of duty
which increased my perturbations; yet something must have said to me,
"Courage! all will yet be well. You are bound to have your own, whatever
happens." Doubtless this feeling had been nurtured in me by the brave
words of Emerson. At any rate, there in a little dingy back room of Dr.
Hull's office, I paused in my study of anatomy and wrote "Waiting." I
had at that time had some literary correspondence with David A. Wasson
whose essays in the "Atlantic" I had read with deep interest. I sent
him a copy of the poem. He spoke of it as a vigorous piece of work, but
seemed to see no special merit in it. I then sent it to "Knickerbocker's
Magazine," where it was printed, in December, I think, in 1862. It
attracted no attention, and was almost forgotten by me till many years
afterwards when it appeared in Whittier's "Songs of Three Centuries."
This indorsement by Whittier gave it vogue. It began to be copied by
newspapers and religious Journals, and it has been traveling on the
wings of public print ever since. I do not think it has any great poetic
merit. The secret of its success is its serious religious strain, or
what people interpret as such. It embodies a very comfortable optimistic
philosophy which it chants in a solemn, psalm-like voice. Its sincerity
carries conviction. It voices absolute faith and trust in what, in the
language of our fathers, would be called the ways of God with man. I
have often told persons, when they have questioned me about the poem,
that I came of the Old School Baptist stock, and that these verses show
what form the old Calvinistic doctrine took in me.
Let me quote here the letter which Mr. Wasson wrote to the author of
"Waiting," on receiving the first autograph copy of it ever written:--
Worcester, Dec. 22,1862.