My soul and I went walking
Beneath the moon of spring;
The lilies pale were talking,
We heard them murmuring.
From dimly moonlit places
They thrust long throats of white,
And lifted fairy faces
Of fragrant snow and light.
Their language was an essence,
Yet clear as any bird’s;
And from it grew a presence,
As music grows from words.
A spirit born of silence
And chastity and dew
Among Elysian islands
Were not more white to view.
A spirit born of fire
And holiness and snow,
Within the Heaven’s desire,
Were not more pure to know.
He smiled among them, lifting
Pale hands of prayer and peace--
And through the moonlight, drifting,
Came words to me like these:--
“We are His lilies, lilies,
Whose praises here we sing!
We are the lilies, lilies
Of Christ our Lord and King!”
ANTHEM OF DAWN
I
Then up the orient heights to the zenith that balanced the crescent,--
Up and far up and over,--the heaven grew erubescent,
Vibrant with rose and with ruby from hands of the harpist Dawn,
Smiting symphonic fire on the firmament’s barbiton;
And the East was a priest who adored with offerings of gold and of gems,
And a wonderful carpet unrolled for the inaccessible hems
Of the glittering robes of her limbs; that, lily and amethyst,
Swept glorying on and on through temples of cloud and mist.
II
Then out of the splendor and richness, that burned like a magic stone,
The torrent suffusion that deepened and dazzled and broadened and shone,
The pomp and the pageant of color, triumphal procession of glare,
The sun, like a king in armor, breathing splendor from feet to hair,
Stood forth with majesty girdled, as a hero who towers afar
Where the bannered gates are bristling hells and the walls
are roaring war:
And broad on the back of the world, like a Cherubin’s fiery blade,
The effulgent gaze of his aspect fell in glittering accolade.
III
Then billowing blue, like an ocean, rolled from the shores of dawn
to even:
And the stars like rafts went down; and the moon, like a
ghost-ship driven,
A feather of foam, from port to port of the cloud-built isles
that dotted,
With pearl and cameo, bays of the day,--her canvas webbed and rotted,--
Lay lost in the gulf of heaven; while over her mixed and melted
The beautiful children of Morn, whose bodies are opal-belted;
The beautiful daughters of Dawn, who, over and under and after
The rivered radiance wrestled; and rainbowed heaven with laughter
Of halcyon sapphire.--O Dawn! thou visible mirth,
Thou hallelujah of heaven! hosanna of Earth!
AT THE LANE’S END
I
No more to strip the roses from
The rose-sprays of her porch’s place!--
I dreamed last night that I was home
Kissing a rose--her face.
I must have smiled in sleep--who knows?--
The rose-aroma filled the lane;
I saw her white hand’s lifted rose
That welcomed home again.
And yet when I awoke--so wan,
My old face wet with icy tears--
Somehow, it seems, she was not gone,
Though dead now thirty years.
II
The clouds roll up and the clouds roll down
Over the roofs of the little town;
Out in the hills, where the pike winds by
Fields of clover and bottoms of rye,
You will hear no sound but the barking cough
Of the striped chipmunk where the lane leads off;
You will hear no bird but the sapsuckér
Far off in the forest,--that seems to purr,
As the warm wind fondles its top, grown hot,
Like the docile back of an ocelot:
You will see no thing but the shine and shade
Of briers that climb and of weeds that wade
The glittering creeks of the heat, that fills
The dusty road and the red-keel hills.--
And all day long in the pennyroyal
The grasshoppers at their anvils toil;
Thick click of their tireless hammers thrum,
And the wheezy belts of their bellows hum;
Tinkers who solder the silence and heat
To make the loneliness more complete.
Around old rails where the blackberries
Are reddening ripe, and the bumblebees
Are a drowsy rustle of Summer’s skirts,
And the bob-white’s wing is the fan she flirts;
Under the hill, through the ironweeds
And ox-eyed daisies and milkweeds, leads
The path forgotten of all but one.
Where elder-bushes are sick with sun,
And wild raspberries branch big, blue veins
O’er the face of the rock where the old spring rains
Its sparkling splinters of molten spar
On the gravel bed where the tadpoles are,--
You will find the pales of a fallen fence,
And the tangled orchard and vineyard, dense
With the weedy neglect of thirty years.
The garden there,--where the soft sky clears
Like an old sweet face that has dried its tears;--
The garden-plot where the cabbage grew
And the pompous pumpkin; and beans that blew
Balloons of white by the melon patch;
Maize; and tomatoes that seemed to catch
Oblong amber and agate balls
Globed of the sun in the frosty falls:
Long rows of currants and gooseberries,
And the balsam-gourd with its honey-bees.
And here was a nook for the princess-plumes,
The snapdragons and the poppy-blooms,
Quaint sweet-williams and pansy-flowers,
And the morning-glories’ bewildered bowers,
Tipping their cornucopias up
For the humming-birds that came to sup.
And over it all was the Sabbath peace
Of the land whose lap was the love of these;
And the old log-house where my innocence died,
With my boyhood buried side by side.
Shall a man with a face as withered and gray
As the wasp-nest stowed in a loft away,--
Where the hornets haunt and the mortar drops
From the loosened logs of the clapboard tops;--
Whom vice has aged as the rotting rooms
The rain where memories haunt the glooms;
A hitch in his joints like the rheum that gnars
In the rasping hinge of the door that jars;
A harsh, cracked throat like the old stone flue
Where the swallows build the summer through;--
Shall a man, I say, with the spider sins
That the long years spin in the outs and ins
Of his soul, returning to see once more
His boyhood’s home, where his life was poor
With toil and tears and their fretfulness,
But rich with health and the hopes that bless
The unsoiled wealth of a vigorous youth;
Shall he not take comfort and know the truth
In its threadbare raiment of falsehood?--Yea!
In his crumbled past he shall kneel and pray,
Like a pilgrim come to the shrine again
Of the homely saints that shall soothe his pain,
And arise and depart made clean again!
III
Years of care can not efface
Visions of the hills and trees
Closing in its dam and race;
Nor the mile-long memories
Of the mill-stream’s lovely place.
How the sunsets used to stain
Mirrors of the waters lying
Under eaves made dark with rain!
Where the red-bird, westward flying,
Lit to try its song again.
Dingles, hills and woods, and springs,
Where we came in calm and storm,
Swinging in the grapevine swings,
Wading where the rocks were warm,
With our fishing-nets and strings.
Here the road plunged down the hill,
Under ash and chinquapin,--
Where the grasshoppers would drill
Ears of silence with their din,--
To the willow-girdled mill.
There the path beyond the ford
Takes the woodside; just below
Shallows that the lilies sword,
Where the scarlet blossoms blow
Of the trumpet-vine and gourd.
Summer winds, that sink with heat,
On the pelted waters winnow
Moony petals that repeat
Crescents, where the startled minnow
Beats a glittering retreat.
Summer winds that bear the scent
Of the ironweed and mint,
Weary with sweet freight and spent,
On the deeper pools imprint
Stumbling steps, whose ripples dent.
Summer winds, that split the husk
Of the peach and nectarine,
Trail along the amber dusk
Hazy skirts of gold and green,
Spilling balms of dew and musk.
Where with balls of bursting juice
Summer sees the red wild-plum
Strew the gravel; ripened loose,
Autumn hears the pawpaw drum
Plumpness on the rocks that bruise:
There we found the water-beech,
One forgotten August noon,
With a hornet-nest in reach,--
Like a fairyland balloon,
Full of bustling fairy speech.
Some invasion, sure, it was;
For we heard the captains scold;
Waspish cavalry a-buzz,--
Troopers uniformed in gold,
Sable-slashed,--to charge on us.
Could I find the sedgy angle,
Where the dragon-flies would turn
Slender flittings into spangle
On the sunlight? or would burn--
Where the berries made a tangle--
Sparkling green and brassy blue;
Rendezvousing, by the stream,
Bands of elf-banditti, who,
Brigands of the bloom and beam,
Drunken were with honey-dew.
Could I find the pond that lay
Where vermilion blossoms showered
Fragrance down the daisied way?
That the sassafras embowered
With the spice of early May?
Could I find it--should I seek--
The old mill? Its weather-beaten
Wheel and gable by the creek?
With its warping roof; worm-eaten,
Dusty rafters worn and weak.
Where old shadows haunt old places,
Loft and hopper, stair and bin;
Ghostly with the dust that laces
Webs that usher phantoms in,
Wistful with remembered faces.
While the frogs’ grave litanies
Drowse in far-off antiphone,
Supplicating, till the eyes
Of dead friendships, long alone
In the dusky corners,--rise.
Moonbeams? or the twinkling tip
Of a star? or, in the darkling
Twilight, fireflies? there that dip--
As if Night a myriad sparkling
Jewels from her hands let slip.
Where, I dream, my youth still crosses,
With a corn-sack for the meal,
Through the sprinkled ferns and mosses,
To the gray mill’s lichened wheel,
Where the water drips and tosses.
ENCHANTMENT
The deep seclusion of this forest path,--
O’er which the green boughs weave a canopy;
Along which bluet and anemone
Spread a dim carpet; where the Twilight hath
Her dark abode; and, sweet as aftermath,
Wood-fragrance roams,--has so enchanted me,
That yonder blossoming bramble seems to be
Some Sylvan resting, rosy from her bath:
Has so enspelled me with tradition’s dreams,
That every foam-white stream that, twinkling, flows,
And every bird that flutters wings of tan,
Or warbles hidden, to my fancy seems
A Naiad dancing to a Faun who blows
Wild woodland music on the pipes of Pan.
IN THE FOREST
One well might deem, among these miles of woods,
Such were the Forests of the Holy Grail,--
Brocéliand and Dean: where, clothed in mail,
The Knights of Arthur rode, and all the broods
Of legend laired.--And, where no sound intrudes
Upon the ear, except the glimmering wail
Of some far bird; or, in some flowery swale,
A brook that murmurs to the solitudes,
Might think he hears the laugh of Vivien
Blent with the moan of Merlin, muttering bound
By his own magic to one stony spot:
And, in the cloud that looms above the glen,--
In which the sun burns like the Table Round,--
Might dream he sees the towers of Camelot.
CAN SUCH THINGS BE
Meseemed that while she played, while lightly yet
Her fingers fell, as roses bloom by bloom,
I listened--dead within a mighty room
Of some old palace where great casements let
Gaunt moonlight in, that glimpsed a parapet
Of statued marble: in the arrased gloom
Majestic pictures towered, dim as doom,
The dreams of Titian and of Tintoret.
And then, it seemed, along a corridor,
A mile of oak, a stricken footstep came,
Hurrying, yet slow.... I thought long centuries
Passed ere she entered--she, I loved of yore,
For whom I died, who wildly wailed my name
And bent and kissed me on the mouth and eyes.
KNIGHT-ERRANT
Onward he gallops through enchanted gloom.--
The phantoms of the forest, dark and dim,
And shadows of vast death environ him--
Onward he spurs victorious over doom.
Before his eyes that love’s far fires illume--
Where courage sits, impregnable and grim--
The form and features of _her_ beauty swim,
Beckoning him on with looks that fears consume.
The thought of her distress, her lips to kiss,
Mails him in triple might; and so at last
To Lust’s huge keep he comes; its giant wall,
Wild-towering, frowning from the precipice:
And through its gate, borne like a bugle-blast,
O’er night and hell he thunders to his all.
THE ARTIST
In story books, when I was very young,
I knew her first, one of the Fairy Race;
And then it was her picture took its place,
Framed round with love’s deep gold, and draped and hung
High in my heart’s red room: no song was sung,
No tale of passion told, I did not grace
With her associated form and face,
And intimated charm of touch and tongue.
As years went on she grew to more and more,
Until each thing, symbolic to my heart
Of beauty,--such as honor, truth, and fame,--
Within the studio of my soul’s thought wore
Her lineaments, whom I, with all my art,
Strove to embody and to give a name.
POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY
Out of the past the dim leaves spake to me
The thoughts of Pindar with a voice so sweet
Hyblæan bees seemed swarming my retreat
Around the reedy well of Poesy.
I closed the book. Then, knee to neighbor knee,
Sat with the soul of Plato, to repeat
Doctrines, till mine seemed some Socratic seat
High on the summit of Philosophy.
Around the wave of one Religion taught
Her first rude children. From the stars that burned
Above the mountained ether, Science learned
The first vague lessons of the work she wrought.
Daughters of God, in whom we still behold
The Age of Iron and the Age of Gold.
“QUO VADIS”
It is as if imperial trumpets broke
Again the silence on War’s iron height;
And Cæsar’s armored legions marched to fight,
While Rome, blood-red upon her mountain-yoke,
Blazed like an awful sunset. At a stroke,
Again I see the living torches light
The horrible revels, and the bloated, white,
Bayed brow of Nero smiling through the smoke:
And here and there a little band of slaves
Among dark ruins; and the form of Paul,
Bearded and gaunt, expounding still the Word:
And towards the North the tottering architraves
Of empire; and, wild-waving over all,
The flaming figure of a Gothic sword.
TO A CRITIC
R. H. S.
Song hath a catalogue of lovely things
Thy kind hath oft defiled,--whose spite misleads
The world too often!--where the poet reads,
As in a fable, of old envyings,
Crows, such as thou, which hush the bird that sings,
Or kill it with their cawings: thorns and weeds,
Such as thyself, ’midst which the wind sows seeds
Of flow’rs, these crush before one blossom swings.
But here and there the wisdom of a School
Unknown to these hath often written down
“Fame” in white ink the future hath turned brown;
When every beauty, heaped with ridicule,
In their ignoble prose, proved their renown,
Making each famous--as an ass or fool.
QUATRAINS
I
_Poetry_
Who hath beheld the goddess face to face,
Blind with her beauty, all his days shall go
Climbing lone mountains towards her temple’s place,
Weighed with Song’s sweet, inexorable woe.
II
_The Unimaginative_
Each form of beauty’s but the new disguise
Of thoughts more beautiful than forms can be;
Sceptics, who search with unanointed eyes,
Never the Earth’s wild Fairy-dance shall see.
III
_Music_
God-born before the Sons of God, she hurled,
With awful symphonies of flood and fire,
God’s name on rocking chaos--world by world
Flamed as the universe rolled from her lyre.
IV
_The Three Elements_
They come as couriers of Heaven: their feet
Sonorous-sandaled with majestic awe;
In raiment of swift foam and wind and heat,
Blowing the trumpets of God’s wrath and law.
V
_Rome_
Above the Circus of the World she sat,
Beautiful and base, a harlot crowned with pride:
Fierce Nations, upon whom she sneered and spat,
Shrieked at her feet and for her pastime died.
VI
_On Reading the Life of Haroun er Reshid_
Down all the lanterned Bagdad of our youth
He steals, with golden justice for the poor:
Within his palace--you shall know the truth!--
A blood-smeared headsman hides behind each door.
VII
_Mnemosyne_
In classic beauty, cold, immaculate,
A voiceful sculpture, stern and still she stands,
Upon her brow deep-chiselled love and hate,
That sorrow o’er dead roses in her hands.
VIII
_Beauty_
High as a star, yet lowly as a flower,
Unknown she takes her unassuming place
At Earth’s proud masquerade--the appointed hour
Strikes, and, behold! the marvel of her face.
IX
_The Stars_
These--the bright symbols of man’s hope and fame,
In which he reads his blessing or his curse--
Are syllables with which God speaks His name
In the vast utterance of the universe.
X
_Echo_
Dweller in hollow places, hills and rocks,
Daughter of Silence and old Solitude,
Tip-toe she stands within her cave or wood,
Her only life the noises that she mocks.
THE DREAMER
Even as a child he loved to thrid the bowers,
And mark the loafing sunlight’s lazy laugh;
Or, on each season, spell the epitaph
Of its dead months repeated in their flowers;
Or list the music of the strolling showers,
Whose vagabond notes strummed through a twinkling staff,
Or read the day’s delivered monograph
Through all the chapters of its dædal hours.
Still with the same child-faith and child regard
He looks on Nature, hearing, at her heart,
The Beautiful beat out the time and place,
Through which no lesson of this life is hard,
No struggle vain of science or of art,
That dies with failure written on its face.
WINTER
The flute, whence Summer’s dreamy finger-tips
Drew music,--ripening the cramped kernels in
The burly chestnut and the chinquapin,
Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips,--
Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips,
And surly songs whistle around his chin;
Now the wild days and wilder nights begin
When, at the eaves, the lengthening icicle drips.
Thy songs, O Summer, are not lost so soon!
Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute,
Which unto Winter’s masculine airs doth give
Thy own creative qualities of tune,
Through which we see each bough bend white with fruit,
Each branch with bloom, in snow commemorative.
MID-WINTER
All day the clouds hung ashen with the cold;
And through the snow the muffled waters fell;
The day seemed drowned in grief too deep to tell,
Like some old hermit whose last bead is told.
At eve the wind woke, and the snow clouds rolled
Aside to leave the fierce sky visible;
Harsh as an iron landscape of wan Hell
The dark hills hung framed in with gloomy gold.
And then, towards night, the wind seemed some one at
My window, wailing: now a little child
Crying outside my door; and now the long
Howl of some starved beast down the flue.--I sat
And knew ’twas Winter with his madman song
Of miseries on which he stared and smiled.
SPRING
First came the rain, loud, with sonorous lips;
A pursuivant who heralded a prince:
And dawn put on her livery of tints,
And dusk bound gold about her hair and hips:
And, all in silver mail, the sunlight came,
A knight, who bade the winter let him pass;
And freed imprisoned beauty, naked as
The Court of Love, in all her wildflower shame.
And so she came, in breeze-borne loveliness,
Across the hills; and heav’n bent down to bless:
Above her head the birds were as a choir;
And at her feet, like some strong worshiper,
The shouting water pæan’d praise of her,
Who, with blue eyes, set the wild world on fire.
TRANSFORMATION
It is the time when, by the forest falls,
The touch-me-nots hang faery folly-caps;
When ferns and flowers fill the lichened laps
Of rocks with color, rich as orient shawls:
And in my heart I hear a voice that calls
Me woodward, where the hamadryad wraps
Her limbs in bark, and, bubbling in the saps,
Sings the sweet Greek of Pan’s old madrigals:
There is a gleam that lures me up the stream--
A Naiad swimming with wet limbs of light?
Perfume that leads me on from dream to dream--
An oread’s footprints flowering into flight?
And, lo! meseems I am a Faun again,
One with the myths that I pursue in vain.
RESPONSE
There is a music of immaculate love,
That beats within the virginal veins of Spring,--
And trillium blossoms, (like the stars that cling
To fairies’ wands;) and, strung on sprays above,
White-hearts and mandrake blooms, (that look enough
Like the elves’ washing--white with laundering
Of May-moon dews;) and all pale-opening
Wildflowers of the woods are born thereof.
There is no sod Spring’s white foot brushes but
Must feel the music that vibrates within,
And thrill to the communicated touch
Responsive harmonies, that must unshut
The heart of Beauty for Song’s concrete kin,
Emotions--that are flowers--born of such.
THE SWASHBUCKLER
Squat-nosed and broad, of big and pompous port;
A tavern visage, apoplexy haunts,
All pimple-puffed: the Falstaff-like resort
Of fat debauchery, whose veined cheek flaunts
A flabby purple: rusty-spurred he stands
In rakehell boots and belt, and hanger that
Claps when, with greasy gauntlets on his hands,
He swaggers past in cloak and slouch-plumed hat.
Aggression marches armies in his words;
And in his oaths great deeds ride cap-à-pie;
His looks, his gestures breathe the breath of swords;
And in his carriage camp all wars to be:--
With him, of battles there shall be no lack
While buxom wenches are and stoops of sack.
SIMULACRA
Dark in the west the sunset’s sombre wrack
Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split,
Along whose battlements the battle lit
Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back,
A mighty city, red with ruin and sack,
Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit,
Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed to sit
With Conflagration glaring at each crack.--
Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes
Our dreams as real as our waking seems
With recollections time can not destroy,
So in the mind of Nature now awakes,
Haply, some wilder memory, and she dreams
The stormy story of the fall of Troy.
THE BLUEBIRD
From morn till noon upon the window-pane
The tempest tapped with rainy finger-nails,
And all the afternoon the blustering gales
Beat at the door with furious feet of rain.
The rose, near which the lily’s bloom lay slain,
Like some red wound dripped by the garden rails,
On which the sullen slug left silvery trails--
It seemed the sun would never shine again.
Then in the drench, long, loud, and clarion-clear,--
A skyey herald tabarded in blue,--
A bluebird warbled ... and at once a bow
Was bent in heaven, and I seemed to hear
God’s sapphire spaces crystallizing through
The strata’d clouds in azure tremolo.
CAVERNS
_Written of Colossal Cave, Kentucky._
Aisles and abysses; leagues, no man explores,
Of rock that labyrinths and night that drips;
Where everlasting silence broods, with lips
Of adamant, o’er earthquake-builded floors.
Where forms, such as the Dæmon-World adores,
Laborious water carves; whence echo slips
Wild-tongued o’er pools where petrifaction strips
Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.--
Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits,
Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth,
I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,--
Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits,
’Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,--
An ancient causeway of forgotten Hell.
A VOICE ON THE WIND
PROEM
_Oh, for a soul that fulfills
Music like that of a bird!
Thrilling with rapture the hills,
Heedless if any one heard._
_Or, like the flower that blooms
Lone in the midst of the trees,
Filling the woods with perfumes,
Careless if any one sees._
_Or, like the wandering wind,
Over the meadows that swings,
Bringing wild sweets to mankind,
Knowing not that which it brings._
_Oh, for a way to impart
Beauty, no matter how hard!
Like unto Nature, whose art
Never once dreams of reward._
A VOICE ON THE WIND
I
She walks with the wind on the windy height
When the rocks are loud and the waves are white,
And all night long she calls through the night,
“O my children, come home!”
Her bleak gown, torn as a tattered cloud,
Tosses around her like a shroud,
While over the deep her voice rings loud,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”
II
Who is she who wanders alone,
When the wind drives sheer and the rain is blown?
Who walks all night and makes her moan,
“O my children, come home!”
Whose face is raised to the blinding gale;
Whose hair blows black and whose eyes are pale,
While over the world goes by her wail,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”
III
She walks with the wind in the windy wood;
The dark rain drips from her hair and hood,
And her cry sobs by, like a ghost pursued,
“O my children, come home!”
Where the trees loom gaunt and the rocks stretch drear,
The owl and the fox crouch back in fear,
As wild through the wood her voice they hear,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”
IV