The coigne wherein its crystal sleeps;
Not for wild butterflies that sway
Their pansy pinions all the day
Above its mirror; nor the bee,
Nor dragon-fly, that, passing, see
Themselves reflected in its spar;
Not for the one white liquid star
That twinkles in its firmament;
Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent
Athwart it when the kindly night
Beads its long grasses with the light
Small jewels of the dimpled dew:
Not for the day’s inverted blue,
Nor the quaint, dimly colored stones
That dance within it where it moans;
Not for all these I love to sit
In silence and to gaze in it.
But, lo! a nymph with merry eyes
Greets mine within its laughing skies;
A glimmering, shimmering nymph who plays
All the long fragrant summer days
With instant sights of bees and birds,
And talks with them in water-words;
And for whose nakedness the air
Weaves moony mists; and on whose hair,
Unfilleted, the night will set
That lone star as a coronet.
THE HILLS
There is no joy of earth that thrills
My bosom like the far-off hills!
Th’ unchanging hills, that, shadowy,
Beckon our mutability
To follow and to gaze upon
Foundations of the dusk and dawn.
Meseems the very heavens are massed
Upon their shoulders, vague and vast
With all the skyey burden of
The winds and clouds and stars above.
Lo, how they sit before us, seeing
The laws that give all Beauty being!
Behold! to them, when dawn draws near,
The nomads of the air appear,
Unfolding crimson camps of day
In brilliant bands; then march away;
And under burning battlements
Of evening plant their tinted tents.
The truth of olden myths, that brood
By haunted stream and haunted wood,
They see; and feel the happiness
Of old at which we only guess:
The dreams, the ancients loved and knew,
Still as their rocks and trees are true:
Not otherwise than presences
The tempest and the calm to these:
One, shouting on them all the night,
Black-limbed and veined with lambent light:
The other, with the ministry
Of all soft things that company
With music--whose embodied form
Fills all the solitude with charm
Of leaves and waters and the peace
Of bird-begotten melodies--
And who at night doth still confer
With the mild moon, that telleth her
Pale tale of lonely love, until
Wan shadows of her passion fill
The heights with shapes that glimmer by
Clad on with sleep and memory.
THE SONG OF THE THRUSH
Overhead, overhead a wood thrush flutes,
And it seems to me
All the sweet words in the world,
Married to melody, could not express
What its few, wild notes,
Inspired, and simple, and free, express,
Say to me
Of expectation and woodland mystery,
Dreams, and wonder-visions never appearing,
Remote and unattainably beautiful--
O indescribable song!
Song of the wild brown thrush!
O June! O love! O youth!
Of you, of you it speaks to me!
Of the lost, the irremediable,
The indescribably fair and far and yet to be found;
The mysteriously hidden, too:
The lure of the undiscoverable calling, calling,
Bidding me on and on,
In the voice of all my longings,
Down the dim, the deep, the cadenced aisles of the forest.
TRANSMUTATION
To me all beauty that I see
Is melody made visible:
An earth-translated state, may be,
Of music heard in Heaven or Hell.
Out of some love-impassioned strain
Of saints, the rose evolved its bloom;
And, dreaming of it here again,
Perhaps relives it as perfume.
Out of some chant, that demons sing
Of hate and pain, the sunset grew;
And, haply, still remembering,
Relives it here as some wild hue.
FROST
Magician he, who, autumn nights,
Down from the starry darkness whirls;
Heav’n’s harlequin, whose spangled tights
And wand are powdered thick with pearls.
Through him each pane presents a scene,
A Lilliputian landscape, where
The world is white instead of green,
And trees and houses hang in air.
Where Elfins gambol and delight,
And bow the jewelled bells of flowers;
Where upside-down we see the night
With many moons and meteor showers.
And surely in his wand and hand
Lies Midas magic, for, behold,
Some morn we wake and find the land,
Both field and forest, turned to gold.
ADVENTURERS
Seemingly over the hilltops,
Possibly under the hills,
A tireless wing that never drops,
And a song that never stills.
Epics heard on the stars’ lips?
Lyrics read in the dew?--
To sing the song at our finger-tips,
And live the world anew!
Cavaliers of the Cortés kind,
Bold and free and strong,--
And, oh, for a fine and muscular mind
To sing a New-World’s song!
Sailing seas of the silver morn,
Blown of its balm and spice,
To put the Old-World art to scorn
At the price of any price!
Danger, death, but the hope high!
God’s, though the purpose fail!--
Into the deeds of a vaster sky
Sailing a dauntless sail.
INVOCATION
I
O Life! O Death; O God!
Have we not striven?
Have we not known Thee, God,
As Thy stars know Heaven?
Have we not held Thee true,
True as Thy deepest,
Sweet and immaculate blue
Heaven whence rains Thy dew!
Have we not _known_ Thee true,
O God who keepest!
II
O God, our Father, God!--
Who gav’st us fire,
To rise above the sod,
To soar, aspire--
What though we strive and strive,
And all our soul says “live”?
Will not the scorn of men,
Like some wild bird, again
Falcon it down with sneers,
As often in past years?
And, O sun-centered high,
Thou, too, who ’rt Poet,
Beneath Thy seeing sky
Each day new Keatses die,
Crying, “Why should we try!
That which we seek ’s a lie!”--
Why is this so?--O why?--
Thou who dost know it!
III
We know Thee beautiful,
We know Thee bitter!
Help Thou!--Men’s eyes are dull,
O God most beautiful!
Make Thou their souls less full
Of things mere glitter.
Dost Thou not see our tears?
Dost Thou not hear the years
Treading our hearts to shards,
O Lord of all the Lords?--
Give heed, O God of Hosts,
There ’mid Thy glorious ghosts,
Most high and holy!
Have mercy on our tears!
Have mercy on our years!
Our strivings and our fears,
O Lord of lordly peers,
On us, so lowly!
IV
On us, so fondly fain
To tell what mother-pain
Of Nature haunts the rain.
On us, so glad to show
What sorrow wings the snow,
And her wild winds that blow.
Us, who interpret right
Her mystic rose of light,
Her moony rune of night.
Us, who have utterance for
Each warm, flame-hearted star
That stammers from afar.
Who hear the tears and sighs
Of every bud that dies
While heav’n’s dew on it lies.
Who see the power that dowers
The wildwood bosks and bowers
With musk and sap of flowers.
Who see what no man sees
In water, earth and breeze,
And in the hearts of trees.
Turn not away Thy light,
O God!--Our strength is slight!
Help us who breast the height!
Have mercy, Infinite!
Have mercy!
THE DEATH OF LOVE
So Love is dead, the Love we knew of old!
And in the sorrow of our heart’s hushed halls
A lute lies broken and a rose-flower falls;
Love’s house stands empty and his hearth lies cold.
Lone in dim places, where sweet vows were told,
In walks grown desolate, by ruined walls
Beauty decays; and on their pedestals
Dreams crumble, and th’ immortal gods are mold.
Music is slain or sleeps; one voice alone,
One voice awakes, and like a wandering ghost
Haunts all the echoing chambers of the Past--
The voice of Memory, that stills to stone
The soul that hears; the mind, that, utterly lost,
Before its beautiful presence stands aghast.
UNANSWERED
How long ago it is since we went Maying!
Since she and I went Maying long ago!
The years have left my forehead lined, I know,
Have thinned my hair around the temples graying.
Ah, time will change us: yea, I hear it saying--
“She, too, grows old: the face of rose and snow
Has lost its freshness: in the hair’s brown glow
Some strands of silver sadly, too, are straying.
The form you knew, whose beauty so enspelled,
Has lost the litheness of its loveliness:
And all the gladness that her blue eyes held
Tears and the world have hardened with distress.”--
“True! true!” I answer, “O ye years that part!
These things are changed--but is her heart, her heart?”
LOVE, THE INTERPRETER
Thou art the music that I hear in sleep,
The poetry that lures me on in dreams;
The magic, thou, that holds my thought with themes
Of young romance in revery’s mystic keep.--
The lily’s aura, and the damask deep
That clothes the rose; the whispering soul that seems
To haunt the wind; the rainbow light that streams,
Like some wild spirit, ’thwart the cataract’s leap--
Are glimmerings of thee and thy loveliness,
Pervading all my world; interpreting
The marvel and the wonder these disclose:
For, lacking thee, to me were meaningless
Life, love, and hope, the joy of everything,
And all the beauty that the wide world knows.
LOVE DESPISED
Why not resolve and hunt it from one’s heart?
This love, this god and fiend, that makes a hell
Of all one’s life, in ways no tongue can tell,
No mind divine, nor any word impart.
Would not one think the slights that make hearts smart,
The ice of love’s disdain, the wintry well
Of love’s disfavor, otherwise would quell?
Or school one’s nature, too, to its own art?
Why will men cringe and cry forever here
For that which, once obtained, may prove a curse?
Why not remember that, however fair,
Decay is wed to Beauty? that each year
Robs somewhat from the riches of her purse,
Until at last her house of pride stands bare?
PEARLS
Baroque, but beautiful, between the lunes,
The valves of nacre of a mussel-shell,
Behold, a pearl! shaped like the burnished bell
Of some strange blossom that long afternoons
Of summer coax to open: all the moon’s
Chaste lustre in it; hues that only dwell
With purity.... It takes me, like a spell,
Back to a day when, whistling truant tunes,
A barefoot boy I waded ’mid the rocks,
Searching for shells strewn in the creek’s slow swirl,
Unconscious of the pearls that round me lay:
While, ’mid wild-roses,--all her tomboy locks
Blond-blowing,--stood, unnoticed then, a girl,
My sweetheart once, the pearl I flung away.
THE WOMAN SPEAKS
Why have you come?--To see me in my shame?
A thing to spit upon, despise and scorn?--
You, you who ask me! You, by whom was torn,
Then cast aside, like some vile rag, my name!
What shelter could you give me, now, that blame
And loathing would not share? that wolves of vice
Would not besiege with eyes of glaring ice?
Wherein Sin sat not with her face of flame?
“You love me”?--God!--If yours be love, for lust
Hell must invent another synonym!
If yours be love, then whoredom is the way
To Heaven and God! and not with soul but dust
Must burn the faces of the Cherubim,--
O beast of beasts, if yours be love, I say!
OF THE SLUMS
Red-faced as old carousal, and with eyes
A hard, hot blue; her hair a frowsy flame,
Bold, dowdy bosomed, from her window-frame
She leans, her mouth all insult and all lies.
Or slattern-slippered and in sluttish gown,
With ribald mirth and words too vile to name,
A new Doll Tearsheet, glorying in her shame,
Armed with her Falstaff now she takes the town.
The flaring lights of alley-way saloons,
The reek of hideous gutters and black oaths
Of drunkenness from vice-infested dens,
Are to her senses what the silvery moon’s
Chaste splendor is, and what the blossoming growths
Of Earth and bird-song are to Innocence.
LIGHT AND WIND
Where, through the myriad leaves of many trees,
The daylight falls, beryl and chrysoprase,
The glamour and the glimmer of its rays
Seem visible music, tangible melodies:
Light that is music; music that one sees--
Wagnerian music--where forever sways
The spirit of romance, and gods and fays
Take form, clad on with dreams and mysteries.
And now the wind’s transmuting necromance
Touches the light and makes it fall and rise,
Vocal, a harp of multitudinous waves
That speaks as ocean speaks--an utterance
Of far-off whispers, mermaid-murmuring sighs--
Pelagian, vast, deep down in coral caves.
THE WINDS
Those hewers of the clouds, the Winds,--that lair
At the four compass-points,--are out to-night;
I hear their sandals trample on the height,
I hear their voices trumpet through the air:
Builders of Storm, God’s workmen, now they bear,
Up the steep stair of sky, on backs of might,
Huge tempest bulks, while,--sweat that blinds their sight,--
The rain is shaken from tumultuous hair:
Now, sweepers of the firmament, they broom,
Like gathered dust, the rolling mists along
Heaven’s floors of sapphire; all the beautiful blue
Of skyey corridor and aëry room
Preparing, with large laughter and loud song,
For the white moon and stars to wander through.
TOUCHES
In heavens of rivered blue, that sunset dyes
With glaucous flame, deep in the west the day
Stands Midas-like; or, wading on his way,
Touches with splendor all the twilight skies.
Each cloud that, like a stepping-stone, he tries
With rosy foot, transforms its sober gray
To blazing gold; while, ray on crystal ray,
Within his wake the stars like bubbles rise.
So should the artist in his work accord
All things with beauty, and communicate
His soul’s high magic and divinity
To all he does; and, hoping no reward,
Toil onward, making darkness aureate
With light of worlds that be and are to be.
EARTH AND MOON
I saw the day like some great monarch die,
Gold-couched, behind the clouds’ rich tapestries.
Then, purple-sandaled, clothed in silences
Of sleep, through halls of skyey lazuli,
The twilight, like a mourning queen, trailed by,
Dim-paged of dreams and shadowy mysteries;
And now the night, the star-robed child of these,
In meditative loveliness draws nigh.
Earth,--like to Romeo,--deep in dew and scent,
Beneath Heaven’s window, watching till a light,
Like some white blossom, in its square be set,--
Lifts a faint face unto the firmament,
That, with the moon, grows gradually bright,
Bidding him climb and clasp his Juliet.
DUSK
Corn-colored clouds upon a sky of gold,
And ’mid their sheaves,--where, like a daisy-bloom
Left by the reapers to the gathering gloom,
The star of twilight flames,--as Ruth, ’tis told,
Dreamed homesick ’mid the harvest fields of old,
The Dusk goes gleaning color and perfume
From Bible slopes of heaven, that illume
Her pensive beauty deep in shadows stoled.
Hushed is the forest; and blue vale and hill
Are still, save for the brooklet, sleepily
Stumbling the stone with one foam-fluttering foot:
Save for the note of one far whippoorwill,
And in my heart _her_ name,--like some sweet bee
Within a rose,--blowing a fairy flute.
SEPTEMBER
The bubbled blue of morning-glory spires,
Balloon-blown foam of moonflowers, and sweet snows
Of clematis, through which September goes,
Song-hearted, rich in realized desires,
Are flanked with hotter hues: with tawny fires
Of acrid marigolds,--that light long rows
Of lamps,--and salvias, red as day’s red close,--
That torches seem,--by which the Month attires
Barbaric beauty; like some Asian queen,
Towering imperial in her two-fold crown
Of harvest and of vintage; all her form
Gold and majestic purple: in her mien
The might of motherhood; her baby brown,
Abundance, high on one exultant arm.
THE END OF SUMMER
Pods are the poppies, and slim spires of pods
The hollyhocks; the balsam’s pearly bredes
Of rose-stained snow are little sacs of seeds
Collapsing at a touch; the lote, that sods
The pond with green, has changed its flowers to rods
And discs of vesicles; and all the weeds,
Around the sleepy water and its reeds,
Are one white smoke of seeded silk that nods.
Summer is dead, ay me! sweet Summer’s dead!
The sunset clouds have built her funeral pyre,
Through which, e’en now, runs subterranean fire:
While from the East, as from a garden-bed,
Mist-vined, the Dusk lifts her broad moon--like some
Great golden melon--saying, “Fall has come.”
THE PASSING GLORY
Slow sinks the sun,--a great carbuncle ball
Red in the cavern of a sombre cloud,--
And in her garden, where the dense weeds crowd,
Among her dying asters stands the Fall,
Like some lone woman in a ruined hall,
Dreaming of desolation and the shroud;
Or through decaying woodlands goes, down-bowed,
Hugging the tatters of her gipsy shawl.
The gaunt wind rises, like an angry hand,
And sweeps the sprawling spider from its web,
Smites frantic music in the twilight’s ear;
And all around, like melancholy sand,
Rains dead leaves down--wild leaves, that mark the ebb,
In Earth’s dark hour-glass, of another year.
PROTOTYPES
Whether it be that we in letters trace
The pure exactness of a woodbird’s strain,
And name it song; or with the brush attain
The high perfection of a wildflower’s face;
Or mold in difficult marble all the grace
We know as man; or from the wind and rain
Catch elemental rapture of refrain
And mark in music to due time and place:
The aim of art is Nature; to unfold
Her truth and beauty to the souls of men
In close suggestions; in whose forms is cast
Nothing so new but ’tis long eons old;
Nothing so old but ’tis as young as when
The mind conceived it in the ages past.
SUPERSTITION
In the waste places, in the sinister night,
When the wood whispers like a wandering mind,
And silence sits and listens to the wind,
Or, ’mid the rocks, to some wild torrent’s flight;
Bat-browed thou wadest with thy wisp of light
Among black pools the moon can never find;
Or, owlet-eyed, thou hootest to the blind
Deep darkness from some cave or haunted height.
He who beholds but once thy fearsome face,
Never again shall walk alone! but wan
And terrible attendants shall be his--
Unutterable things that have no place
In God or Beauty--that compel him on,
Against all hope, where endless horror is.
A. D. NINETEEN HUNDRED
War and Disaster, Famine and Pestilence,
Vaunt-couriers of the Century that comes,
Behold them shaking their tremendous plumes
Above the world! Lo, all the air grows dense
With rumors of destruction and a sense,
Cadaverous, of corpses and of tombs
Predestined; while,--like monsters in the glooms,--
Bristling with battle, shadowy and immense,
The Nations rise in dread apocalypse.--
Where now the boast Earth makes of civilization?
Its brag of Christianity?--In vain
We seek to see them in the wild eclipse
Of hell and horror and the devastation
Of Death triumphant on his hills of slain.
UNCALLED
As one, who, journeying westward with the sun,
Beholds at length from the up-towering hills,
Far-off, a land unspeakable beauty fills,
Circeän peaks and vales of Avalon:
And, sinking weary, watches, one by one,
The big seas beat between; and knows it skills
No more to try; that now, as Heaven wills,
This is the helpless end, that all is done:
So ’tis with him, whom long a vision led
In quest of Beauty--and who finds at last,
She lies beyond his effort; all the waves
Of all the world between them: while the dead,
The myriad dead, who populate the Past
With failure, hail him from forgotten graves.
QUATRAINS
I
_Moths and Fireflies_
Since Fancy taught me in her school of spells
I know her tricks: These are not moths at all,
Nor fireflies; but masking Elfland belles
Whose link-boys torch them to Titania’s ball.
II
_Autumn Wildflowers_
Like colored lanterns swung in Elfin towers,
Wild morning-glories light the tangled ways,
And, like the rosy rockets of the Fays,
Burns the sloped crimson of the cardinal-flowers.
III
_The Wind in the Pines_
When winds go organing through the pines
On hill and headland, darkly gleaming,
Meseems I hear sonorous lines
Of Iliads that the woods are dreaming.
IV
_Opportunity_
Behold a hag whom Life denies a kiss
As he rides questward in knighterrant-wise;
Only when he hath passed her is it his
To know, too late, the Fairy in disguise.
V
_Dreams_
They mock the present and they haunt the past,
And in the future there is naught agleam
With hope, the soul desires, that at last
The heart, pursuing, does not find a dream.
AFTERWORD
_What vague traditions do the golden eves,
What legends do the dawns
Inscribe in fire on Heaven’s azure leaves,
The red sun colophons?_
_What ancient stories do the waters verse?
What tales of war and love
Do winds within the Earth’s vast house rehearse,
God’s stars stand guard above?_
_Would I could know them as they are expressed
In hue and melody!
And say, in words, the beauties they suggest,
Language their mystery!_
_And in one song magnificently rise,
The music of the spheres,
That more than marble should immortalize
My name in after years._