The days are warm all Indian Summer through,_Nantucket windows

Placid and mild with dreaming full content;

Beach plums and grapes glimmer with frosty dew,

Rabbits career from hunter provident;

Mellow and hazy blurs the moorland scene,

Placid and still on dreamy tides of noon;

The fishing fleet comes silver laden in,

And over haystacks floats the harvest moon.

Horizoned moon, so round and thin and strange,

Great mellow bowl of gold September brew,

Diaphanous rolling over rolling range

Of solemn hills that part to let thee through.

Thou last great Toy of Summer, yellow boon,

All honey filled, lambent with creamy light,

Hardly a gazer of us but will croon

Some childish nonsense to thy disk tonight!

Upon a night of stars, the grave old Mill

Spreads out its fans upon a scudding sky;

The crescent harbor’s ebony is still,

Studded with plangent lights trailed silvery.

Here is true self, once more with hand on lip,

Trying to read the night’s deep graven lines,

Watching the shadow of some late come ship,

Or muffling darkness of the blotted pines.

The summer streets are filled with flickering swarms,

The village band is playing and the wheels

Of farmer wagons clatter past the farms....

Bright headlights of black bulking automobiles

Flit back of Monomoy, where Indians, now

Pressing the clover with accustomed heels,

Would find great modern monsters on their track

Beside their wigwam or beyond their shack.

But as the music filters through the town,

And honey-suckle breathes around the doors,

One finds the lane as secret as the shores;

No modern engine treads its sweetness down,

No smart prospector makes this isle his own,

For pattern of the cheap and opportune--

Not ’neath this honey-suckle and this moon!

Back of the town where all the houses turn

Their mild grey fronts to winds that buffet strong,

The cobbled streets in patterns quaint and stern,

Lead to four trees spread on the sky like song;

Looking at these I paused the other day,

Wondering that beauty so bestript, forlorn,

Should strike a chord that takes processional way,

Crashed on the skies in branches gaunt and worn.

Twisted and starved these bitter trees that blow

Upon the Western sky like choral song,

Flinging strange rapture on the after glow;

Still radiant? Do these dead trees belong

To some tree-part of us, where bent and maimed

Green branches wither? Hampered twigs grow wrong ...?

Hush! On the screen of the bright Western sky

The crippled trees again burst into song.

Modest these little houses of the town,

Staring with sober windows over the lea,

Scattered are peaks and gables toward the down,

Trailing slow march from seaport to the sea.

Charmed thing to hear one’s foot-fall sound along

Some moonlit, bricked, hedged street, whose panneled doors

Gleam with bright knockers, where the oblivioned stone

Was trodden once by Quaker ancestors.

_The minstered Vast of immemorial sea,

Blue vaults and green that cave the Island tides

Choruses solemn dark immensity

To that Moon priest that with its law abides;

The hoodéd waves march on cathedral dunes,

Flagelant spring the breakers on the rips,

And the encircling shore is writ with runes

Of voyaging souls and questing sails and ships._

_Yea, all around Cathedral Vast of sea

Blue vaults and green that cave the island’s tides

Curled toppling Uncials of Eternity

Illumining the beaches’ glistening sides;

New consecrate the sand’s communion shell

With every moonlight chrism and sunrise swell._

_Clean Island, cloistered ways unspoiled by man,

The thorn trees cloaked like prophets, and the reeds

Organ with murmurings of furtive Pan;

The spirits’ intense strange music, lost from creeds,

Lost far from love--lost in all modern places;

Lost from the reading by all human faces,

Isolate--dumb; but if one wanders here,

Vocal and strong, immaculate and clear._

_For now one figure left of all the gods

Goes singing down the thistle-lighted way;

One figure wanders through these island moods

Back from the town and back of all the bay.

And where the goldenrods their censers sway

Against a brake or by a grey swamp wood,

Over the moor steals happy Solitude._

The corn is stacked, the pumpkins’ on the roof,

Globule on grey their ponderous green and gold,

The laughing gull wantons its wild reproof,

The water’s blue is strangely laced with cold;

Vermilion berries coral the black-hedged pond,

Around the shore the chilly foam-patch quivers,

The sweet fern shrivels up its copper frond,

The owl flaps heavily, the farmland shivers.

These are the roads the island farmers took,

Slow-following flocks that tinkled towards the town,

And stopped to crop the clover or to look

With hornéd stare across the purple down.

These are the roads the shearers of the sheep

In high-swung wagons rode; these winding trails

Moccasins knew, where now the children keep

To Shimmo Shore with huckleberry pails.

What is the thing that on these commons gives

Me back to Me? What is this thing that heals

The cities’ wounds, that shows to me where lives

The Being of Me? What scorcery reveals

My hidden Native, blind, unnamed, unsung,

Wrapped in its passionate ardors like a shape

Of chambered chrysalid Soul--close woofed, high swung,

Waiting for sun and rain and winged escape?

There are wild days out on the winter heath,

Wild days asmoke in mystery and flame;

The black ducks break their columns into wreath,

The gaunt trees cringe away in windblown shame;

The moody skies press to the barren earth,

Sullen the sea hangs foam around the shore;

There is a look of starving and of dearth

Along the shivering roads across the moor.

Then, as if space awed of its yawning breach

Desired rhythms to sound some message home,

Crash in great clouds, dark waves of earthy speech,

The farmlands’ seaweed pile and stubbled loam.

There is cloud-writing on the scrolled West,

The church’s dome swells symboled on the sky;

Austere the landscape, yet so clear expressed,

It looms to awe and brooding majesty!

And then on Headland or on barren dune,

The wild light leaps, born of the naked sea;

The North cliffs are cathedral; there is rune

And choral in the surf’s antiphony.

The laborer, who slowly takes his way

Back to the hamlet in the early night,

Sees the old village set in convent grey,

And candled shrines of votive window light.

There are great days in Autumn, when the world

Turns to blue fire and all the hills are red;

One hears the fishing gulls’ wild screaming skirled

Up to the wingéd comrades overhead.

The Sound is flecked with scudding green and white,

And beaches stretch away to golden glow,

Till stars hang garlanded along the night,

And constellations swing liquid and low.

And foggy days, when wrapped in trailing pause,

The trees, like ships, sail pearly seas bemused

With melting sails and ropes of rainy gauze

Making for harbor, tenuous, confused,

Anchored in subtle inlets, phantom cruised;

Where voyagers land unchallenged, unperused,

With silver myrrh to sanctify the homes,

And cloudy swirls to hallow forth the domes.

These ships bring stores by which my heart is fed,

The voyagers of this filmy vapor flight

Lay balm on gashes where the soul has bled,

Wrapping its wounds in meshes of soft light.

And I am soothed of grief, who take a white

Communion under calm of dripping trees,

Walking uncandled avenues of rainy night

With veiléd forms to nebulous mysteries.

Charmed thing to drift along the narrow lanes

Where some dear door flies open to the rap,

To sit behind windows of whaling days;

A lantern in the hall, a chair mayhap

Some geniused Folger used, to read a log

Stamped with inked whales, kept blue from boyhood cruise;

The Swift that wound the yarn, peat from the bog--

The horn the Town Crier used to cry the news.

Charmed thing to catch a sea-word full of spice,

To eat of beach plum jelly by the fire,

To see rag rugs hooked like a sailor’s splice,

To watch the peats’ blue flicker on the fire;

To see the rafters carved in sailor-ways,

Paintings of canvased ships crossing the bars,

When daring whalers went uncharted ways,

And laid their course by youth’s adventurous stars.

Along the street in early morning’s glow,

Down to their boats the Portuguese fishers go;

And through the cobbled alleys bootéd feet

Drown the gruff voice as sailors comrades meet.

Then shawled forms slip down to the baker’s shop,

The Spanish bell rings in the tower top,

The placid tradesmen wait the lifted latch,

And quahog diggers launch for the clamming patch.

But village stir and village matters keep

Free Masonry too subtle and too deep

For strangers’ smattering tongue and half-taught eye

That sees them through a garbled mystery.

What shall be known of souls that live and love,

Marry and bear, know joy and agony,

Under blue circle of an Island sky

Within the silver ring of sounding sea?

Their quiet dreams take root in resolute ways,

Their poetry is blown to spurts of flame;

From their grim grandeur of forgotten days

Comes many a high and sober-minded name.

Their character persists where many a door

Opened its narrow pride to let them roam,

Their feet stand firm on an unshaken floor,

Roofed by great roof-trees of New England home.

So to the memory their great names come

What time they reckoned life and grasped its fact,

Their splendid hours when their spirits’ dumb,

Unworded promise became conscious act;

The Islanders, Nantucketers, their theme

Endures in a worth that cannot fail,

Across the country their progressive dream

Steadily marks the Great New England Trail.

For even now in times of want and war,

In times of apathy and greed and fear,

The challenges to spirit skyward soar,

The core of stalwart things is hidden here;

The white shoals lift like new creative shore,

The Sound’s salt breath comes like a stirrup cup,

Till every wanderer takes his burden up.

So, with it all remote, tranquil, unchanged,

Untouched in depths of solitude and peace,

The Island fades away, the shoals are ranged,

Backward in sliding rank the bluffs decrease;

Backward they slide, the glittering Sound spreads wide.

Now is no road to Island paths but foam,

A long, long water-path twixt us and home.

Yet when we sit in silence at the board

And shapen silver glitters on the white

Damask, bubbled with flower and glass and scored

With sensuous patterns of the candle light,

One smiles and speaks of ’Sconset Lighthouse flare,

Of sails like wings tapered upon the Sound,

Of tossing cross-rip by the bell buoy, where

The schooners get their ranges outward bound.

There falls a silence until someone tells

An old wife’s tale; another speaks of bay,

Another one of canterbury bells,

And someone else of meadows stacked with hay.

The kindling smile goes round, the voices muse,

The light is kind that travels from eye to eye,

And many lonely Island trampings fuse;

Along rut roads go many a memory.

With eyes alight we say: “When shall I go

Where the blue chicory twinkles toward the town,

Or Bouncing Bet bathes in a rosy snow,

Or where the night wafts scent across the down;

When shall I breathe the breath of inshore spins,

And see the darkling fern of water-flaws,

And catch the drive of myriad mackerel fins

Where the furred trawler floats its netted jaws!”

In spite of foppish talk and city form,

We take the lane and loiter on the crest,

Speaking in terms of Island sun and storm;

The marlins’ tarry smell, the breakers’ breast,

Until across the light and baffling word

There steals the old sea-wind, and with a thrill

The stagnant pools of city minds are stirred,

Incoming tides the vapid channels fill.

But we (who know) speak in no idle way,

We hold no rendezvous, nor name an hour;

We make no promise when to go or stay,

We do not plan to gather fruit or flower;

We only tell the Image deep within

Our struggling beings: “Beyond all abodes

And all the challenging, whether we lose or win,

Spirit, we two shall take the Island roads!”

SEA-MEASURE.

All night long the even roll of sea

Rhythmic and slow

On silence to whose inner mystery

No man may go.

Socrates, Plato, Christ must all have heard

Walking the lonely beach

Listening for that hidden inner word

That they might teach.

All lonely men the centuries send down

To master human things

Must have been strengthened by this monotone

To evener ponderings.

Quietly feeling what we feel tonight

That there is hidden bond

Between our Deepselves and some infinite

Deepness beyond.

IN AN OLD BURYING GROUND.

This is strange heraldry

The graveyard paints

For him who best perceives

Its curious feints.

Under its leaning stones

Sailors and parson men

Titles and beggarmen

Maidens and crones,

Mingle their bones.

They laugh at dreams we weave

Of equality

Under the sun

Yet here it’s done!

Under the frail grass-spear

All these are equal here

None lie alone.

Greek name and Bible name

Pagan and prude;

Under the grass

Not any class.

Fine old aristocrat--

Right near his trimkept plat

The cobbler’s lass!

Also I notice near

Sun shining full and clear

Violets as blue.

The man who used to swear

Sleeping quite calmly there

Where Quakers do.

Dreamer and prig and crank;

Humble and full of swank

Level they rank

To us they all seem just

Handfuls of human dust

Even and blank.

And this I’ve come to hold

One may be quite an old

Aristocrat;

But when one comes to die

Things are Democracy

And that is that!

CHRISTMAS EVE ON NANTUCKET.

For half an hour tonight we wander

Through the streets,

And see the Christmas trees against the lighted pane;

And catch child voices raised in glee and hear

Street singers chanting carols loud and free

Then a bell tone, and then the far-off sea.

We turn a corner and we pass a house

Whence strains of music come,

“Minuit Chrétians--” They will be singing that in Paris tonight!

From a side gate a scarlet figure booted, slips with bells

Jingling; some amateur Santa Claus late for festival.

Here a bright voiced smiling woman hurries along

To the dim lighted church, bearing a hemlock wreath

Made by her hands.

Upon white panelled doors hang other wreaths

Woven from ground pine near Wannacomet Pond.

And scarlet berries blaze

In window boxes bare of summer flowers

But now made Holiday.

Another narrow street, and here the candles shine

Ranging along the pane in a white row,

Lovely immaculates of memory.

And in another window a small figure

A dainty mandarin poised in Chinoise grace

Beneath some mistletoe!

And in one window more an old white head

Is bent over some early coming gift

Brought by the letter carrier

From children far away.

Late! Yet a few steps further, where the narrow lane

Turns to the moors. There in December skies

Tender with Christmas memories of years on years,

Hangs in its winter white, The Evening Star!

SONG OF THE LIGHTSHIPS.

(Landlubber’s Chantey.)

When the wolves of wind press hard

On the wild seas snarling pack,

And the waves bite the shore

And the shore bites back;

When the night’s like a cave

Full of black things howling

And the hurricanes rave

With the whistle buoy yowling.

There’s a rusty trusty boat that never makes a port,

There’s a scrubby bold boat that never finds a lee,

The blunt little lightship,

The iron clad lightship,

The weather-wise lightship,

Anchored out at sea!

When the storms signal’s set,

Great Point stuck with masts,

And the range lights blur

Through the wicked black blasts

When the extra anchors drag

And the bell buoy clangs

And the jetty rocks swirl

Under tide rips fangs.

There’s one little boat that never makes a port

There’s one tidy ship that never seeks a lee

The blunt little lightship

The staunch, able lightship

The game, snubby lightship

Anchored out at sea.

When the night’s very still

And the moon rides high,

There’s one strange craft

Gives a hail and stands by.

Though the forms on her decks

Have a look of the dead

Still they warn of a wreck

Or a shoal dead ahead.

_It’s the winter-lost Lightship that never found a lee

It’s the tide-driven Lightship that never made a port

It’s the silent-crewed Lightship, the speechless brave Lightship

The ice-covered Lightship

Sunk at sea._

Now when home fires blaze

And the storm is shut out,

And the wind and its ways

Are sea-yarned about;

When the good glass is lifted

In the good pipe smoke

And the good talk has drifted

From the well worn joke....

Toast the one little boat that never makes port!

Sing of the craft that never hunts a lee--

Drink to the lightships, the lonely crews of lightships

The lunging, plunging lightships

Anchored out at sea!

SEPTEMBER NOON.

Upon the warm brick walls the patterns come,

Dim moving likenesses of pensive leaves;

The swallows twitter round the ivied eaves

Late bees in perilous petunias hum;

On the moors, amber grape and bloomy plum,

But here in trim back-yards the apple’s face

Twinkling with dahlias in some latticed place.

The stranger’s foot has gone and all the world

Has settled down to Island ways of peace,

Where the clouds mid-summer caravans cease

Soundlessness on the hills is silver-furled!

Now all faint scents and spice of full increase!

The scarlet pepper pendant on its bush

And late corn leaning on the farmland hush.

Slow wagons trundle with the sea-grass haul,

The crickets, palaced in the golden rod

Begin their strumming; the horse-chestnuts fall

And morning glories on the trellis nod;

Marigold’s velvet turns to pungent pod.

A sea of azure girds the shores around;

The tawny silence mellows till the deep

Steamboat whistle’s sombre-throated sound

Wakens the isle from Indian Summer’s sleep

Then all is bustle and the city’s stir

Once more has come upon the Islander.

MAIN STREET BY MOONLIGHT.

The old church clock strikes one, and down the row

Of ancient houses where the moonlight floods,

The black tree branches move like wands that throw

A net of woven loopings flecked with buds.

The night is still, a silver quiet now

Transforms the plain old homes whose ancient mood

Returns; through panelled doorways come and go

Figures soft shod, in prim calash and hood;

Here by a lilac bush the little gate

Supports two figures of sweetheart and beau

Here by a hedge two others hesitate

Then join the shadowy thronging too and fro.

Do you believe that in those rooms upstair

The newer generation dreams again

Back to the lives of all these women and men

Setting them free to haunt the pavements here?

That youngsters sleeping see sails homeward fare,

Ships laden with treasure and salt romance;

The Quakers’ broad brim; Puritans askance?

That such bold dreaming sets these spirits free

On this deserted street in moonlit beam

“Coming alive,” though coming soberly

And looking on us as figures in =their= dream?

Hush, with what proud simplicity these figures move

And live again austerities of grace

Who used their lives so guardedly--this glove

The homespun petticoat! this barbe of lace!

Boots and prunellas on the brick path pace;

Fair tinted skin, clear eye and honored name

Come through the panelled doors or garden place.

The scholars’ reserve, the solid merchants’ fame

The Friends, the Captains, blooded knight and dame,

Who to old English gentry backward trace.

So through the cobbled streets they silently press

On very gentle errands of their own

And make no plea, and no proud tale confess

Nor look aghast at their once simple town

Yet do they smile, permitting us to guess

That they prefer their own to our renown....

Was that the clock just struck ... the street is clear

The moon rides high, there are no figures here....

Someone stopped dreaming in this street, my dear!

PSALM OF IMAGINED HUNGER.

If I were starving in Nantucket I would first

Go down to the beach and dig for quahaugs;

Or some scallops.

Or drop overboard a neat little lobster car,

Or row to a place where there are wild oysters;

Then I would hang around the docks at five o’clock

When the fishermen come in,

And perhaps get an extra plaicefish

Or some shark or black fish,

(Though I shouldn’t like to eat horseshoe crab or squid)

That failing, I would go out on the moors and snare a pheasant;

I would catch a rabbit and though I wouldn’t know

how to cook it, an owl.

To eat crow, I have heard is not judicious--but how

about marsh-hawk?

If it were August I would get Irish moss out of the sea,

And flavor it with cranberries.

I would then go crabbing near Our Island Home;

If it were July I should live in the blueberry patches

And find black berries, (you know where!)

And get strawberries in the old cemetery.

I would go mushrooming (very prudently) in fields near Thorn Lots.

I would go beach plumming (very early) on the State Road

I would get in touch with grape vines near Wauwinet

And with hazel nuts near ’Sconset

And dig for swamp root out near Madaket.

Elder berry would be a last resort!

I would hang over the fences of a certain yard in Hussey Street

To see if grapes and pears would come to me.

Or I would interrupt tea-parties on Pleasant Street

Boldly walking in and asking for apples.

Of course I would weed the potato patch of anyone that asked me to

For two potatoes.

I would help with the melons and do what I could

for corn and pumpkins;

Peaches and cherries I would pluck on shares

But if all these things failed I would go to a little house,

Where they always know what I mean

And ask for food!

THE MOON-CANOE.

Where evening tides creep dark and blue,

I launch my little moon-canoe.

I leave the planet harbor light,

And lay my course along the Night.

I paddle down the Milky Way

Where phospher sky weeds gleam and spray,

And pluck what starry branches grow

Along its winding overflow.

I swing my shallop out mid dream

Where tides of summer evening stream;

And carried on this sound so wide,

Still on and on and on I glide,

Harking, along the Western bar

The bell buoy of a swinging star.

My meteor anchor will, I ween,

Hold in this dark of depth unseen;

The dew, my silver lead and line

Doth sound me shallows of star shine;

And now and then I reef the veil

Of fog that serves me for a sail.

When, bold, I make the Western lee,

Old pilot shadows signal me;

And tacking windward come a fleet

Of clouds, with ghostly spar and sheet.

I follow them and disembark,

And moor my boat beyond the Dark.

DEPRECATION.

While mending nets I made the songs I knew,

Hummed them for sake of humming, not for singing;

But as I crooned, the bell-buoy crooned them too,

The blacksmith had them on his anvil ringing,

And the gulls carried them on clearcut winging....

Yet, if their ragged form the world regrets,

Do you explain.... “But, she was mending nets!”