Under the Stars and Stripes,
Blazon the name that we now must uphold,
Under the Stars and Stripes.
Vast in the past they have builded an arch,
Over which Freedom has lighted her torch--
Follow it! follow it! come, let us march
Under the Stars and Stripes!
II
We in whose bodies the blood of these runs,
Under the Stars and Stripes,
We will acquit us as sons of their sons,
Under the Stars and Stripes.
Ever for justice, our heel upon wrong,
We in the might of our vengeance thrice strong--
Rally together! come marching along
Under the Stars and Stripes!
III
Out of our strength and a nation’s great need,
Under the Stars and Stripes,
Heroes again as of old we shall breed,
Under the Stars and Stripes.
Broad to the winds be our banner unfurled!
Straight from our guns let defiance be hurled!
God on our side, we will battle the world,
Under the Stars and Stripes!
May, 1898.
OUR CAUSE
I
Lord God, who mad’st Spain’s vessels melt
Before the flame our squadrons dealt,
And Santiago’s mountain belt
Rock near and far
With thunder of our ships of steel,
Keep us still humble! help us kneel
In prayer with hearts as great to heal,
As strong in war!
II
When turret booms to turret; when
The steam goes up of battle, then
Lord God, we pray Thee, keep our men
Till all is o’er:
Should pride of conquest then mislead
Our House and Senate, Lord, we plead
Keep Thou our cause as clean of greed
As ’twas before.
III
And when the batteries there of Spain,
From shore and headland, hurricane
Their roaring sleet and crashing rain
Of shell and shot;
When drums beat up and bugles blow,
And rank on rank we face the foe,
In life and death, in joy and woe,
Forget us not.
IV
Not for ourselves we pray to Thee;
But for the cause of liberty,
Lord God!--Let old Oppression see
How o’er her coasts
Our Eagle’s fierce, majestic form
Soars through the lightning and the storm
Beneath thy all protecting arm,
Lord God of Hosts!
July 4th, 1898.
AFTERWORD
_The old enthusiasms
Are dead, quite dead, in me;
Dead the aspiring spasms
Of art and poesy,
That opened magic chasms,
Once, of wild mystery,
In youth’s rich Araby,
Aladdin-wondrous chasms._
_The longing and the care
Are mine; and, helplessly,
The heartache and despair
For what can never be.
More than my mortal share
Of sad mortality,
It seems, God gives to me,
More than my mortal share._
_O world! O time! O fate!
Remorseless trinity!
Let not your wheel abate
Its iron rotary!--
Turn round! nor make me wait,
Bound to it neck and knee,
Hope’s final agony!--
Turn round! nor make me wait._
POEMS OF FOREST AND FIELD PROEM
_They took him into confidence--each oak
Of the far forest: and all day he sat
Hearing of Nature from an autocrat,
An oak--so old, Dodona might have spoke
Its infant oracles through it; that, part
Of the oracular beauty of the gods,
Yet irresponsible, down in its heart
Still felt the rapture of their periods._
_They took him into confidence--the skies;
And all night long he lay beneath one star,
Hearing of God.... One that was chorister
At Earth’s first morning; that beheld fierce eyes
Of rebel angels, and the birth of Hell;
Whom God set over Eden and o’er them,
The Two, as destiny; that did foretell
How Christ lay born at far-off Bethlehem._
THE HYLAS
I
I heard the hylas in the bottomlands
Piping a reed-note in the praise of Spring:
The South-wind brought the music on its wing,
As ’t were a hundred strands
Of guttural gold smitten of elfin hands;
Or of sonorous silver, struck by bands,
Anviled within the earth,
Of laboring gnomes shaping some gem of worth.
Sounds that seemed to bid
The wildflowers wake;
Unclose each dewy lid,
And starrily shake
Sleep from their airy eyes
Beneath the loam,
And, robed in dædal dyes,
Frail as the fluttering foam,
In countless myriads rise.
And in my city home
I, too, who heard
Their reedy word,
Awoke, and, with my soul, went forth to roam.
II
And under glimpses of the cloud-white sky
My soul and I
Beheld her seated, Spring among the woods
With bright attendants,
Two radiant maidens,
The Wind and Sun: one robed in cadence,
And one in white resplendence,
Working wild wonders with the solitudes.
And thus it was,
So it seemed to me,
Where she sat apart
Fondling a bee,
By some strange art,
As in a glass,
Down in her heart
My eyes could see
What would come to pass:--
How in each tree,
Each blade of grass,--
Dead though it seemed,--
Still lived and dreamed
Life and perfume,
Color and bloom,
Housed from the North
Like golden mirth,
That she with jubilation would bring forth,
Astonishing Earth.
III
And thus it was I knew
That though the trees were barren of all buds,
And all the woods
Of blossoms now, still, still their hoods
And heads of blue and gold,
And pink and pearl lay hidden in the mould;
And in a day or two,
When Spring’s fair feet came twinkling through
The trees, their gold and blue,
And pearl and pink in countless bands would rise,
Invading all these ways
With loveliness; and to the skies,
In radiant rapture raise
The fragile sweetness of a thousand eyes.
When every foot of soil would boast
An ambuscade
Of blossoms; each green rood parade
Its flowery host;
And every acre of the woods,
With little bird-like beaks of leaves and buds,
Brag of its beauty; making bankrupts of
Our hearts of praise, and beggar us of love.
IV
Here, when the snow was flying,
And barren boughs were sighing,
In icy January,
I stood, like some gray tree, lonely and solitary.
Now every spine and splinter
Of wood, washed clean of winter,
By hill and canyon
Makes of itself an intimate companion,
A confidant, who whispers me the dreams
That haunt its heart, and clothe it as with gleams.
And lonely now no more
I walk the mossy floor
Of woodlands where each bourgeoning leaf is matched,
Mated with music; triumphed o’er
Of building love and nestling song just hatched.
V
Washed of the early rains,
And rosed with ruddy stains,
The boughs and branches now make ready for
Their raiment green of leaves and musk and myrrh.--
As if to greet her pomp,
The heralds of her state,
As ’t were with many a silvery trump,
The birds are singing, singing,
And all the world’s elate,
As o’er the hills, as ’twere from Heaven’s gate,
With garments, dewy-clinging,
Comes Spring, around whose way the budded woods are ringing
With redbird and with bluebird and with thrush;
While, overhead, on happy wings is swinging
The swallow through the heaven’s azure hush:
And wren and sparrow, vireo and crow
Are busy with their nests, or high or low,
In every tree, it seems, and every bush.
The loamy odor of the turfy heat,
Breathed warm from every field and wood-retreat,
Is as if spirits passed on flowery feet:--
That indescribable
Aroma of the woods one knows so well,
Reminding one of sylvan presences,
Clad on with lichen and with moss,
That haunt and trail across
The woods’ dim dales and dells; their airy essences
Of racy nard and musk
Rapping at gummy husk
And honeyed sheath of every leaf and flower
That open to their knock, each at the appointed hour:--
And, lo!
Where’er they go,
Behold a miracle
Too beautiful to tell!--
Where late the woods were bare
The red-bud shakes its hair
Of flowering flame; the dogwood and the haw
Voluble with bees dazzle with pearl the shaw;
And the broad maple crimsons, sunset-red,
Through firmaments of forest overhead:
And of its boughs the wild-crab makes a lair,
A rosy cloud of blossoms, for the bees,
Bewildered there,
To traffic in; lulling itself with these.
And in the whispering woods
The wild-flower multitudes
Rise, star, and bell, and bugle, all amort
To everything save their own loveliness
And the soft wind’s caress,--
The wind that tip-toes through them:--liverwort,
Spring-beauty, windflower and the bleeding-heart,
And bloodroot, holding low
Its cups of stainless snow;
Sorrel and trillium and the twin-leaf, too,
Twinkling, like stars, through dew:
And patches, as it were, of saffron skies,
Ranunculus; and golden eyes
Of adder’s-tongue; and mines,
It seems, of grottoed gold, the poppy-celandines;
And, sapphire-spilled,
Bluets and violets,
Dark pansy-violets and columbines,
With rainy radiance filled;
And many more whose names my mind forgets,
But not my heart:
The Nations of the Flowers, making gay
In every place and part,
With pomp and pageantry
Of absolute Beauty, all the worlds of woods,
In congregated multitudes,
Assembled where
Unearthly colors all the oaks put on,
Velvet and silk and vair,
Vermeil and mauve and fawn,
Dim and auroral as the hues of dawn.
WIND AND CLOUD
_A March Voluntary_
I
Winds that cavern heaven and the clouds
And canyon with cerulean blue,--
Great rifts down which the stormy sunlight crowds
Like some bright seraph, who,
Mailed in intensity of silver mail,
Flashes his splendor over hill and vale,--
Now tramp, tremendous, the loud forest through:
Or now, like mighty runners in a race,
That swing, long pace to pace,
Sweep round the hills, fresh as, at dawn’s first start,
They swept, dew-dripping, from
The crystal-crimson ruby of her heart,
Shouting the dim world dumb.
And with their passage the gray and green
Of the earth’s washed clean;
And the cleansing breath of their might is wings
And warm aroma we know as Spring’s,
And sap and strength to her bourgeonings.
II
My brow I bare
To the cool, clean air,
That blows from the crests of the clouds that roll,
Pearl-piled and berged as floes of Northern Seas,
Banked gray and thunder-low
Big in the heaven’s peace;
Clouds, borne from nowhere that we know,
With nowhere for their goal;
With here and there a silvery glow
Of sunlight chasming deeps of sombre snow,
Great gulfs that overflow
With sky, a sapphire-blue,
Or opal, sapphire-kissed,
Wide-welled and deep and swiftly rifting through
Stratas of streaming mist;--
Each opening like a pool,
Serene, cerule,
Set round with crag-like clouds ’mid which its eye gleams cool.
III
What blue is bluer than the bluebird’s blue!--
’T is as if heaven itself sat on its wings;
As if the sky in miniature it bore
The fields and forests through,
Bringing the very heaven to our door;
The daybreak of its back soft-wedded to
The sunset-auburn of its throat that sings.--
The dithyrambics of the wind and rain
Strive to, but can not, drown its strain:
Again, and yet again
I hear it where the maples tassel red,
And blossoms of the crab round out o’erhead,
And catkins make the willow-brake
A gossamer blur around the lake
That lately was a stream,
A little stream locked in its icy dream.
IV
Invisible crystals of aërial ring,
Against the wind I hear the bluebird fling
Its notes; and where the oak’s mauve leaves uncurl
I catch the skyey glitter of its wing;
Its wing that lures me, like some magic charm,
Far in the woods
And shadowy solitudes:
And where the purple hills stretch under purple and pearl
Of clouds that sweep and swirl,
Its music seems to take material form;
A form that beckons with cerulean arm
And bids me see and follow,
Where, in the violet hollow,
There at the wood’s far turn,
On starry moss and fern,
She shimmers, glimmering like a rainbowed shower,
The Spirit of Spring,
Diaphanous-limbed, who stands
With honeysuckle hands
Sowing the earth with many a firstling flower,
Footed with fragrance of their blossoming,
And clad in heaven as is the bluebird’s wing.
V
The tumult and the booming of the trees,
Shaken with shoutings of the winds of March--
No mightier music have I heard than these,--
The rocking and the rushing of the trees,
The organ-thunder of the forest’s arch.
And in the wind their columned trunks become,
Each one, a mighty pendulum,
Swayed to and fro as if in time
To some vast song, some roaring rhyme,
Wind-shouted from sonorous hill to hill.
The woods are never still:
The dead leaves frenzy by,
Innumerable and frantic as the dance
That whirled its madness once beneath the sky
In ancient Greece,--like withered Corybants:
And I am caught and carried with their rush,
Their countless panic--borne away,
A brother to the wind, through the deep gray
Of the old beech-wood, where the wild March-day
Sits dreaming, filling all the boisterous hush
With murmurous laughter and swift smiles of sun;
Conspiring in its heart and plotting how
To load with leaves and blossoms every bough,
And whispering to itself, “Now Spring’s begun!
And soon her flowers shall golden through these leaves!--
Away, ye sightless things and sere!
Make room for that which shall appear!
The glory and the gladness of the year;
The loveliness my eye alone perceives,--
Still hidden there beneath the covering leaves,--
My song shall waken!--flowers, that this floor
Of whispering woodland soon shall carpet o’er
For my sweet sisters’ feet to tread upon,
Months kinder than myself, the stern and strong,
Tempestuous-loving one,
Whose soul is full of wild, tumultuous song,
And whose rough hand now thrusts itself among
The dead leaves; groping for the flowers that lie
Huddled beneath, each like a sleep-closed eye:
Gold adder’s-tongue and pink
Oxalis; snow-pale bloodroot blooms;
May-apple hoods, that parasol the brink,
Screening their moons, of the slim woodland-stream:
And the wild iris; trillium,--white as stars,--
And bluebells, dream on dream:
With harsh hand groping in the glooms,
I grasp their slenderness and shake
Their lovely eyes awake,
Dispelling from their souls the sleep that mars;
With heart-disturbing jars
Clasping their forms, and with rude finger-tips,
Through the dark rain that drips
Lifting them shrinking to my stormy lips.
VI
“Already spicewood and the sassafras,
Like fragrant flames, begin
To tuft their boughs with topaz, ere they spin
Their beryl canopies--a glimmering mass,
Mist-blurred, above the deepening grass.
Already where the old beech stands
Clutching the lean soil as it were with hands
Taloned and twisted,--on its trunk a knot,
A huge excrescence, a great fungous clot,
Like some enormous and distorting wart,--
My eyes can see how, blot on beautiful blot
Of blue, the violets blur through
The musky and the loamy rot
Of leaf-pierced leaves; and, heaven in their hue,
A sunbeam at each blossom’s heart,
The little bluets, crew on azure crew,
Prepare their myriads for invasion too.
VII
“And in my soul I see how, soon, shall rise,--
Still hidden to men’s eyes,--
Dim as the wind that round them treads,--
Hosts of spring-beauties, streaked with rosy reds,
And pale anemones, whose airy heads,
As to some fairy rhyme,
All day shall nod in delicate time:
And now, even now, white peal on peal
Of pearly bells,--that in bare boughs conceal
Themselves,--like snowy music, chime on chime,
The huckleberries to my gaze reveal--
Clusters, that soon shall toss
Above this green-starred moss,
That, like an emerald fire, gleams across
This forest-side, and from its moist deeps lifts
Slim, wire-like stems of seed;
Or, lichen-colored, glows with many a bead
Of cup-like blossoms: carpets where, I read,
When through the night’s dark rifts
The moonlight’s glimpsing splendor sifts,
The immaterial forms
With moonbeam-beckoning arms,
Of Fable and Romance,--
Myths that are born of whispers of the wind
And foam of falling waters, music-twinned--
Shall lead the legendary dance;
The dance that never stops,
Of Earth’s wild beauty on the green hill-tops.”
VIII
The youth, the beauty and disdain
Of birth, death does not know,
Compel my heart with longing like to pain
When the spring breezes blow.
The fragrance and the heat
Of their soft breath, whose musk makes sweet
Each woodland way, each wild retreat,
Seem saying in my ear, “Hark, and behold!
Before a week be gone
This barren woodside and this leafless wold
A million flowers shall invade
With argent and azure, pearl and gold,--
Like rainbow fragments scattered of the dawn,--
Here making bright, here wan
Each foot of earth, each glen and glimmering glade,
Each rood of windy wood,
Where late gaunt Winter stood,
Shaggy with snow and howling at the sky;
Where even now the Springtime seems afraid
To whisper of the beauty she designs,
The flowery campaign that she now outlines
Within her soul; her heart’s conspiracy
To take the world with loveliness; defy
And then o’erwhelm the Death--that Winter throned
Amid the trees,--with love that she hath owned
Since God informed her from His very breath,
Giving her right triumphant over Death.
And, irresistible,
Her heart’s deep ecstasy shall swell,
Taking the form of flower, leaf, and blade,
Invading every dell,
And sweeping, surge on surge,
Around the world, like some exultant raid,
Even to the heaven’s verge.
Soon shall her legions storm
Death’s ramparts, planting Life’s fair standard there,
The banner which her beauty hath in care,
Beauty, that shall eventuate
With all the pomp and pageant and the state,
That are a part of power, and that wait
On majesty, to which it, too, is heir.”
IX
Already bluish pink and green
The bloodroot’s buds and leaves are seen
Clumped in dim cirques; one from the other
Hardly distinguished in the shadowy smother
Of last year’s leaves blown brown between.
And, piercing through the layers of dead leaves,
The searching eye perceives
The dog’s-tooth violet, pointed needle-keen,
Lifting its beak of mottled green;
While near it heaves
The May-apple its umbrous spike, a ball,--
Like to a round, green bean,
That folds its blossom,--topping its tight-closed parasol:
The clustered bluebell near
Hollows its azure ear,
Low-leaning to the earth as if to hear
The sound of its own growing and perfume
Flowing into its bloom:
And softly there
The twin-leaf’s stems prepare
Pale tapers of transparent white,
As if to light
The Spirit of Beauty through the wood’s green night.
X
Why does Nature love the number five?
Five-whorled leaves and five-tipped flowers?--
Haply the bee i’ the voluble rose,
Laboring aye to store its hive,
And humming away the long noon hours,
Haply it knows as it comes and goes:
Or haply the butterfly,
Or moth of pansy-dye,
Flitting from bloom to bloom
In the forest’s violet gloom,
It knows why:
Or the irised fly, to whom
Each bud, as it glitters near,
Lends eager and ardent ear.--
And, also, tell
Why Nature loves so well
To prank her flowers in gold and blue.
Haply the dew,
That lies so close to them the whole night through,
Hugged to each honeyed heart,
Perhaps the dew the secret could impart:
Or haply now the bluebird there that bears,
Glad, unawares,
God’s sapphire on its wings,
The lapis-lazuli
O’ the clean, clear sky,
The heav’n of which he sings,
Haply he, too, could tell me why:
Or the maple there that swings,
To the wind’s soft sigh,
Its winglets, crystal red,
A rainy ruby twinkling overhead:
Or haply now the wind, that breathes of rain
Amid the rosy boughs, it could explain:
And even now, in words of mystery,--
That haunt the heart of me,--
Low-whispered, dim and bland,
Tells me, but tells in vain,
And strives to make me see and understand,
Delaying where
The feldspar fire of the violet breaks,
And the starred myrtle aches
With heavenly blue; and the frail windflower shakes
Its trembling tresses in the opal air.
IN SOLITARY PLACES
I
The hurl and hurry of the winds of March,
That tore the ash and bowed the pine and larch,
And filled the night with rushings,--like the crew
Of the Wild Huntsman,--and the days with hue
And cry of storm, soft in the heaven’s porch
Have laid them down:--loud winds, that trampled through
The forests with enormous, scythe-like sweep,
And from the darkened deep,
The battlemented heavens, thunder-blue,
Rumbled the arch,
The rocking arch of all the booming oaks,
With stormy chariot-spokes:
Chariots, from which wild bugle-blasts they blew
In warlike challenge.... Now the windflower sweet
Misses the fury of their ruining feet,
The trumpet-thunder of resistless flight,
Crashing and vast, obliterating light;
Sweeping the skeleton madness down
Of last-year’s leaves; and, overhead,
Hurrying the giant foliage of night,
Gaunt clouds that streamed with tempest.
... Now each crown
Of ancient woods, that clamored with their tread,
The frenzy of their passage, stoops no more,
Hearing no more their clarion-command,
Their chariot-hurl and the wild whip in hand.
No more, no more,
The forests rock and roar
And tumult with their shoutings.
Hushed and still
Is the green-gleaming and the sunlit hill,
Along whose sides,
Flushing the dewy moss and rainy grass--
Beneath the topaz-tinted sassafras,
Pale, aromatic as some orient wine--
The violet fire of the bluet glides,
The amaranthine flame
Of sorrel and of bluebell runs;
And through the drabs and duns
Of rotting leaves, the moonéd celandine,
Line upon lovely line,
Deliberate, goldens into birth:
And, ruby and rose, the moccasin-flower hides:
Innumerable flowers, with which she writes her name,
April, upon the page,
The winter-withered parchment of old earth;
Her fragrant autograph, that gives it worth
And loveliness that take away its age.
II
Here where the woods are wet,
The blossoms of the dog’s-tooth violet
Seem meteors in a miniature firmament
Of wild-flowers, where, with rainy sound and scent
Of breeze and blossom, dim the April went:
Their tongue-like leaves of umber-mottled green,
So thickly seen,
Seem dropping words of gold,
Inaudible syllables of a magic old.
Beside them, near the wahoo-bush and haw,
Blooms the hepatica;
Its slender flowers upon swaying stems
Lifting chaste, solitary blooms,
Astral, and twilight-colored,--frail as gems
That star the diadems
Of elves and sylvans, piercing pale the glooms;--
Or like the wands, the torches of the fays,
That link lone, leafy ways
With slim, uncertain rays:--
(The faëry people, whom no eye may see,
Busy, so legend says,
With budding bough and leafing tree,
The blossom’s heart o’ honey and honey-sack o’ the bee,
And all dim thoughts and dreams,
That take the form of flowers, as it seems,
And haunt the banks of greenwood streams,
Showing in every line and curve,
Commensurate with our love, an intimacy,
A smiling confidence or sweet reserve.)
There, at that leafy turn,
Of trailered rocks, rise fronds of hart’s-tongue fern:
Fronds that my fancy names
Uncurling gleeds of emerald and gold,
Whose feathering flames
Were kindled in the musky mould,
And now, as stealthy as the graying morn,
Thorn upon woolly thorn,
Build up, and silently unfold
Faint, cool, green fires, that burn
Uneagerly, and spread around
An elfin light above the ground,
Like that green, rayless glow
A spirit, lamped with crystal, makes below
In dripping caves of labyrinthine moss,
Or grottoes of the weedy undertow.--
And in the underwoods, around them, toss
The white-hearts with their penciled leaves,
That, ’mid the shifting gleams and glooms,
The interchanging shine and shade,
Seem some soft garment made
By visionary hands, that none perceives;
Hands busy with invisible looms
Of woodland shine and shade; a shadowy light,
Whose figments interbraid,
Carpeting the woods with colors and perfumes.--
Or, are they fragments left in flight,
These flow’rs that scatter every glade
With windy, rippling white,
And breezy, fluttering blue,
Of her wild gown that shone upon my sight,
A moment, in the woods I wandered through?
April’s, who fled this way?
April, whom still I follow,
Whom still my dreams pursue;
Who leads me on by many a tangled clue
Of loveliness, until in some green hollow,
Born of her fragrance and her melody,
But lovelier than herself and happier, too,
Cradled in blossoms of the dogwood-tree,
My soul shall see,
White as a sunbeam in the heart of day,
The infant, May.
III
Up, up, my heart! and forth where none perceives!
’Twas this which that sweet lay meant
You heard in dreams. Come, let us take rich payment,
For every care that grieves,
From Nature’s prodigal purse. ’Twas this that May meant
By sending forth the wind which round our eaves
Whispered all night;--or was’t the spirit who weaves,
From gold and glaucous green of early leaves,
Spring’s regal raiment?--
Up, up, my heart, and forth where none perceives!
Come, let us forth, my heart, where none divines!
Into far woodland places,
Where we may meet the fair assembled races,
Beneath the guardian pines,
Of May’s first flowers.... Poppy-celandines,
And starry trilliums, bugled columbines,
With which her hair, her radiant hair she twines,
And loops and laces.--
Come, let us forth, my heart, where none divines!