Wreathed with serest brier,--
Sorrow strikes now; sad its gold
Sighing where, ’mid roses old,
Fair of face and dead and cold
Lies my Heart’s Desire.
LATE OCTOBER WOODS
Clumped in the shadow of the beech,--
In whose brown top the crows are loud,--
Where, every side, great briers reach
And cling like hands,--the beech drops crowd
The mossy cirque with neutral tints
Of gray; and deep, with berries bowed,
The buckbush reddens ’mid the mints.
O’erhead the forest scarcely stirs:
The wind is laid: the sky is blue:
Bush-clover, with its links of burrs,
And some last blooms,--few, pink of hue,--
Makes wild the way: and everywhere
Slim, white-ribbed cones of fungi strew
The grass that’s like a wildman’s hair.
The jewel-weeds, whose pods bombard
The hush with fairy batteries
Of seeds, grow dense here; pattering hard
Their sacs explode, persuade the eyes
To search the heaven for show’rs:--One seems
To walk where old Enchantment plies
Her shuttle of lost days and dreams.
And, lo! yon rock of fern and flower,
That heaves its height from bramble deeps,
All on a sudden seems the tower
Wherein the Sleeping Beauty sleeps:
And that red vine the fire-drake,
The flaming dragon, is, that keeps
The world from her no man may wake.
IN THE BEECH WOODS
Amber and emerald, cairngorm and chrysoprase,
Stream through the autumn woods, scatter the beech-wood ways:
Ways where the wahoo-bush brightens with scarlet;
And where the aster-stalk lifts its last starlet.
Ways where the brier burns; poplars drop, one by one,
Leaves that seem beaten gold, each like a splash of sun:
Round which the beeches rise, tree upon golden tree,
That, with each wind that blows, sound like a summer sea.
Ways where the papaw leans, great-leaved and beryl-green,
Like some grand forester one in Romance hath seen;
And like some Indian queen, sung of in story,
Flaming the gum-tree stands, crowned with its glory.
Ways where the bittersweet, cleaving its pods of gold,
Brightens the brake with flame, torches the dingle old:
And where the dogwood, too, crimsons with ruby seeds;
Spicewood and buckbush bend ruddy with rosy beads.
These are the woods of gold; forests our childhood knew,
Where the Enchanted dwelt, she with the eyes of blue;
She of the raven locks, and of the lovely looks,
She who oft gazed at us out of the Story Books.
And with that Prince again, striding his snow-white steed,
To her deliverance through the gold wood we speed;
On through the wood of flame to the Dark Tower,
Where like a light she gleams high in her bower.
THE WORD IN THE WOOD
I
The acorn-oak
Sullens to sombre crimson all its leaves;
And where it hugely heaves
A giant head dark as congested blood,
The gum-tree towers, against the sky a stroke
Of purpling gold; and every blur of wood
Is color on the pallet that she drops,
The Autumn, dreaming on the hazed hilltops.
II
And as I went
Through golden forests in a golden land,
Where Magic waved her wand
And dimmed the air with dreams my boyhood knew,
Enchantment met me; and again she bent
Her face to mine, and smiled with eyes of blue,
And kissed me on the mouth and bade me heed
Old tales again from books no man may read.
III
And at her word
The wood became transfigured; and, behold!
With hair of wavy gold
A presence walked there; and its beauty was
The beauty not of Earth: and then I heard
Within my heart vague voices, murmurous
And multitudinous as leaves that sow
The firmament when winds of autumn blow.
IV
And I perceived
The voices were but one voice made of sighs,
That sorrowed in this wise:
“I am the child-soul that grew up and died,
The child-soul of the world that once believed,
Believed in me, but long ago denied;
The Faery Faith it needs no more to-day,
The folk-lore Beauty long since passed away.”
THE NIGHT-WIND
I
I have heard the wind on a winter’s night,
When the snow-cold moon looked icily through
My window’s flickering firelight,
Where the frost his witchery drew:
I have heard the wind on a winter’s night,
Wandering ways that were frozen white,
Wail in my chimney-flue:
And its voice was the voice,--so it seemed to me,--
The voice of the world’s vast misery.
II
I have heard the wind on a night of spring,
When the leaves unclasped their girdles of gold,
And the bird on the bough sang slumbering,
In the lilac’s fragrant fold:
I have heard the wind on a night of spring,
Shaking the musk from its dewy wing,
Sigh in my garden old:
And it seemed that it said, as it sighed above,
“I am the voice of the Earth’s great love.”
III
I have heard the wind on a night of fall,
When a devil’s-dance was the rain’s downpour,
And the wild woods reeled to its demon call,
And the carpet fluttered the floor:
I have heard the wind on a night of fall,
Heaping the leaves by the garden wall,
Weep at my close-shut door:
And its voice, so it seemed, as it sorrowed there,
Was the old, old voice of the world’s despair.
IV
I have heard the wind on a summer night,
When the myriad stars stormed heaven with fire,
And the moon-moth glimmered in phantom flight,
And the crickets creaked in choir:
I have heard the wind on a summer night,
Rocking the red rose and the white,
Murmur in bloom and brier:
And its voice was the voice,--so it seemed to me,--
Of Earth’s primordial mystery.
GOD’S GREEN BOOK
I
Out, out in the open fields,
Where the great, green book of God,--
The book that its wisdom yields
To each soul that is not a clod,--
Lies wide for the world to read,
I would go; and in flower and weed,
That letter the lines of the grass,
Would read of a better creed
Than that which the town-world has.
II
Too long in the city streets,
The alleys of grime and sin,
Have I heard the iron beats
Of the heart of toil; whose din,
And the throb of whose wild unrest
Have stunned the song in my breast,
Have marred its music and slain
The bird that was once its guest,
And my soul would find it again.
III
Out there where the great, green book,
Whose leaves are the grass and trees,
Lies open; where each may look,
May muse and read as he please;
The book, that is gilt with gleams,
Whose pages are ribboned with streams;
That says what our souls would say
Of beauty that’s wrought of dreams
And buds and blossoms of May.
A WET DAY
Dark, drear, and drizzly, with vapor grizzly,
The day goes dully unto its close;
Its wet robe smutches each thing it touches,
Its fingers sully and wreck the rose.
Around the railing and garden-paling
The dripping lily hangs low its head:
A brood-mare whinnies; and hens and guineas
Droop, damp and chilly, beneath the shed.
In splashing mire about the byre
The cattle huddle, the farm-hand plods;
While to some neighbor’s a wagon labors
Through pool and puddle and clay that clods.
The day, unsplendid, at last is ended,
Is dead and buried, and night has come;--
Night, blind and footless, and foul and fruitless,
With weeping wearied, and sorrow-dumb.
Ah, God! for thunder! for winds to sunder
The clouds and o’er us smite rushing bars!
And through wild masses of storm, that passes,
Roll calm the chorus of moon and stars.
AFTER STORM
Great clouds of sullen seal and gold
Bar bleak the tawny west,
From which all day the thunder rolled,
And storm streamed, crest on crest.
Now silvery in its deeps of bronze
The new moon fills its sphere;
And point by point the darkness dons
Its pale stars there and here.
But still behind the moon and stars,
The peace of heaven remains
Suspicion of the wrath that wars,
That Nature now restrains.
As, lined ’neath tiger eyelids, glare
The wild-beast eyes that sleep,
So smoulders in its sunset lair
The rage that rent the deep.
SUNSET ON THE RIVER
I
A sea of onyx are the skies,
Cloud-islanded with fire;
Such nacre-colored flame as dyes
A sea-shell’s rosy spire;
And at its edge one star sinks slow,
Burning, into the overglow.
II
Save for the cricket in the grass,
Or passing bird that twitters,
The world is hushed. Like liquid glass
The soundless river glitters
Between the hills that hug and hold
Its beauty like a hoop of gold.
III
The glory deepens; and, meseems,
A vasty canvas, painted
With revelations of God’s dreams
And visions symbol-sainted,
The west is, that each night-cowled hill
Kneels down before in worship still.
IV
There is no thing to wake unrest;
No sight or sound to jangle
The peace that evening in the breast
Brings, smoothing out the tangle
Of gnarls and knots of care and strife
That snarl the colored cord of life.
TABERNACLES
The little tents the wildflowers raise
Are tabernacles where Love prays
And Beauty preaches all the days.
I walk the woodland through and through,
And everywhere I see their blue
And gold where I may worship too.
All hearts unto their inmost shrine
Of fragrance they invite; and mine
Enters and sees the All Divine.
I hark; and with some inward ear
Soft words of praise and prayer I hear,
And bow my head and have no fear.
For God is present as I see
In them; and gazes out at me
Kneeling to His divinity.
Oh, holiness that Nature knows,
That dwells within each thing that grows,
Vestured with dreams, as is the rose
With perfume! whereof all things preach--
The birds, the brooks, the leaves that reach
Our hearts and souls with loving speech;
That makes a tabernacle of
The flow’rs; whose priests are Truth and Love,
Who help our souls to rise above
The Earth and that which we name sin,
Unto the knowledge, that is kin
To Heaven, to which at last we win.
THE CAT-BIRD
I
The tufted gold of the sassafras,
And the gold of the spicewood-bush,
Bewilder the ways of the forest pass,
And brighten the underbrush:
The white-starred drifts of the wild-plum tree,
And the haw with its pearly plumes,
And the redbud, misted rosily,
Dazzle the woodland glooms.
II
And I hear the song of the cat-bird wake
I’ the boughs o’ the gnarled wild-crab,
Or there where the snows of the dogwood shake,
That the silvery sunbeams stab:
And it seems to me that a magic lies
In the crystal sweet of its notes,
That a myriad blossoms open their eyes
As its strain above them floats.
III
I see the bluebell’s blue unclose,
And the trillium’s stainless white;
The bird-foot violet’s purple and rose,
And the poppy, golden-bright!
And I see the eyes of the bluet wink,
And the heads of the white-hearts nod;
And the baby mouths of the woodland pink
And the sorrel salute the sod.
IV
And this, meseems, does the cat-bird say,
As the blossoms crowd i’ the sun:--
“Up, up! and out! oh, out and away!
Up, up! and out, each one!
Sweethearts! sweethearts! oh, sweet, sweet, sweet!
Come listen and hark to me!
The Spring, the Spring, with her fragrant feet,
Is passing this way!--Oh, hark to the beat
Of her bee-like heart!--Oh, sweet, sweet, sweet!
Come! open your eyes and see!
See, see, see!”
DAYS COME AND GO
Leaves fall and flowers fade,
Days come and go:
Now is sweet Summer laid
Low in her leafy glade,
Low like a fragrant maid,
Low, low, ah, low.
Tears fall and eyelids ache,
Hearts overflow:
Here for our dead love’s sake
Let us our farewells make--
Will he again awake?
Ah, no, no, no.
Winds sigh and skies are gray,
Days come and go:
Wild birds are flown away:
Where are the blooms of May?--
Dead, dead, this many a day,
Under the snow.
Lips sigh and cheeks are pale,
Hearts overflow:
Will not some song or tale,
Kiss, or a flower frail,
With our dead love avail?--
Ah, no, no, no.
THE WANING YEAR
A sense of something that is sad and strange;
Of something that is felt as death is felt,--
As shadows, phantoms, in a haunted grange,--
Around me seems to melt.
It rises, so it seems, from the decay
Of the dim woods; from withered leaves and weeds,
And dead flowers hanging by the woodland way
Sad, hoary heads of seeds.
And from the cricket’s song,--so feeble now
’Tis like a sound heard in the heart, a call
Dreamier than dreams;--and from the shaken bough,
And acorns’ drowsy fall.
From scents and sounds it rises, sadly slow,
This presence, that hath neither face nor form;
That in the woods sits like demented woe,
Whispering of wreck and storm.
A presence wrought of melancholy grief,
And dreams that die; that, in the streaming night,
I shall behold, like some fantastic leaf,
Beat at my window’s light.
That I shall hear, outside my storm-lashed door,
Moan like the wind in some rain-tortured tree;
Or round my roof and down my chimney roar
All the wild night to me.
GRAY NOVEMBER
I
Dull, dimly gleaming,
The dawn looks downward
Where, flowing townward,
The river, steaming
With mist, is hidden:
Each bush, that huddles
Beside the road,--the rain has pooled with puddles,--
Seems, in the fog, a hag or thing hag-ridden.
II
Where leaves hang tattered
In forest tangles,
And woodway angles
Are acorn-scattered,
Coughing and yawning
The woodsman slouches,
Or stands as silent as the hound that crouches
Beside him, ghostly in the mist-drenched dawning.
III
Through roses, rotting
Within the garden,--
With blooms, that harden,
Of marigolds, knotting,
(Each one an ember
Dull, dead and dripping,)
Her brow, from which their faded wreath is slipping,
Mantled in frost and fog, comes in November.
WHAT OF IT THEN
I
Well, what of it then, if your heart be weighed with the yoke
Of the world’s neglect? and the smoke
Of doubt, blown into your eyes, makes night of your road?
And the sting of the goad,
The merciless goad of scorn,
And the rise and fall
Of the whip of necessity gall,
Till your heart, forlorn,
Indignant, in rage would rebel?
And your bosom fill,
And sobbingly swell,
With bitterness, yea, against God and ’gainst Fate,
Fate, and the world of men,
What of it then?...
Let it be as it will,
If you labor and wait,
You, too, will arrive, and the end for you, too, will be well.
What of it then, say I! yea, what of it then!
II
Well, what of it then? if the hate of the world and of men
Make wreck of your dreams again?
What of it then
If contumely and sneer,
And ignorant jibe and jeer,
Be heaped upon all that you do and dream:
And the irresistible stream
Of events overwhelm and submerge
All effort--or so it may seem?
Not all, not all shall be lost,
Not all, in the merciless gurge
And pitiless surge!--
Though you see it tempestuously tossed,
Though you see it sink down or sweep by,
Not in vain did you strive, not in vain!
The struggle, the longing and toil
Of hand and of heart and of brain,
Not in vain was it all, say I!
For out of the wild turmoil
And seething and soil
Of Time, some part of the whole will arise,
Arise and remain,
In spite of the wrath of the skies
And the hate of men.--
What of it then, say I! yea, what of it then!
WOMANHOOD
I
The summer takes its hue
From something opulent as fair in her,
And the bright heav’n is brighter than it was;
Brighter and lovelier,
Arching its beautiful blue,
Serene and soft, as her sweet gaze, o’er us.
II
The springtime takes its moods
From something in her made of smiles and tears,
And flowery earth is flowerier than before,
And happier, it appears,
Adding new multitudes
To flowers, like thoughts, that haunt us evermore.
III
Summer and spring are wed
In her--her nature; and the glamour of
Their loveliness, their bounty, as it were,
Of life, and joy, and love,
Her being seems to shed,
The magic aura of the heart of her.
THE ROSE’S SECRET
When down the west the new moon slipped,
A curved canoe that dipped and tipped,
When from the rose the dewdrop dripped,
As if it shed its heart’s blood slow;
As softly silent as a star
I climbed a lattice that I know,
A window lattice, held ajar
By one slim hand as white as snow:
The hand of her who set me here,
A rose, to bloom from year to year.
I, who have heard the bird of June
Sing all night long beneath the moon;
I, who have heard the zephyr croon
Soft music ’mid spring’s avenues,
Heard then a sweeter sound than these,
Among the shadows and the dews--
A heart that beat like any bee’s,
Sweet with a name--and I know whose:
Her heart that, leaning, pressed on me,
A rose, she never looked to see.
O star and moon! O wind and bird!
Ye harkened, too, but never heard
The secret sweet, the whispered word
I heard, when by her lips his name
Was murmured.--Then she saw me there!--
But that I heard was I to blame?
Whom in the darkness of her hair
She thrust since I had heard the same:
Condemned within its deeps to lie,
A rose, imprisoned till I die.
THE HUSHED HOUSE
I, who went at nightfall, came again at dawn;
On Love’s door again I knocked.--Love was gone.
He who oft had bade me in, now would bid no more;
Silence sat within his house; barred its door.
When the slow door opened wide through it I could see
How the emptiness within stared at me.
Through the dreary chambers, long I sought and sighed,
But no answering footstep came; naught replied.
Then at last I entered, dim, a darkened room:
There a taper glimmered gray in the gloom.
And I saw one lying crowned with helichrys;
Never saw I face as fair as was his.
Like a wintry lily was his brow in hue;
And his cheeks were each a rose, wintry, too.
Then my soul remembered all that made us part,
And what I had laughed at once--broke my heart.
UNFORGOTTEN
I
How many things, that we would remember,
Sweet or sad, or great or small,
Do our minds forget! and how one thing only,
One little thing endures o’er all!
For many things have I forgotten,
But this one thing can never forget--
The scent of a primrose, woodland-wet,
Long years ago I found in a far land;
A fragile flower that April set,
Rainy pink, in her forehead’s garland.
II
How many things by the heart are forgotten!
Sad or sweet, or little or great!
And how one thing that could mean nothing
Stays knocking still at the heart’s red gate!
For many things has my heart forgotten,
But this one thing can never forget--
The face of a girl, a moment met,
Who smiled in my eyes; whom I passed in pity;
A flower-like face, with weeping wet,
Flung to the streets of a mighty city.
UNSUCCESS
_A modern Poet addresses his Muse, to whom he has devoted the best Years
of his Life_
I
Not here, O belovéd! not here let us part, in the city, but there!
Out there where the storm can enfold us, on the hills, where
its breast is made bare:
Its breast, that is rainy and cool as the fern that drips by the fall
In the luminous night of the woodland where winds to the waters call.
Not here, O belovéd! not here! but there! out there in the storm!
The rush and the reel of the heavens, the tempest, whose rapturous arm
Shall seize us and sweep us together,--resistless as passions seize men,--
Through the rocking world of the woodland, with its multitude
music, and then,
With the rain on our lips, belovéd! in the heart of the night’s wild hell,
One last, long kiss forever, and forever and ever farewell.
II
I am sick of the madness of men; of the bootless struggle and strife:
Of the pain and the patience of waiting; the scoff and the
scorning of life:
I am sick of the shapes and the shadows; the sins and the
sorrows that crowd
The gateways of heart and of brain; of the laughter, the shout
that is loud
In the mouth of Success--Success, that was never for me, ah me!--
And all the wrong and neglect that are heaped beloved, on thee!
I am sick of the whining of failure; the boast and the brag of Success;
The vainness of effort and longing; the dreams and the days that oppress:
I am sick of them all; but am sickest, am sickest in body and soul,
Of the love that I bear thee, beloved! and only thy death can make whole.
III
Imperfect, imperfect God made us,--or the power that men call God.--
And I think that a Power so perfect, that made us with merely a nod,
Could have fashioned us beings less faulty; more able to wear and to bear;
Less open to mar and to fracture; less filled with the stuff of despair:
Less damned with the unavailing; less empty of all good things--
The hopes and the dreams that mature not while the clay still
to them clings:
I am sick of it all, belovéd! of the world and the ways of God;
The thorns that have pierced thy bosom; the shards of the paths
we have trod:
I am sick of going and coming; and of love I am sickest of all:
The striving, the praying, the dreaming; and the things that
never befall.--
So there in the storm and the darkness,--O fair, and O fugitive!--
Out there in the night, belovéd, must thou die so I may live!
THE FIRST QUARTER
I
_January_
Shaggy with skins of frost-furred gray and drab,
Harsh, hoary hair framing a bitter face,
He bends above the dead Year’s fireplace
Nursing the last few embers of its slab
To sullen glow: from pinched lips, cold and crab,
The starved flame shrinks; his breath, like a menáce,
Shrieks in the flue, fluttering its sooty lace,
Piercing the silence like an icy stab.
From rheum-gnarled knees he rises, slow with cold,
And to the frost-bound window, muttering, goes,
With iron knuckles knocking on the pane;
And, lo! outside, his minions manifold
Answer the summons: wolf-like shapes of woe,
Hunger and suffering, trooping to his train.
II
_February_
Gray-muffled to his eyes in rags of cloud,
His whip of winds forever in his hand,
Driving the herded storms along the land,--
That shake the wild sleet from wild hair and crowd
Heaven with tumultuous bulks,--he comes, low-browed
And heavy-eyed; the hail, like stinging sand,
Whirls white behind, swept backward by his band
Of wild-hoofed gales that o’er the world ring loud.
All day the tatters of his dark cloak stream
Congealing moisture, till in solid ice
The forests stand; and, clang on thunderous clang,
All night is heard,--as in the moon’s cold gleam
Tightens his grip of frost, his iron vise,--
The boom of bursting boughs that icicles fang.
III
_March_
This is the tomboy month of all the year,
March, who comes shouting o’er the winter hills,
Waking the world with laughter, as she wills,
Or wild halloos, a windflower in her ear.
She stops a moment by the half-thawed mere
And whistles to the wind, and straightway shrills
The hyla’s song, and hoods of daffodils
Crowd golden round her, leaning their heads to hear.
Then through the woods, that drip with all their eaves,
Her mad hair blown about her, loud she goes
Singing and calling to the naked trees,
And straight the oilets of the little leaves
Open their eyes in wonder, rows on rows,
And the first bluebird bugles to the breeze.
ZERO
The gate, on ice-hoarse hinges, stiff with frost,
Croaks open; and harsh wagon-wheels are heard
Creaking through cold; the horses’ breath is furred
Around their nostrils; and with snow deep-mossed
The hut is barely seen, from which, uptossed,
The wood-smoke pillars the icy air unstirred;
And every sound, each axe-stroke and each word,
Comes as through crystal, then again is lost.
The sun strikes bitter on the frozen pane,
And all around there is a tingling,--tense
As is a wire stretched upon a disk
Vibrating without sound:--It is the strain
That Winter plays, to which each tree and fence,
It seems, is strung, as ’twere of ringing bisque.
ON THE HILLTOP.
There is no inspiration in the view.
From where this acorn drops its thimbles brown
The landscape stretches like a shaggy frown;
The wrinkled hills hang haggard and harsh of hue:
Above them hollows the heaven’s stony blue,
Like a dull thought that haunts some sleep-dazed clown
Plodding his homeward way; and, whispering down,
The dead leaves dance, a sere and shelterless crew.
Let the sick day stagger unto its close,
Morose and mumbling, like a hoary crone
Beneath her faggots--huddled fogs that soon
Shall flare the windy west with ashen glows,
Like some deep, dying hearth; and let the lone
Night come at last--night, and its withered moon.
AUTUMN STORM
The wind is rising and the leaves are swept
Wildly before it, hundreds on hundreds fall
Huddling beneath the trees. With brag and brawl
Of storm the day is grown a tavern, kept
Of madness, where, with mantles torn and ripped
Of flying leaves that beat above it all,
The wild winds fight; and, like some half-spent ball,
The acorn stings the rout; and, silver-stripped,
The milkweed-pod winks an exhausted lamp:
Now, in his coat of tatters dark that streams,
The ragged rain sweeps stormily this way,
With all his clamorous followers--clouds that camp
Around the hearthstone of the west where gleams
The last chill flame of the expiring day.
THE JONGLEUR