The roamer and other poems/Sonnets and Lyrics
SONNETS AND LYRICS
THE OLD HOUSE
O kindly house, where time my soul endowsWith courage, hope, and patience manifold,How shall my debt of love to thee be told,Since first I heard the sweet-voiced robins rouseThe morn among thy ancient apple-boughs?Here was I nourished on the truths of old,Here taught against new times to make me bold,Memory and hope thy door-posts, O dear house!
Heaven's blessing rested on thy dark-gray roof,And clasped thy children, age to lapsing age,Birth and the grave thy tale till time's release;Poverty did not hold from thee aloof;Of lowly good thou wast the hermitage;Now falls the evening light. God give thee peace!
THE ROCK
Slow sloping to its point pyramidal,A brown rock rises from the ocean waste;Seaward, great billows there incessant hasteAnd to their shoreward brethren flash and call.I see the vast horizon rise and fall,As when my blood with many raptures raced;And on that pointed rock, by heaven embraced,I see a maiden lifted over all.
As shines the rose above inferior flowers,So sprang her beauty up, supreme to be;As comes the rainbow on departing showers,So bloomed and faded that fair memory;So stood she "on the top of happy hours,"And drank the sunrise glory of the sea.
THE LILIES
Ever the garden has a spiritual word:In the slow lapses of unnoticed timeIt drops from heaven, or upward learns to climb,Breathing an earthly sweetness, as a birdIs in the porches of the morning heard;So, in the garden, flower to flower will chime,And with the music thought and feeling rhyme,And the hushed soul is with new glory stirred.
Beauty is silent,—through the summer daySleeps in her gold,—O wondrous sunlit gold,Frosting the lilies' virginal array!Green, full-leaved walls the fragrant sculpture hold,Warm, orient blooms!—how motionless are they—Speechless—the eternal loveliness untold!
THE MALLOWS
How delicate they stand above the box,Against the fragile breath of summer seenWithin the garden's walls of emerald green(Dull cloistral hedges) and tall hollyhocksStarring the flowery distance! airy flocksOf veinèd petals hover there, and lean,Turned earthward, toward us, in the hush and sheen,—Our mallows, once more in the well-loved walks!
Oh, blest succession of the lengthening years,That brings again our annual holiday,And beautifies this season of our tearsWith former sights, and the familiar ray,Shining upon us from above the spheres,While flower and shrub keep the old heavenly way!
TO A. S.
On receiving His Work on Milton
Georgia! the very name is flower and sun,And bourgeons like the summer! straight I seeThe robins in your china-berry tree,A rosy host, ere day is well begun,And the red-headed woodpeckers that runAbout the humming poles' telegraphy,Hunting the fancied worm!—But here, with me,Your rose-japonica, too soon undone,
Lies dead. Me, in my northern hermitage,The "dark" and "miry" ways of March confine,Who once was free of Enna and Palerm:I sooth the rugged clime with bard and sage,And mend the sullen fates, this book of thineMy solace, that doth the inward sight confirm.
PICQUART
Picquart, no brighter name on times to beThy country raises, nor all Europe vaunts,Thou star of honor on the breast of France,Soldier of justice; all men honor theeWho to false honor would'st not bow the knee,Nor parley with the time's intolerance;Thou art of those to whom the whole world grantsThe meed of universal memory.
Loyal to more than to thy sabre vows,Kissed on the sword and hallowed oft with blood;True to thy land's ideal of equal laws;Champion of human rights; about thy brows,Thy battles done, how fair thy laurels bud,Thou lying dead, a victor in man's cause!
A LAMENT
Dizzily dropping, to the gulf I fall,The bright bolt in my brain!Vainly upon the heavenly gods I call,Murmuring a mortal's pain.
Deep under deep receives me, and no wingBears up the astonished soul:—Only the fire-eyed stars have ceased to sing.And the gray sea to roll.
GOLDEN FRAGMENTS
"THOU CREATIVE SILENCE STRANGE!"
Hath the lily breathed to the rootWhat stars from it shall shoot?What bloom life hath in its fragrant hour,Hath the seed told the flower?Hath the dark whispered to the sunWhat heaven shall be when day is done?—Thou Creative Silence strange,Dumbly bear us, change through change!
THE EBB
Like echoing cliffs above my bloodMy senses are; with passion roarsThe ear, eyes darken,—life's abud!But when love ebbs,—Atlantic shoresSorrow not so when the sea's floodBack on the sea's heart pours.
THE CHEAT
When my tiny hands would holdSticks and straw, they turned to gold. Life reverses fairy law,The wealth I hold turns sticks and straw.'Tis a cheat, whichever way,Boy or man, with gold we play.
VALE!
Rear who will a marble pile!Of death I know but this:No rising sun gives back thy smile,No darkness yields thy kiss.
THE STATUE
All flawed in beauty, shorn of fate,Deep droops yon statue, sad at heart;Some Greek isle hides his lovely mate,And robs his form of perfect art.
THE ONYX
Love, the sexton, from the sodGave me this onyx; prize it, you;A carven Eros, graved "Adieu!"—Who breaks the image, finds the god.
SONGS UNSUNG
Ye songs unknown, unuttered,That flutter in me unsung,Would ye had left my bosomIn the days when I was young!
Then had ye flown o'er the sea-wasteAnd drunk of the outer foam,Perchance, in the gray of the morning,Ye had found it,—found it,—home!
Had ye soared in the azure distance,Had ye cloven the sun, above,Perchance, in the unknown heaven,Ye had found it,—unknown love!
L'ENVOY
My song is not for the old,Whose day is done, whose blood is cold;Nor for the safe is it,Mummies of wealth and wit;But it shall be understoodOf youth and the great life-lovers,Lost adventurers and far rovers,And the eagles of the brood,—Evokers of diviner powersDark in the ether-wave,Who heap the couch of life with flowersAnd line with love the grave.