POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
written Respite, Kindred, To One Self-slain, At the Grand Cañon, The Night on the Mountain, The Muse of the Incommunicable, and this, the first of the Omnia Exeunt in Mysteriam series:
The stranger in my gates— lo! that am I,
And what my land of birth I do not know,
Nor yet the hidden land to which I go.
One may be lord of many ere he die,
And tell of many sorrows in one sigh,
But know himself he shall not, nor his woe,
Nor to what sea the tears of wisdom flow,
Nor why one star is taken from the sky.
An urging is upon him evermore,
And though he bide, his soul is wanderer.
Scanning the shadows with a sense of haste—
Where fade the tracks of all who went before:
A dim and solitary traveler
"On ways that end in evening and the waste.
It goes without saying that there are lovely lines, couplets, or quatrains on almost every page. But besides the above sonnets, the poems which seem to me most simple, sincere, and beautiful are A Possibility, In Babylon, Winter Sunset, and this, The Last Days:
The russet leaves of the sycamore
Lie at last on the valley floor—
By the autumn wind swept to and fro
Like ghosts in a tale of long ago.
Shallow and clear the Carmel glides
Where the willows droop on its vine-walled sides.
The bracken—rust is red on the hill
The pines stand brooding, somber and still;
Gray are the cliffs, and the waters gray,
Where the seagulls dip to the sea-born spray.
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