Poems

  There is a place hung o'er of summer boughs  And dreamy skies wherein the gray hawk sleeps;  Where water flows, within whose lazy deeps,  Like silvery prisms where the sunbeams drowse,  The minnows twinkle; where the bells of cows  Tinkle the stillness; and the bobwhite keeps  Calling from meadows where the reaper reaps,  And children's laughter haunts an oldtime house:  A place where life wears ever an honest smell  Of hay and honey, sun and elder-bloom,—  Like some sweet, simple girl,—within her hair;  Where, with our love for comrade, we may dwell  Far from the city's strife, whose cares consume.—  Oh, take my hand and let me lead you there.

MENDICANTS

  Bleak, in dark rags of clouds, the day begins,  That passed so splendidly but yesterday,  Wrapped in magnificence of gold and gray,  And poppy and rose. Now, burdened as with sins,  Their wildness clad in fogs, like coats of skins,  Tattered and streaked with rain; gaunt, clogged with clay,  The mendicant Hours take their somber way  Westward o'er Earth, to which no sunray wins.  Their splashing sandals ooze; their foosteps drip,  Puddle and brim with moisture; their sad hair  Is tagged with haggard drops, that with their eyes'  Slow streams are blent; each sullen fingertip  Rivers; while round them, in the grief-drenched air  Wearies the wind of their perpetual sighs.

THE END OF SUMMER

  Pods the poppies, and slim spires of pods  The hollyhocks; the balsam's pearly bredes  Of rose-stained snow are little sacs of seeds  Collapsing at a touch: the lote, that sods  The pond with green, has changed its flowers to rods  And discs of vesicles; and all the weeds,  Around the sleepy water and its reeds,  Are one white smoke of seeded silk that nods.  Summer is dead, ay me! sweet Summer's dead!  The sunset clouds have built her funeral pyre,  Through which, e'en now, runs subterranean fire:  While from the east, as from a garden bed,  Mist-vined, the Dusk lifts her broad moon—like some  Great golden melon—saying, "Fall has come."

NOVEMBER

  The shivering wind sits in the oaks, whose limbs,  Twisted and tortured, nevermore are still;  Grief and decay sit with it; they, whose chill  Autumnal touch makes hectic-red the rims  Of all the oak leaves; desolating, dims  The ageratum's blue that banks the rill;  And splits the milkweed's pod upon the hill,  And shakes it free of the last seed that swims.  Down goes the day despondent to its close:  And now the sunset's hands of copper build  A tower of brass, behind whose burning bars  The day, in fierce, barbarian repose,  Like some imprisoned Inca sits, hate-filled,  Crowned with the gold corymbus of the stars.II  There is a booming in the forest boughs;  Tremendous feet seem trampling through the trees:  The storm is at his wildman revelries,  And earth and heaven echo his carouse.  Night reels with tumult; and, from out her house  Of cloud, the moon looks,—like a face one sees  In nightmare,—hurrying, with pale eyes that freeze  Stooping above with white, malignant brows.  The isolated oak upon the hill,  That seemed, at sunset, in terrific lands  A Titan head black in a sea of blood,  Now seems a monster harp, whose wild strings thrill  To the vast fingering of innumerable hands—  Spirits of tempest and of solitude.

THE DEATH OF LOVE

  So Love is dead, the Love we knew of old!  And in the sorrow of our hearts' hushed halls  A lute lies broken and a flower falls;  Love's house stands empty and his hearth lies cold.  Lone in dim places, where sweet vows were told,  In walks grown desolate, by ruined walls  Beauty decays; and on their pedestals  Dreams crumble and th' immortal gods are mold.  Music is slain or sleeps; one voice alone,  One voice awakes, and like a wandering ghost  Haunts all the echoing chambers of the Past—  The voice of Memory, that stills to stone  The soul that hears; the mind, that, utterly lost,  Before its beautiful presence stands aghast.

UNANSWERED

  How long ago it is since we went Maying!  Since she and I went Maying long ago!—  The years have left my forehead lined, I know,  Have thinned my hair around the temples graying.  Ah, time will change us: yea, I hear it saying—  "She too grows old: the face of rose and snow  Has lost its freshness: in the hair's brown glow  Some strands of silver sadly, too, are straying.  The form you knew, whose beauty so enspelled,  Has lost the litheness of its loveliness:  And all the gladness that her blue eyes held  Tears and the world have hardened with distress."—  "True! true!" I answer, "O ye years that part!  These things are chaned—but is her heart, her heart?"

UNCALLED

  As one, who, journeying westward with the sun,  Beholds at length from the up-towering hills,  Far-off, a land unspeakable beauty fills,  Circean peaks and vales of Avalon:  And, sinking weary, watches, one by one,  The big seas beat between; and knows it skills  No more to try; that now, as Heaven wills,  This is the helpless end, that all is done:  So 'tis with him, whom long a vision led  In quest of Beauty; and who finds at last  She lies beyond his effort; all the waves  Of all the world between them: while the dead,  The myriad dead, who people all the past  With failure, hail him from forgotten graves.