human
Can you continue this poem for me?
  Letters from Home
Sappho's Tomb
To even the casual reader of poetry who may chance to turn to the
It must be admitted, however, even in the face of this ingenious
probably the first rhymed poem written in England.
With the introduction of end-rhymes came the discovery that a
adventuring and pioneering along the path of future progress.
satisfied with the rhythm of Nature, whose heart-beats in their
predecessors have fashioned many rhythms that are pretty, many
mortality seeking expression.
The blue, blue sea,
And the drone of waves,
And the wheeling swallows,
And the sun on the opal sails,
And the misty and salt-bleached headlands,
And the milkweed thick at my feet,
And the milkweed held in the hand of a child
Who dreams on the misty cliff-edge,
Watching the fading sails
And the noonday blue
Of the lonely sea!
Was it all years ago,
Or was it but yesterday?
I only know that the scent
Of the milkweed brings it back,
Back with a strangle of tears:
The child and the misty headlands,
The drone of the dark blue sea,
And the opal sails
In the sun!
I am tired of the dust
And the fever and noise
And the meaningless faces of men;
And I want to go home!
Oh, day after day I get thinking of home
Where the black firs fringe the skyline,
And the birds wheel down the silence,
And the hemlocks whisper peace,
And the hill-winds cool the blood,
And the dusk is crowned with glory,
And the lone horizon softens,
And the world's at home with God!
Oh, I want to go there!
_I want to go home!_
A rind of light hangs low
On the rim of the world;
A sound of feet disturbs
The quiet of the cell
Where a rope and a beam looms high
At the end of the yard.
But in the dusk
Of that walled yard waits a woman;
And as the thing from its cell,
Still guarded and chained and bound,
Crosses that little space,
Silent, for ten brief steps,
A woman hangs on his neck.
_And that walk from a cell to a sleep
Is known as Life,
And those ten dark steps
Of tangled rapture and tears
Men still call Love._
Some day, O Seeker of Dreams, they will seek even us!
Some day they will wake, Fellow Singer, and hunger and want
So let us, Shy Weaver of Beauty, take heart,
For out of their dust they will call to us yet!
Let us wait, and sing, and be wise,
As the sea has waited and sung,
As the hills through the night have been wise!
And when they have learned of our lips,
Still back to our feet they will grope
For that ultimate essence and core of all song,
I have drunk deep
Of the well of bitterness.
Black hours have harried me,
Blind fate has bludgeoned my bent head,
And on my brow the iron crown
Of sorrow has been crushed.
And being mortal, I have cried aloud
At anguish ineluctable.
But over each black hour has hung
Forlorn this star of knowledge:
The path of pain too great to be endured
Leads always unto peace;
And when the granite road of anguish mounts
Up and still up to its one ultimate
And dizzy height of torture,
Softly it dips and meets
The valley of endless rest!
Summer is dead.
And love is gone.
And life is glad of this.
For sad were both, with having given much;
And bowed were both, with great desires fulfilled;
And both were grown too sadly wise
Ever to live again.
Too aged with hours o'er-passionate,
Too deeply sung by throats
That took no thought of weariness,
Moving too madly toward the crest of things,
Giving too freely of the fountaining sap,
Crowding too gladly into grass and leaves,
Breathing too blindly into flower and song!
Again the lyric hope may thrill the world,
Again the sap may sweeten into leaves,
Again will grey-eyed April come
With all her choiring throats;
But not to-day--
For the course is run.
And the cruse is full,
And the loin ungirt,
And the hour ordained!
And now there is need of rest;
And need of renewal there is;
And need of silence,
And need of sleep.
Too clear the light
Now lies on hill and valley;
And little is left to say,
And nothing is left to give.
Summer is dead;
And love is gone!
I am through with regret.
No more shall I kennel with pain.
I have called to this whimpering soul,
This soul that is sodden with tears
And sour with the reek of the years!
And now we shall glory in light!
Like a tatter of sail in the wind,
Like a tangle of net on the sand,
Like a hound stretched out in the heat,
My soul shall lie in the sun,
And be drowsy with peace,
And not think of the past!
Letters from Home, you said.
Unopened they lay on the shack-sill
As you stared with me at the prairie
And the foothills bathed with light.
Letters from Home, you whispered,
And the homeland casements shone
Through the homeland dusk again,
And the sound of the birds came back,
And the soft green sorrowing hills,
And the sigh of remembered names,
The wine of remembered youth,--
Oh, these came back,
Back with those idle words
Of "Letters from Home"!
Over such desolate leagues,
Over such sundering seas,
Out of the lost dead years,
After the days of waiting,
After the ache had died,
After the brine of failure,
After the outland peace
Of the trail that never turns back,
Now that the night-wind whispers
How Home shall never again be home,
And now that the arms of the Far-away
Have drawn us close to its breast,
Out of the dead that is proved not dead,
To waken the sorrow that should have died,
To tighten the throat that never shall sing,
To sadden the trails that we still must ride,
Too late they come to us here--
Our Letters from Home!
I watched the men at work on the stubborn rock,
But mostly the one man poised on a drill
Above the steam that hissed and billowed about him
White in the frosty air,
Where the lordly house would stand.
Majestic, muscular, high like a god,
He stood,
And controlled and stopped
And started his thundering drill,
Offhand and careless and lordly as Thor,
Begrimed and solemn and crowned with sweat,
Where the great steel chains swung over the buckets of rock.
Then out of a nearby house came a youth,
All gloved and encased in fur and touched with content,
Thin-shouldered and frail and finished,
Leading a house-dog out on a silver chain.
He peered at the figure that fought with the drill
Above the billowing steam and tumult of sound,
Peered up for a moment impassive,
With almost pitying eyes,
And then went pensively down the Avenue's calm,
In the clear white light of the noonday sun,
Not holding, but held by his silvery chain!
A village wrapped in slumber,
Silent between the hills,
Empty of moon-lit marketplace,
Empty of moving life--
Such is my quiet heart.
Shadowy-walled it rests,
Sleeping its heavy sleep;
But sudden across the dark
Tingles a sound of drums!
The drums, the drums, the distant drums,
The throb of the drums strikes up,
The beat of the drums awakes!
Then loud through the little streets,
And strange to the startled roofs,
The drums, the drums approach and pound,
And throb and clamour and thrill and pass,
And between the echoing house-walls
All swart and grim they go,
The battalions of regret,
After the drums, the valiant drums
That die away in the night!
I caught the smell of ether
From the glass-roofed room
Where the hospital stood.
Suddenly all about me
I felt a mist of anguish
And the old, old hour of dread
When Death had shambled by.
Yellow with time it is,
This letter on which I look;
But up from it comes a perfume
That stabs me still to the heart;
And suddenly, at the odour,
Through a ghost-like mist I know
Rapture and love and wild regret
When Life, and You, went by.
Mournful the summer moon
Rose from the quiet sea.
Golden and sad and full of regret
As though it would ask of earth
Where all her lovers had vanished
And whither had gone the rose-red lips
That had sighed to her light of old.
Then I caught a pulse of music,
Brokenly, out at the pier-end,
And I heard the voices of girls
Going home in the dark,
Laughing along the sea-wall
Over a lover's word!
In an old and ashen island,
Beside a city grey with death,
They are seeking Sappho's tomb!
Beneath a vineyard ruinous
And a broken-columned temple
They are delving where she sleeps!
There between a lonely valley
Filled with noonday silences
And the headlands of soft violet
Where the sapphire seas still whisper,
Whisper with her sigh;
Through a country sad with wonder
Men are seeking vanished Sappho,
Men are searching for the tomb
Of muted Song!
They will find a Something there,
In a cavern where no sound is,
In a room of milky marble
Walled with black amphibolite
Over-scored with faded words
And stained with time!
Sleeping in a low-roofed chamber,
With her phials of perfume round her,
In a terra-cotta coffin
With her image on the cover,
Childish echo of her beauty
Etched in black and gold barbaric--
Lift it slowly, slowly, seekers,
Or your search will end in dust!
With a tiny nude Astarte,
Bright with gilt and gravely watching
Over grass-green malachite,
Over rubies pale, and topaz,
And the crumbled dust of pearls!
With her tarnished silver mirror,
With her rings of beaten gold,
With her robes of faded purple,
And the stylus that so often
Traced the azure on her eyelids,--
Eyelids delicate and weary,
Drooping, over-wise!
And at her head will be a plectron
Made of ivory, worn with time,
And a flute and gilded lyre
Will be found beside her feet,
And two little yellow sandals,
And crude serpents chased in silver
On her ankle rings--
And a cloud of drifting dust
All her shining hair!
In that lost and lonely tomb
They may find her;
Find the arms that ached with rapture,
Softly folded on a breast
That for evermore is silent;
Find the eyes no longer wistful,
Find the lips no longer singing,
And the heart, so hot and wayward
When that ashen land was young,
Cold through all the mists of time,
Cold beneath the Lesbian marble
In the low-roofed room
That drips with tears!
In the dead of the night
You turned in your troubled sleep
As you heard the wild swans pass;
And then you slept again.
You slept--
While a new world swam beneath
That army of eager wings,
While plainland and slough and lake
Lay wide to those outstretched throats,
While the far lone Lights allured
That phalanx of passionate breasts.
And I who had loved you more
Than a homing bird loves flight,--
I watched with an ache for freedom,
I rose with a need for life,
Knowing that love had passed
Into its unknown North!
O odour of incense, pride of purple and gold,
Burst of music and praise, and passion of flute and pipe!
O voices of silver o'er-sweet, and soothing antiphonal chant!
O Harmony, ancient, ecstatic, a-throb to the echoing roof,
And glimmer of gold and taper, and throbbing, insistent pipe--
If song and emotion and music were all--
Were it only all!
For see, dark heart of mine,
How the singers have ceased and gone!
See, how all of the music is lost and the lights are low,
And how, as our idle arms, these twin ineloquent towers
Grope up through the old inaccessible Night to His stars!
And, lost in the gloom, to His frontiers old I turn
Where glimmer those sentinel fires,
Beyond which, Dark Heart, we two
Some night must steal us forth,
Quite naked, and alone!
I lounge on the deck of the river-steamer,
Homeward bound with its load,
Churning from headland to headland,
Through moonlight and silence and dusk.
And the decks are alive with laughter and music and singing,
And I see the forms of the sleepers
And the shadowy lovers that lean so close to the rail,
And the romping children behind,
And the dancers amidships.
But high above us there in the gloom,
Where the merriment breaks like a wave at his feet,
Unseen of lover and dancer and me,
Is the Pilot, impassive and stern,
With his grim eyes watching the course.
Are they,
That falter through the gloom,
That echo through the lonely chambers
Of our house of life?
Did a door close?
Did a whisper waken?
Did a ghostly something
Sigh across the dusk?
From the mournful silence
Something, something went!
Far down some shadowy passage
Faintly closed a door--
And O how empty lies
Our house of life!
You stood alone
In the dusky window,
Watching the racing river.
Touched with a vague unrest,
And if tired of loving too much
More troubled at heart to find
That the flame of love could wither
And the wonder of love could pass,
You kneeled at the window-ledge
And stared through the black-topped maples
Where an April robin fluted,--
Stared idly out
At the flood-time sweep of the river,
Silver and paling gold
In the ghostly April twilight.
Shadowy there in the dusk
You watched with shadowy eyes
The racing, sad, unreasoning
Hurrying torrent of silver
Seeking its far-off sea.
Faintly I heard you sigh,
And faintly I heard the robin's flute,
And faintly from rooms remote
Came a broken murmur of voices.
And life, for a breath, stood bathed
In a wonder crowned with pain,
And immortal the moment hung;
And I know that the thought of you
There at the shadowy window,
And the matted black of the maples,
And the sunset call of a bird,
And the sad wide reaches of silver,
Will house in my haunted heart
The pines shake and the winds wake,
And the dark waves crowd the sky-line!
The birds wheel out on a troubled sky;
The widening road runs white and long,
And the page is turned,
And the world is tired!
So I want no more of twilight sloth,
And I want no more of resting,
And of all the earth I ask no more
Than the green sea, the great sea,
The long road, the white road,
And a change of life to-day!
If I love you, woman of rose
And warmth and wondering eyes,
If it so fall out
That you are the woman I choose,
Oh, what is there left to say,
And what should it matter to me,
Or what can it mean to you?
For under the two white breasts
And the womb that makes you woman
The call of the ages whispers
And the countless ghosts awaken,
And stronger than sighs and weeping
The urge that makes us one,
And older than hate or loving or shame
This want that builds the world!
What shall I care for the ways
Of these idle and thin-flanked women in silk
And the lisping men-shadows that trail at their heels?
What are they worth in my world
Or the world that I want,
These flabby-armed, indolent, delicate women
And these half-women daring to call themselves men
Yet afraid to get down to the earth
And afraid of the wind,
Afraid of the truth,
And so sadly afraid of themselves?
How can they help me in trouble and death?
How can they keep me from hating my kind?
Oh, I want to get out of their coffining rooms,
I want to walk free with a man,
A man who has lived and dared
And swung through the cycle of life!
God give me a man for a friend
Give me a man with his heel on the neck of Hate,
With his fist in the face of Death,
A man not fretted with womanish things,
Unafraid of the light,
Of the worm in the lip of a corpse,
Unafraid of the call from the cell of his heart,--
God give me a man for friend!
When the sun is high,
And the hills are happy with light,
Then virile and strong I am!
Then ruddy with life I fare,
The fighter who feels no dread,
The roamer who knows no bounds,
The hunter who makes the world his prey,
And shouting and swept with pride,
Still mounts to the lonelier height!
In the cool of the day,
When the huddling shadows swarm,
And the ominous eyes look out
And night slinks over the swales
And the silence is chill with death,
Then I am the croucher beside the coals,
The lurker within the shadowy cave,
Who listens and mutters a charm
And trembles and waits,
A hunted thing grown
Afraid of the hunt,
A silence enisled in silence,
A wonder enwrapped in awe!
I saw a woman stand
Under the seas of bloom,
Under the waves of colour and light,
The showery snow and rose of the odorous trees
That made a glory of earth.
She stood where the petals fell,
And her hands were on her breast,
And her lips were touched with wonder,
And her eyes were full of pain--
For pure she was, and young,
Quietly I closed the door.
Then I said to my soul:
"I shall never come back,
Back to this haunted room
Where Sorrow and I have slept."
I turned from that hated door
And passed through the House of Life,
Through its ghostly rooms and glad
And its corridors dim with age.
Then lightly I crossed a threshold
Where the casements showed the sun
And I entered an unknown room,--
And my heart went cold,
For about me stood that Chamber of Pain
I had thought to see no more!
I am desolate,
Desolate because of a woman.
When at midnight walking alone
I look up at the slow-wheeling stars,
I see only the eyes of this woman.
In bird-haunted valleys and by-ways secluded,
Where once I sought peace,
I find now only unrest
And this one unaltering want.
When the dawn-wind stirs in the pine-tops
I hear only her voice's whisper.
When by day I gaze into the azure above me
I see only the face of this woman.
In the sunlight I cannot find comfort,
Nor can I find peace in the shadows.
Neither can I take joy in the hill-wind,
Nor find solace on kindlier breasts;
For deep in the eyes of all women I watch
I see only her eyes stare back.
Nor can I shut the thought of her out of my heart
And the ache for her out of my hours.
Ruthlessly now she invades even my dreams
And wounds me in sleep;
And my body cries out for her,
Early and late and forever cries out for her,
And her alone,--
_And I want this woman!_
I am sick at heart because of this woman;
I am lost to shame because of my want;
And mine own people have come to mean naught to me;
And with many about me still am I utterly alone,
And quite solitary now I take my way
Where men are intent on puny things
And phantasmal legions pace!
And a wearisome thing is life,
And forever the shadow of this one woman
Is falling across my path.
The turn in the road is a promise of her.
The twilight is thronged with her ghosts;
The grasses speak only of her,
The leaves whisper her name forever;
The odorous fields are full of her.
Her lips, I keep telling myself,
Are a cup from which I must drink;
Her breast is the one last pillow
Whereon I may ever find peace!
Yet she has not come to me,
And being denied her, everything stands denied,
And all men who have waited in vain for love
Cry out through my desolate heart;
And the want of the hungering world
Runs like fire through my veins
And bursts from my throat in the cry
_That I want this woman!_
I am possessed of a great sickness
And likewise possessed of a great strength,
And the ultimate hour has come.
I will arise and go unto this woman,
And with bent head and my arms about her knees
I shall say unto her: "Beloved beyond all words,
Others have sought your side,
And many have craved your kiss,
But none, O body of flesh and bone,
Has known a hunger like mine!
And though evil befall, or good,
This hunger is given to me,
And is now made known to you,--
For I must die,
Or you must die,
Or Desire must die
This night!"
In the white-walled room
Where the white bed waits
Stand banks of meaningless flowers;
In the rain-swept street
Are a ghost-like row of cabs;
And along the corridor-dusk
Phantasmal feet repass.
Through the warm, still air
The odour of ether hangs;
And on this slenderest thread
Of one thin pulse
Hangs and swings
The hope of life--
The life of her
I love!
You bid me to sleep,--
But why, O Daughter of Beauty,
Was beauty thus born in the world?
Since out of these shadowy eyes
The wonder shall pass!
And out of this surging and passionate breast
The dream shall depart!
And out of these delicate rivers of warmth
The fire shall wither and fail!
And youth like a bird from your body shall fly!
And Time like a fang on your flesh shall feed!
And this perilous bosom that pulses with love
Shall go down to the dust from which it arose,--
Yet Daughter of Beauty, close,
Close to its sumptuous warmth
You hold my sorrowing head,
And smile with shadowy eyes,
And bid me to sleep again!
The opal afternoon
Is cool, and very still.
A wash of tawny air,
Sea-green that melts to gold,
Bathes all the skyline, hill by hill.
Out of the black-topped pinelands
A black crow calls,
And the year seems old!
A woman from a doorway sings,
And from the valley-slope a sheep-dog barks,
And through the umber woods the echo falls.
Then silence on the still world lies,
And faint and far the birds fly south,
And behind the dark pines drops the sun,
And a small wind wakes and sighs,
And Summer, see, is done!
Alone amid the Rockies I have stood;
Alone across the prairie's midnight calm
Full often I have fared
And faced the hushed infinity of night;
Alone I have hung poised
Between a quietly heaving sea
And quieter sky,
Aching with isolation absolute;
And in Death's Valley I have walked alone
And sought in vain for some appeasing sign
Of life or movement,
While over-desolate my heart called out
For some befriending face
Or some assuaging voice!
But never on my soul has weighed
Such loneliness as this,
As here amid the seething London tides
I look upon these ghosts that come and go,
These swarming restless souls innumerable,
Who through their million-footed dirge of unconcern
Must know and nurse the thought of kindred ghosts
As lonely as themselves,
Or else go mad with it!
That Spring by Spring the Earth shall still be beautiful,
And Summer by Summer be lovely again,
--And I shall be gone!"
"I would not care, perhaps," you said, watching your roses,
"If only 'twere dust and ruin and emptiness left behind!
But the thought that Earth and April
Year by casual year
Shall waken around the old ways, soft and beautiful,
Year by year when I am away,
--This, this breaks my heart!"
I watched the workers in steel,
The Pit-like glow of the furnace,
The rivers of molten metal,
The tremulous rumble of cranes,
The throb of the Thor-like hammers
On sullen and resonant anvils!
I saw the half-clad workers
Twisting earth's iron to their use,
Shaping the steel to their thoughts;
And, in some way, out of the fury
And the fires of mortal passion,
It seemed to me,
In some way, out of the torture
And tumult of inchoate Time,
The hammer of sin is shaping
The soul of man!
The city is old in sin,
And children are not for cities,
And, wan-eyed woman, you want them not,
You say with a broken laugh.
Yet out of each wayward softness of voice,
And each fulness of breast,
And each flute-throated echo of song,
Each flutter of lace and quest of beautiful things,
Each coil of entangling hair built into its crown,
Each whisper and touch in the silence of night,
Each red unreasoning mouth that is lifted to mouth,
Each whiteness of brow that is furrowed no more with thought,
Each careless soft curve of lips that can never explain,
Arises the old and the inappeasable cry!
Every girl who leans from a tenement sill
And flutters a hand to a youth,
Every woman who waits for a man in the dusk,
Every harlotous arm flung up to a drunken heel
That would trample truth down in the dust,
Reaches unknowingly out for its own,
And blind to its heritage waits
For its child!
Remote, in some dim room,
On this dark April morning soft with rain,
I hear her pensive touch
Fall aimless on the keys,
And stop, and play again.
And as the music wakens
And the shadowy house is still,
How all my troubled soul cries out
For things I know not of!
Ah, keen the quick chords fall,
And weighted with regret,
Fade through the quiet rooms;
And warm as April rain
The strange tears fall,
And life in some way seems
Too deep to bear!
Over my home-sick head,
High in the paling light
And touched with the sunset's glow,
Soaring and strong and free,
The unswerving phalanx sweeps,
The honking wild geese go,--
Go with a flurry of wings
Home to their norland lakes
And the sedge-fringed tarns of peace
And the pinelands soft with Spring!
I cannot go as the geese go,
But into the steadfast North,
The North that is dark and tender,
My home-sick spirit wings,--
Wings with a flurry of longing thoughts
And nests in the tarns of youth.
Dewy, dewy lawn-slopes,
Is this the day she comes?
O wild-flower face of Morning,
Must you never wake?
Silvery, silvery sea-line,
Does she come to-day?
O murmurous, murmurous birch-leaves,
Beneath your whispering shadow
She will surely pass;
And thrush beneath the black-thorn
And white-throat in the pine-top,
Sing as you have never sung,
For she will surely come!
The lone green of the lawn-slope,
The grey light on the sky-line,
The mournful stir of birch-leaves,
The thin note of the brown thrush,
And the call of troubled white-throats
Across the afternoon!--
Ah, Summer now is over,
And for us the season closed,
For she who came an hour ago
Has gone again--
Has gone!
God knows that I've tinkled and jingled and strummed,
That I've piped it and jigged it until I'm fair sick of the game,
I want to throw off the shackles and chains of time,
I want to sit down with my soul and talk straight out,
I want to make peace with myself,
And say what I have to say,
While still there is time!
Yea, I will arise and go forth, I have said,
To the uplands of truth, to be free as the wind,
Rough and unruly and open and turbulent-throated!
Yea, I will go forth and fling from my soul
The shackles and chains of song!
But, lo, on my wrists are the scars,
And here on my ankles the chain-galls,
And the cell-pallor, see, on my face!
And my throat seems thick with the cell-dust,
And for guidance I grope to the walls,
And after my moment of light
I want to go back to the Dark,
Since the Open still makes me afraid,
And silence seems best in the sun,
And song in the dusk!
I feel all primal and savage to-day.
I could eat and drink deep and love strong
I could fight and exult and boast and be glad!
I could tear out the life of a wild thing and laugh at it!
I could crush into panting submission the breast of a woman
A-stray from her tribe and her smoke-stained tent-door!
I could glory in folly and fire and ruin,
And race naked-limbed with the wind,
And slink on the heels of my foes
And dabble their blood on my brows--
For to-day I am sick of it all,
This silent and orderly empty life,
And I feel all savage again!
Black with a batter of mud
Stippled with silvery pools
Stands the pavement at the street-end;
And the gutter snow is gone
From cobble and runnelling curb;
And no longer the ramping wind
Is rattling the rusty signs;
And moted and soft and misty
Hangs the sunlight over the cross-streets,
And the home-bound crowds of the city
Walk in a flood of gold.
And suddenly out of the dusk
There comes the ancient question:
Can it be that I have lived
In earlier worlds unknown?
Or is it that somewhere deep
In this husk that men call Me
Are kennelled a motley kin
I never shall know or name,--
Are housed still querulous ghosts
That sigh and awaken and move,
And sleep once more?
I am only a note in the chorus,
A leaf in the fluttering June,
A wave on the deep.
These things that I struggle to utter
Have all been uttered before.
In many another heart
The selfsame song was born,
The ancient ache endured,
The timeless wonder faced,
The unanswered question nursed,
The resurgent hunger felt,
And the eternal failure known!
But glad is the lip of its whisper;
The wave, of its life;
The leaf, of its lisp;
And glad for its hour is my soul
For its echo of godlier music,
Its fragment of song!
The thin gold of the sun lies slanting on the hill;
In the sorrowful greys and muffled violets of the old orchard
A group of girls are quietly gathering apples.
Through the mingled gloom and green they scarcely speak at all,
And their broken voices rise and fall unutterably sad.
There are no birds,
And the goldenrod is gone.
And a child calls out, far away, across the autumn twilight;
And the sad grey of the dusk grows slowly deeper,
And all the world seems old!
I tire of these empty masks,
These faces of city women
That seem so vapid and well-controlled.
I get tired of their guarded ways
And their eyes that are always empty
Of either passion or hate
Or promise or love,
And that seem to be old
And are never young!
I think of the homelier faces
That I have seen,
The vital and open faces
In the by-ways of the world:
A Polish girl who met
Her lover one wintry morning
Outside the gaol at Ossining;
A lean young Slav violinist
And the steerage women about him,
Held by the sound of his music;
A young and deep-bosomed Teuton
Suckling her shawl-wrapped child
On a grey stone bridge in Detmold;
A group of girls from Ireland,
Crowding the steps of a colonist-car
And singing half-sadly together
As their train rocked on and on
Over the sun-bathed prairie;
A mournful Calabrian mother
Standing and staring out
Past the mists of Ischia
After a fading steamer;
A Nautch girl held by a sailor
Who'd taken a knife from her fingers
But not the fire from her eyes;
And a silent Sicilian mother
Standing alone in the Marina
Awaiting her boy who had been
Long years away!--
These I remember!
And of these
I never tire!
There is strength in the soil;
In the earth there is laughter and youth.
There is solace and hope in the upturned loam.
And lo, I shall plant my soul in it here like a seed!
And forth it shall come to me as a flower of song;
For I know it is good to get back to the earth
That is orderly, placid, all-patient!
It is good to know how quiet
And noncommittal it breathes,
This ample and opulent bosom
That must some day nurse us all!
On opal Aprilian mornings like this
I seem dizzy and drunk with life.
I waken and wander and laugh in the sun;
With some mystical knowledge enormous
I lift up my face to the light.
Drunk with a gladness stupendous I seem;
With some wine of Immensity god-like I reel;
And my arm could fling Time from His throne;
I could pelt the awed taciturn arch
Of Morning with music and mirth;
And I feel, should I find but a voice for my thought,
That the infinite orbits of all God's loneliest stars
That are weaving vast traceries out on the fringes of Night
Could never stand more than a hem on the robe of my Song!
My heart stood empty and bare,
So I hung it with thoughts of a woman.
The remembered ways of this woman
Hung sweet in my heart.
So I followed where thought should lead,
And it led to her feet.
But the mouth of this woman was pain,
And the love of this woman, regret;
And now only the thought
Of all those remembered thoughts
Of remembered ways,
Is shut in my heart!
When they flagged our train because of a broken rail,
I stepped down out of the crowded car,
With its clamour and dust and heat and babel of broken talk.
I stepped out into the cool, the velvet cool, of the night,
And felt the balm of the prairie-wind on my face,
And somewhere I heard the running of water,
I felt the breathing of grass,
And I knew, as I saw the great white stars,
That the world was made for good!
There's a poet tombed in you,
Man of blood and iron!
There's a dreamer dead and buried
Deep beneath your cynic frown,
Deep beneath your toil!
And deep beneath my music,
There's a strong man stirs in me;
There's a ghost of blood and granite
Coffined in this madness
You live your day and drain it;
I weave my dream and lose it;
But the red blood lost in me awakens still at times,
At all your city's sky-line,
At all your roaring market-place,
At all its hum of power--
And the poet dead within you stirs
Still at the plaintive note or two
Of a dreamer's plaintive song!
Glad with the wine of life,
Reeling I go my way,
Drunk with the ache of living
And mouthing my drunken song!
Then comes the lucid moment
And the shadow across the lintel;
And I hear the ghostly whisper,
And I glimpse with startled eyes
The Door beyond the doorway,
And I see the small dark house
Where I must sleep.
Then song turns sour on my lips,
And the warmth goes out of my blood,
And I turn me back to the beaker,
And re-draining my cup of dream,
I drown the whispering voices,
I banish the ghostly question
As to which in the end is true:
The wine and the open road?
Or the waiting Door?
Empty it seems, at times, their cry about Love,
Their claim that love is the only thing that survives.
For I who am born of my centuries strewn with hate,
Who was spewed into life from a timeless tangle of sin,
I can hate as strong and as long as I love!
There are hours and issues I hate;
There are creeds and deeds and doubts I hate;
There are men I hate to the uttermost;
And although in their graves they listen and weep,
Earth's mothers and wistful women who cried for peace,
I hate this King of Evil who has crowned my heart with Hate!
I lay by your side last night.
By you, in my dreams,
I felt the damp of the grave.
I was dead with you--
And my bones still ache with Death.
For my hand went out and I touched your lips,
And I found them fallen away,
Wasted and lost!
Those lips once warm with life
Were eaten and gone!
And my soul screamed out in the dark
At the intimate blackness of Death.
And then I arose from the dead
And returned to the day;
And my bones and my heart still ache with it all,
And I hunger to hear the relieving babble of life,
The crowd in the hurrying street,
The tumult and laughter and talk,
To make me forget!
One room in my heart shall be closed, I said;
One chamber at least in my soul shall be secret and locked!
I shall hold it my holy of holies, and no one shall know it!
But you, calm woman predestined, with casual hands,
You came with this trivial key,
And ward by obdurate ward the surrendering lock fell back,
And disdainfully now you wander and brood and wait
In this room that I thought was my own!
It isn't the Sea that I love,
But the ships
That must dare and endure and defy and survive it!
It isn't the flesh that I love,
But the spirit
That guides and derides and controls and outlives it!
It isn't this earth that I love,
But the mortals
Who give to it meaning and colour and passion and life!
For what is the Sea without ships?
And what is the flesh without soul?
And what is a world without love?
You have said that I sold
My life for a song;
Laid bare my heart
That men might listen
And go their ways--
My inchoate heart
That I dare not plumb,
That goes unbridled
To the depths of Hell,
That sings in the sun
To the brink of Heaven!
I have tossed you the spindrift
Born of its fretting
On its shallowest coast,
But over the depths of it
Bastioned in wonder
And silent with fear
God sits with me!
All my lean life
I garnered nothing but a dream or two,
These others gathered harvests
And grew fat with grain.
But no man lives by bread,
And bread alone.
So, forgetful of their scorn,
When starved, they cried for life,
I gave them my last dreams,
I bared for them my heart,
That they might eat!
A canyon of granite and steel,
A river of grim unrest,
And over the fever and street-dust
Arches the azure of dream.
And fretting along the tumult,
Threading the iron curbs,
Tawdry in tinsel and feather
Drift the daughters of pleasure,
The sad-eyed traders in song,
The makers of joy,
The Columbines of the city
Seeking their ends!
But under the beaded eye-lash,
Under the lip with its rouge,
Under the mask of white
Splashed with geranium-red,
As God's own arch of azure
Leans softly over the street,
Surely, this day, runs warmer
assistant
Sure, a continuation for this poem could be:
  The blood through a wasted breast!
Must I round my life to a song,
As the waves wear smooth the shore-stone?
Shall the mortal beat and throb
Of this heart of mine
Be only to crumble a dream,
And fashion the pebbles of fancy,
That the tides of time may cover,
Or a child may find?
Little in truth it matters;
But this at the most I know:
Infinite is the ocean
That thunders upon man's soul,
And the sooner the soul falls broken,
The smoother will be its song!
Ere the thread is loosed,
And the sands run low,
And the last hope fails,
Wherever we fare,
May it fall that we come in the end,
Come back to the crimson valleys,
Back to the northern pine-lands,
And the grey lakes draped with silence,
And the sunlight thin and poignant,
And the leaf that flutters earthward,
And the skyline green and lonely,
And the ramparts of the dead world
Ruddy with wintry rose!
May we fare, O Fond and True,
Through our soft-houred Indian Summer,
Through the paling twilight weather,
And facing the lone green uplands,
And greeting the sun-warmed hills,
Step into the pineland shadows
And enter the sunset valley
And go as the glory goes
Out of the dreaming autumn,
Out of the drifting leaf
And the dying light!
If I tire of you, beautiful woman,
I know that the fault is mine;
Yet not all mine the failure
And not all mine the loss!
In loveliness still you walk;
But I have walked with sorrow!
I have threaded narrows,
And I have passed through perils
That you know nothing of!
And I in my grief have gazed
In eyes that were not yours;
And my emptier hours have known
The sigh of kindlier bosoms,
The kiss of kindlier mouths!
Yet the end of all is written,
And nothing, O rose-leaf woman,
You ever may dream or do
Henceforth can bring me anguish
Or crown my days with joy!
_Three tears, O stately woman,
You said could float your soul,
So little a thing it seemed!
Yet all that's left of life
I'd give to know your love,
I'd give to show my love,
And feel your kiss again!_
I sat in the sunlight thinking of life;
I sat there, dreaming of Death.
And a moth alit on the sun-dial's face,
And the birds sang sleepily,
And the leaves stirred,
And the sun lay warm on the hills,
And the afternoon grew old.
So, some day I knew the birds would sing,
And the leaves would stir,
And the afternoon grow old--
And I would not be there.
And the warmth went out of the day,
And a wind blew out of the West where I sat,
And the birds were still!