Chapter X: Rays

Your eyes were gem-like in that dim deep chamber
Hushed and sombre with imprisoned fire,
With yellow ghostly globes of intense aether
Potent as the rays of pure desire.

Your voice was startled into vivid wonder,
When the winged wild whining mystic wheel
Took flight and shot the dark with frosty crashings
Like an ice-berg splitting to the keel.

Your flesh was never warmer to my passion
Than when, moving in that lumor green,
We saw with eyes our fragile bones enamoured
Clasping sadly on the pallid screen.

You seemed so virginal and so undreaming
Of the burning hunger in my eyes,
To peer more fever-deeply in your being
Than the very death of passion lies.

The subtle-tuned shy motions of your spirit,
Fashioned through the ages for the sun,
Were dumb in that green lustre-haunted cavern
Where you walked a naked skeleton;

Slim-hipped and fluent and of lovely motion,
Living to the tip of every bone,
And ah, too exquisitely vivid-moving
Ever to lie wanly down alone--

To lie forever down so still and slender,
Tracing on the ancient screen of night
That naked and pale writing of the wonder
Of your beauty breathing in the light.

SONNETS

A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS

Although so complex and difficult to construct, the sonnet has always seemed to me a natural and almost inevitable form. Whether the reason lies in its intrinsic nature, or in the tradition that surrounds it, is not easy to tell. A sonnet is almost exactly square, and yet it has a division sufficiently off the centre to make its squareness admirable instead of tiresome; and perhaps this simple trait, together with its closely woven structure of rhyme, is what gives it the quiet assurance it has--the tranquil rightness of a thing of nature or natural convenience. I feel towards an excellent sonnet as I imagine an eager horse may feel towards a good measure tightly filled up with golden grain.

This feeling is due partly to a kind of honesty of which the squareness of a sonnet is symbolic. It is a form in which poets can express themselves when they are not rhapsodically excited. And very often they are not so excited, and at such times if they write rapid lyrics they have to whip themselves up with an emotion that they get out of the writing rather than out of the facts. And this makes much lyric poetry seem a little histrionic, whereas in order to create a sonnet at all, a concentration and sustainment of feeling is required that is inevitably equal to its more temperate pretensions.

The quality of being inevitably and honestly square may become a dreadful thing, however. And it makes this form inappropriate for persons who have not at least a certain degree of lyrical taste. In the hands of such persons a sonnet is not a poem, but an enterprise. They get inside that square with a whole lot of materials, colors and sounds and old clothes of ideas, and they push them round, and if they can not make them fill in properly and come up to the edges, they climb out and get some more. And the result is so palpably spreadout an object, always with lumps of imagery here and there, that it can not even be received in the linear sequence that is natural to the eye and ear.

This fault can be avoided by having strongly in mind while composing a sonnet, the virtues not specifically its own--the clarity, the running and pouring in single stream, that are the qualities of song. And to these qualities the strict convention of its rhymes and the traditional relation of the sonnet's parts, ought to give way when there is a conflict between them, for if a poem has not rhapsody, it is the more important that it should have grace. At least that is my opinion, and I offer this preface, in expiatory rather than boastful vein, to those high priests of perfection who guard the sonnet as a kind of lonely reliquary of their god.

A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT

You love me not as I love, or when I
Grow listless of the crimson of your lips,
And turn not to your burning finger-tips,
You would show fierce and feverish your eye,
And hotly my numb wilfulness decry,
Holding your virtues over me like whips,
And stinging with the visible eclipse
Of that sweet poise of life I crucify!

How can you pass so proudly from my face,
With all the tendrils of your passion furled,
So adequate and animal in grace,
As one whose mate is only all the world!
I never taste the sweet exceeding thought
That you might love me, though I loved you not!

THOSE YOU DINED WITH

They would have made you like a pageant, bold
And nightly festive, lustre-lit for them,
And round your beauty, like a dusky gem,
Have poured the glamour of the pride of gold;
And you would lie in life as in her bed
The mistress of a pale king, indolent,
Though hot her limbs and strong her languishment,
And her deep spirit is unvisited.

But I would see you like a gypsy, free
As windy morning in the sunny air,
Your wild warm self, your vivid self, to be,
A miracle of nature's liberty,
Giving your gift of being kind and fair,
High, gay and careless-handed everywhere!

THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD

The passions of a child attend his dreams.
He lives, loves, hopes, remembers, is forlorn
For legendary creatures, whom he deems
Not too unreal--until one golden morn
The gracious, all-awaking sun shines in
Upon his tranquil pillow, and his eyes
Are touched, and opened greatly, and begin
To drink reality with rich surprise.

I loved the impetuous souls of ancient story--
Heroic characters, kings, queens, whose wills
Like empires rose, achieved, and fell, in glory.
I was a child, until the radiant dawn,
Thy beauty, woke me--O thy spirit fills
The stature of those heroes, they are gone!

AS THE CRAG EAGLE

As the crag eagle to the zenith's height
Wings his pursuit in his exalted hour
Of her the tempest-reared, whose airy power
Of plume and passion challenges his flight
To that wild altitude, where they unite,
In mutual tumultuous victory
And the swift sting of nature's ecstasy,
Their shuddering pinions and their skyward might--
As they, the strong, to the full height of heaven
Bear up that joy which to the strong is given,
Thus, thus do we, whose stormy spirits quiver
In the bold air of utter liberty,
Clash equal at our highest, I and thee,
Unconquered and unconquering forever!

TO MY FATHER

The eastern hill hath scarce unveiled his head,
And the deliberate sky hath but begun
To meditate upon a future sun,
When thou dost rise from thy impatient bed.
Thy morning prayer unto the stars is said.
And not unlike a child, the penance done
Of sleep, thou goest to thy serious fun,
Exuberant--yet with a whisper tread.

And when that lord doth to the world appear,
The jovial sun, he leans on his old hill,
And levels forth to thee a golden smile--
Thee in his garden, where each warming year
Thou toilest in all joy with him, to fill
And flood the soil with Summer for a while.

TO EDWARD S. MARTIN

FROM A PROFESSIONAL HOBO

How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen
Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace
The maiden maxims of your writing-place,
And on this gripped and mortal-sweating den
And battle-pit of hunger now and then
Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,
The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race
Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen!

How long have art and wit and poetry,
With all their power, been content, like you,
To gild the smiling fineness of the few,
To filmy-curtain what they dare not see,
In multitudinous reality,
The rough and bloody soul of what is true!

* * * * *

(In an editorial in _Life_, Mr. Martin had described as
"professional hoboes" a number of revolutionary agitators whom
he did not like--Pancho Villa, William D. Haywood, Wild Joe
O'Carroll--and he did me the honor to include me among them.)

EUROPE--1914

Since Athens died, the life that is a light
Has never shone in Europe. Alien moods,
The oriental morbid sanctitudes,
Have darkened on her like the fear of night.
In happy augury we dared to guess
That her pure spirit shot one sunny glance
Of paganry across the fields of France,
Clear startling this dim fog of soulfulness.

But now, with arms and carnage and the cries
Of Holy Murder, rolling to the clouds
Her bloody-shadowed smoke of sacrifice,
The Superstition conquers, and the shrouds
Of sick black wonder lay their murky blight
Where shone of old the immortal-seeming light.

ISADORA DUNCAN

You bring the fire and terror of the wars
Of infidels in thunder-running hordes,
With spears like sun-rays, shields, and wheeling swords
Flame shape, death shape and shaped like scimitars,
With crimson eagles and blue pennantry,
And teeth and armor flashing, and white eyes
Of battle horses, and the silver cries
Of trumpets unto storm and victory!

Who is this naked-footed lovely girl
Of summer meadows dancing on the grass?
So young and tenderly her footsteps pass,
So dreamy-limbed and lightly wild and warm--
The bugles murmur and the banners furl,
And they are lost and vanished like a storm!

THE SUN

Now autumn, and that sadness as of love
Heroic in immortal solitude;
Those veins of flaming passion through the wood;
But in the blue and infinite above
A shining circle like the light of truth,
Self-poising; deathless his desire sublime,
Whose motion is the measurement of time,
Whose step is morning, and his smile is youth.

No passion burns upon the livid earth
Whose stain can tint that circle, or whose cry
Can rout the tranquilly receiving sky.
All passion, all its crimson stream, from birth
To murder, bloom and pestilential blight,
All flows beneath the sanction of his light.

THE NET

The net brings up, how long and languidly,
A million vivid quiverings of life,
Keen-finned and gleaming like a steely knife,
All colors, green and silver of the sea,
All forms of skill and eagerness to be--
They die and wither of the very breath
That sounds your pity of their lavish death
While they are leaping, star-like, to be free.

They die and wither, but the aged sea,
Insane old salty womb of mystery,
Is pregnant with a million million more,
Whom she will suckle in her oozy floor,
Whom she will vomit on a heedless shore,
While onward her immortal currents pour.

A DUNE SONNET

I was so lonely on the dunes to-day;
The shadow of a bird passed o'er the sand,
And I, a driftwood relic in my hand....
Sea winds are not more lonely when they stray
A little fitful and bewildered way
In this wan acre, whose dry billows stand
So pitilessly still of curve, so bland,
And wide, and waiting, infinitely grey.

In hollows I could almost hear them say,
The misty breezes--Run, we will not stay
In this unreal and spiritual land!
Our soul of life is calling from the strand,
Whose blue and breathing bosom leapt or lay
Or laughed to us in shots of silver spray!

SONGS

SEA-SHORE

The wind blows in along the sea--
Its salty wet caresses
Impart to all the ships that be
A thrill before it passes.

The tide is never at a stand,
A mountain in its motion,
Forever homing to the land,
And ever to the ocean.

And on its fickle, mighty breast
The waters still are moving,
With love in every running crest
And laughter in the loving--

Light love to touch the prows of ships
That slip along so slenderly.
I would as lightly touch your lips,
And your heart as tenderly,

If you would move with all that move,
The flowing and caressing,
Who have no firmness in their love,
No sorrow in its passing.

RAINY SONG

Down the dripping pathway dancing through the rain,
Brown eyes of beauty, laugh to me again!

Eyes full of starlight, moist over fire,
Full of young wonder, touch my desire!

O like a brown bird, like a bird's flight,
Run through the rain drops lithely and light.

Body like a gypsy, like a wild queen,
Slim brown dress to slip through the green--

The little leaves hold you as soft as a child,
The little path loves you, the path that runs wild.

Who would not love you, seeing you move,
Warm-eyed and beautiful through the green grove?

Let the rain kiss you, trickle through your hair,
Laugh if my fingers mingle with it there,

Laugh if my cheek too is misty and drips--
Wetness is tender--laugh on my lips

The happy sweet laughter of love without pain,
Young love, the strong love, burning in the rain.

A HYMN TO GOD

IN TIME OF STRESS

Lift, O dark and glorious Wonder,
Once again thy gleaming sword,
Cleave this killing doubt asunder
With one sheer and sacred word!

For my heart is weak and broken,
And the struggle runs too high,
And there is no burning token
In the new immortal sky.

Oh, not curb or courage only
Does my hour demand of me,
It is thought supreme and lonely
And responsible and free!

And I quail before the danger
As a bark before the blast,
When the beacon star's a stranger
In the mountains piling fast,

And there is no light but reason
And the compass of the ship.
God, a word of thine in season!
God, a motion of thy lip!

COMING SPRING

Ice is marching down the river,
Gaily out to sea!
Sunbeams o'er the snow-hills quiver,
Setting torrents free!

Yellow are the water-willows,
Yellow clouds are they,
Rising where the laden billows
Swell along their way!

Arrows of the sun are flying!
Winter flees the light,
And his chilly horn is sighing
All the moisty night!

Lovers of the balmy weather,
Lovers of the sun!
Drifts and duty melt together--
Get your labors done!

Ice is marching down the river,
Gaily out to sea!
Sing the healthy-hearted ever,
Spring is liberty!

DAISIES

Daisies, daisies, all surprise!
Open wide your sunny eyes!
See the linnet on the wing;
See the crimson feather!
See the life in every thing,
Sun, and wind, and weather!
Shadow of the passer-by,
Bare-foot skipping over,
Meadow where the heifers lie,
Butter-cup, and clover!
All is vivid, all is real,
All is high surprising!
Ye are pure to see and feel;
Ye the gift are prizing
Men and gods would perish for--
Gods with all their thunder!--
Could they have the thing ye are,
Everlasting wonder!

BOBOLINK

Bright little bird with a downward wing,
How many birds within you sing?

Two or three at the least it seems,
Overflowing golden streams.

If I could warble on a wing so strong,
Filling five acres full of song,

I'd never sit on the grey rail fence,
I'd never utter a word of sense,

I'd float forever in a light blue sky,
Uttering joy to the passers-by!

DIOGENES

A hut, and a tree,
And a hill for me,
And a piece of a weedy meadow.

I'll ask no thing,
Of God or King,
But to clear away His shadow.

EARLIER POEMS

EARLIER POEMS

A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY

Most of the friends who read the volume from which these poems are selected, wanted to ask me what I meant by one of the titles, "The Thought of Protagoras." And I meant so much--I meant to convey in that phrase the hue of the philosophic background upon which the colors of my life are drawn--that since I failed, I venture to enlarge its meaning here with a word of confession.

An attitude that might be called affirmative scepticism is native to my mind, and underlies every impulse that I have to portray the universal character of life and truth. We seek among all our experiences for some absolute and steadfast value by which, or toward which, we may guide ourselves, but there is no absolute value except life itself, the having of experiences. And among all our opinions we seek for an objective and eternal truth, but nothing is eternally true except the variety of opinions. Intermittently throughout the whole history of western, and I suppose of eastern thought, this mood has arisen. It was the mood of Protagoras, and of that Protagorean vein in Plato which is the height of ancient wisdom. It arose again, after a period of bright-minded investigation and formulation of "isms," in Sextus Empiricus and the little group of Alexandrian scientists--the last light to go out in the darkness of the reign of saints and theologies. Again, after those ages of sombre and oppressive faith under the roof of the cathedral, it appeared in the great Montaigne. The writings of Montaigne arrive in history with a bold and tranquil flavor of delight in free meditation, as though the too Sunday-serious world had at last made up its mind to escape from church and go fishing. It is a reverent Sabbath holiday in human thought. Almost immediately, however, the insane passion of belief recurs. Descartes' attempt at a surgery of doubt is only the pathetic opening of space for new and enormous growths of the old substance. Spinoza follows him, the God-intoxicated man, and Leibnitz and other monumental believers. And then David Hume quietly prepares, and once more offers to mankind, in his clear, humble and noble enquiry about Human Understanding, the sceptic wisdom, the moral equilibrium, that would save its health and reason. But Kant and Hegel and those mountainous Germans, the giants of soul-vapor, overwhelming again with their rationalizations of primitive egotism, send all the world to the mad-house of metaphysical conviction. And from this we are now again issuing awakened--for the fifth time. And today the awakener is no individual. The awakener is science--empirical science turning its brave eyes upon man, its maker, to reveal the origin and destroy the excessive pretensions of his thoughts. And so once again the sanity of the world has been saved--or so at least it seems to one whose intellectual home is in these ages of sacred doubt.

Thoughts that are abstract logically, are, psychologically, concrete things. General ideas are specific occurrences. They are occurrences in an individual mind, reflecting perhaps a material disturbance in a brain. And these things and occurrences can, in the conception of science, be explained as the result of antecedent causes. They, which are the sovereign instruments of explanation, can themselves become the subject of explanation, and therein lose their impersonality and their universality which was their truth. Such, I think, is the modern counterpart of the thought of Protagoras, summarized for the ancients in his famous saying that "man is the measure of all things."

This thought used to come to my mind strongly in a seminar at Columbia University, where in a shadowy corner of the great library at sunset we gathered to read and study the writing of Spinoza. Our teacher was a scholar of philosophy with the rarest gift of sinking himself emotionally, as well as with intellect, into the metaphysical system of the philosopher he studied. He is not the one I have portrayed in my poem--that is a product of my imagination. But he seemed always so ingenuous to me, in his acceptance of the existence of realities corresponding to the vast abstractions of that philosopher of eternity, that I could not but see continually in my fancy demons of time and the concrete conspiring against him among the alleys of the book-shelves; and there came the thought of death walking straight into that chamber to annihilate the event of the individual idea--the only actual thing denoted for me by his words of portentous and childish-universal import. In my poem I tried to make such a death portray and prove to the imagination the thought of Protagoras.

In another poem, Leif Ericson, I made the same reflection a theme of joy and a kind of pagan sermon of life. The voyage of that wonderful sailor out over the challenging blue, without knowledge and without sanction of ends, is a symbol of the adventure of individual being. It is an example to our hearts, so fond of faith and prudence, so little filled by nature with moral courage and abandon.

AT THE AQUARIUM

Serene the silver fishes glide,
Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed;
As through the aged deeps of ocean,
They glide with wan and wavy motion.
They have no pathway where they go,
They flow like water to and fro.
They watch with never winking eyes,
They watch with staring, cold surprise,
The level people in the air,
The people peering, peering there,
Who wander also to and fro,
And know not why or where they go,
Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.

EARTH'S NIGHT

Sombre,
Sombre is the night, the stars' light is dimmed
With smoky exhalations of the earth,
Whose ancient voice is lifted on the wind
In ceaseless elegies and songs of tears.
O earth, I hear thee mourning for thy dead!
Thou art waving the long grass over thy graves;
Murmuring over all thy resting children,
That have run and wandered and gone down
Upon thy bosom. Thou wilt mourn for him
Who looketh now a moment on these stars,
And in the moving boughs of this dark night
Heareth the murmurous sorrow of thy heart.

THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS

My memory holds a tragic hour to prove,
Or paint with bleeding stroke, the ancient thought
That will to sorrow move all minds forever--
All that love to know. It was the hour
When lamps wink yellow in the winter twilight,
And the hurriers go home to rest;
And we whose task was meditation rose
And wound a murmuring way among the books
And effigies, the fading fragrance, of
A vaulted library--a place to me
Most like a dim vast cavernous brain, that holds
All the world hath of musty memory
In sombre convolutions that are dying.
There at our faithful table every day,
In the great shadow of this dissolution,
We would speak of things eternal, things
Divine, that change not. And we spoke with one
Who was a leader of the way to them;
A man born regal to the realms of thought.
High, pale, and sculptural his brow,
And high his concourse with the kings of old,
Plato, and Aristotle, and the Jew--
The bold, mild Jew who in his pensive chamber
Fell in love with God. It was of him,
And that unhungering love of his, he told us;
And with soft and stately melody,
The scholar's eloquence, he lifted us
Sublime above the very motions of
Our mortal being, and we walked with him
The heights of meditation like the gods.
I have no memory surpassing this.
And yet--strange pity of our natures or
Of his--there ran a rumor poisonous.
Scandal breeds her brood in the house of prayer.
And we, to whom these were like hours of prayer,
We whispered things not all philosophy
When he was gone. We knew but little where
He went, or whence he came, but this we knew,
That there was other love in him than what
He taught us--love that makes more quickly pale!
Ay, even he was tortured with the lure
Of mortal motion in the eyes--and lips
And limbs that were not warm to him alone
Were warm to him. He drank mortality.
Dim care, the ghost of retribution, sat
In pallor on his brow, and made us whisper
In the shadow of our meditations.
Faintly, faintly did we feel the hour
Advancing--livid painting of a thought!
He spoke of Substance,--strangely--on that day--
Eternal, self-existent, infinite--
He seemed, I thought, to rest upon the name.
And as he spoke there came on me that trance
Of inattention, when the words would seem
To drop their magic of containing things,
And, by a shift, become but things themselves--
Mere partial motions of the flesh of lips.
I watched these motions, watched them blandly, till
I knew I watched them, and that roused me, and
I heard him saying, "Things, and moving things,
Are merely modes of but one attribute,
Of what is infinite in attributes,
And may be called----" He spoke to there, and then--
His pencil, the thin pencil, dropped--A crack
Behind us--A quick step among the books--
His hand, his head, his body all collapsed
And fell, or settled utterly, before
The fact came on us--he was shot and killed.
But little I remember after that.
What matters it? The deed, the quick red deed
Was done, and all his speculations vanished
Like a sound.

TO THE ASCENDING MOON

Rise, rise, aerial creature, fill the sky
With supreme wonder, and the bleak earth wash
With mystery! Pale, pale enchantress, steer
Thy flight high up into the purple blue,
Where faint the stars beholding--rain from there
Thy lucent influence upon this sphere!
I fear thee, sacred mother of the mad!
With thy deliberate magic thou of old
Didst soothe the perplexed brains of idiots whipped,
And scared, and lacerated for their cure--
Ay, thou didst spread the balm of sleep on them,
Give to their minds a curved emptiness
Of silence like the heaven thou dwellest in;
Yet didst thou also, with thy rayless light,
Make mad the surest, draw from their smooth beds
The very sons of Prudence, maniacs
To wander forth among the bushes, howl
Abroad like eager wolves, and snatch the air!
Oft didst thou watch them prowl among the tombs
Inviolate of the patient dead, toiling
In deeds obscure with stealthy ecstasy,
And thou didst palely peer among them, and
Expressly shine into their unhinged eyes!
I fear thee, languid mother of the mad!
For thou hast still thy alien influence;
Thou dost sow forth thro' all the fields and hills,
And in all chambers of the natural earth,
A difference most strange and luminous.
This tree, that was the river sycamore,
Is in thy pensive effluence become
But the mind's mystic essence of a tree,
Upright luxuriance thought upon--the stream
Is liquid timeless motion undefined--
The world's a gesture dim. Like rapturous thought,
Which can the rigorous concrete obscure
Unto annihilation, and create
Upon the dark a universal vision,
Thou--even on this bold and local earth,
The site of the obtruding actual--
Thou dost erect in awful purity
The filmy architecture of all dreams.
And they are perfect. Thou dost shed like light
Perfection, and a vision give to man
Of things superior to the tough act,
Existence, and almost co-equals of
His own unnamed, and free, and infinite wish!
Phantoms, phantoms of the transfixed mind!
Pour down, O moon, upon the listening earth--
The earth unthinking, thy still eloquence!
Shine in the children's eyes. They drink thy light,
And laugh in innocence of sorcery,
And love thy silver. I laugh not, nor gaze
With half-closed lids upon the awakened night.
Nay, oft when thou art hailed above the hill,
I lean not forth, I hide myself in tasks,
Even to the blunt comfort of routine
I cling, to drowse my soul against thy charm,
Yearning for thee, ethereal miracle!

LEIF ERICSON

Through the murk of the ocean of history northward and far,
I descry thee, O Sailor! Thy deed like the dive of a star
Doth startle the ages of darkness through which it is hurled,
Doth flash, and flare out, and is gone from the eyes of the world!

What watchers beheld thee, and heralding followed thy lead,
Or bugled the nations into the track of thy deed?
What continent soundeth thy name, what people thy praise?
Who sendeth the signal of gratitude back to the days
When thou in thy boat didst put forth from the world, and defy
Infinity, ignorance, tempest, and ocean, and sky?
No, history brags not of God, nor doth history brag
Of thee, sailor, who carried thy sail and thy sea-colored flag
Clear over His seas, drove into His mystery old
The prow of thy sixty-foot skerry, whose quivering hold
Could dip but a cupful out of His watery wrath,
That stormed thee, and snatched at thy bowsprit, and licked up thy path!

When mythical rumor sky-carried ran over the earth,
With the whisper of lands that were dreamed of beyond the red birth
Of the west-wind, the blood of thy body took running fire
To launch and be swift o'er the sea as a man's desire!

O rare is the northern morning that shineth for thee!
A million silvering crests on the cold blue sea--
And the wind drives in from the jubilant sea to the land,
And, catching thy laughter, it tosses the cloak in thy hand,
As taunting thee forth to thy sails in the frosty air,
Where thousands surround thee with awe and a wondering prayer.
And they that stand with thee--tumultuous-hearted they stand!
They bend at thy word--I hear the boat sing on the sand--
And they slip to their oars as the boat leaps aloft on a wave,
With thee at the windy helm, joyful and joyfully brave!

* * * * *

The depth of the billows is awful, the depth of the sky
Is silent as God. Silent the dark on high.
Naught sings to thy heart save thy heart and the wind, the wild giant
Of ocean, agrin in the darkness, who rattles defiant
A laugh through thy rigging, and howls from the clouds at thee,
And moans in a mimic of pain and a murmurous glee.
Still stern I behold thee, thy stature dim through the dark,
Unmoved, unreleasing the helm of thy storm-driven bark.
"O God of our fathers, give signs to our sea-worn eyes!
Give sight to Thy sailors! Give but the sun to arise
In the morn on an island pale in the haze of the west!
O beam of the star in the north, is thy only behest
To gesture me onward eternally unto no shore
Of these high and wild waters, famed for their hunger of yore?
Then give to thy sailor for life the courage of death,
To encounter the taunt of this wind with a rougher breath
Of gigantic contempt in the soul for where and when,
So it be onward impetuous, living, onward again!
He saileth safe who carrieth death on board,
He flieth a laughing sail in the wrath of the Lord!"
So sang thy heart to thy heart, and so to the swinging sea
In a lull of the wind, the song of a spirit free!

Serene adventurer, lover of distance divine,
Pursuing thy love forever though never thine,
O sun-tanned king with thy blue eyes over the sea,
Who dares to sing, and live, the praise of thee?

Not they that safe in a haven of certainty, steer
From mooring to mooring with faith and with fear,
And pray for a map of the universe, pointer, and plan,
When all the blue waves of the ocean the courage of man
Challenge to venture, not they are the praisers of thee!
Nor they who sail for the cargo, and dream that the sea,
In its wanton wild infinite wonder of motion and sound,
Is bound by a purpose, as their little breathing is bound.
The profit of thy great sailing to thee was small,
And unto the world it was nothing--a man, that was all,
And his deed like a star, to flame in the dull old sky!
Of the story of apathy, age after decorous age going by!
Grapes were thy import, winey and luscious to eat,
Grapes, and a story--"The dew in the west was sweet!"
Wine of the distance ever the reddest seems,
And sweet is the world to the dreamer and doer of dreams!
Weigh them, O pale-headed merchant--little ye know!
Compute, O desk-dwellers, ye will not measure him so,
For ye know only knowledge, ye know not the drive of the will
That brought it with passion to birth--it driveth still
Through the hearts of the kindred of earth, the forward fleeing,
The kin of the stormy soul at the helm of all-being!
Sailors, unreefed, and high-masted, and wet, and free,
Who sail in the love of the billows, whose port is the sea--
They sing thee, O Leif the Lucky, they sing thee sublime,
And launch with thee, glad as with God, on the ocean of time!

* * * * *

Leif Ericson, the Norse adventurer, sailed to America 500 years
before Columbus.

MIDNIGHT

Midnight is come,
And thinly in the deepness of the gloom
Truth rises startle-eyed out of a tomb,
And we are dumb.

A death-bell tolls,
And we still shudder round the too smooth bed,
For Truth makes pallid watch above the dead,
Freezing our souls.

But day returns,
Light and the garish life, and we are brave,
For Truth sinks wanly down into her grave.
Yet the heart yearns.

IN MARCH

On a soaked fence-post a little blue-backed bird,
Opening her sweet throat, has stirred
A million music-ripples in the air
That curl and circle everywhere.
They break not shallow at my ear,
But quiver far within. Warm days are near!

TO THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH

Soft little daughters of the mead,
The random bush, the wanton weed,
That lived to love, and loved to breed,
Who hither bound you?
You're innocent of all the screed
That blows around you.

Sweet daffodils so laughing yellow,
Beneath a bending pussy-willow,
You need not try to gulp and swallow
The Apostles' Creed,
Or shudder at the fates that follow
Adam's deed.

Big bloody hymns the choir sings,
And blows it to the King of Kings,
The while you dream of humble things
That wander there
Where first you spread your golden wings
On summer air;

Like Jesus, simple and divine,
In beauty, not in raiment fine,
Who asked no high or holier shrine
In which to pray,
Than garden groves of Palestine
'Neath olives gray.

His name, I think, would still be bright
Though churches were unbuilded quite,
And they whose hearts are toward the height
Should simple be,
And lift their heads into the light
As straight as ye.

TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT

Good-night, little bed, with your patient white pillow,
Your light little spread, and your blanket of yellow!
I wonder what leaves you so pensive to-night--
The breezes are tender, the stars are so bright,
I should think you would wrinkle a little and smile,
And be happy to think we can sleep for a while.
Are you waiting for something? Or are you just seeming
To listen so breathlessly, hushed, as though dreaming
A form that is fresher than breezes so light,
A coming more precious than stars to the night,
Who shall mould you as soft as the breast of a billow,
And crown with all beauty your patient white pillow?
Good-night, little bed--are you lonely so late?
We will lie down together, together we'll wait.

IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA

_Scene_: A cell leading to the gallows.

_Characters_: A noble lady, who is an assassin.
A common murderer.

The chilling gray, a ghost of mortal dawn,
Has touched them, and they know the hour. The guard
Shifts guiltily his shoes upon the stone.
They raise their eyes in languid terror; but
The moment passes, and 'tis still again--
Save, in some piteous way she moves her throat.
There is a wandering of her burning eyes,
Until they fix, and strangely stare upon
The face of her companion. They would plead
Against the heavy horror of his look;
For not an idiot's corpse could strike the soul
More sick with wonder.
"O look up and speak
To me!"--Her voice is startling to the walls--
"Speak any word against this gloom!"

He moves
A blood-deserted eye, but answers not.
"Tell if 'twas cold and filthy where you lay!"

"Ay, filthy cold! 'Twas cold enough to keep
The carrion from rotting on these bones!
They never kill us--never 'til we hang!"

He spoke a brutal tongue against the gloom.
And there was heard far off a step, a voice.
The guard stood up; a quiver moved her limbs.

"Give me some simple word. Give me your hand
In comradeship. We die together--and
The while we breathe--we are each other's world."

"No--not your world, my lady! Though we die,
I have no grace to give a hand to you.
My hand is thick and dirty--yours is pale!"

"You say 'my lady' in the very tomb!
Will even death not laugh this weakness off
Your tongue? To think nobility abides
This hour! _My lady!_ O, it is a curse
That whips me at the grave! I was not born--
Can I not even die, a human soul?"
"Yes, you can die! And better--you can kill!
'Tis not your ladyship--the gallows' rope
Snaps that to nothing! Death? Not death alone
Can laugh at your nobility--I laugh.
No--not your piteous ladyship--that dies.
It is your crime that daunts me--That shall live!
To plant, with this fine delicate little hand,
Small heavy death into the very heart
Of time-defended tyranny--that lives!
The future is all life for you. For me--
A glassy look, a yell into the air,
And I am gone! No life springs up from me!
I am the dirt that drank the drippings of
A guilty murder--that is why I sit
Like sickness here, and goad you with my shame!
I'll take your hand. I'll tell you I was starved,
Wrecked, shattered to the bones with drunken hunger,
And I killed for gold. I'll tell you this--
Your crime shall live to blot the memory
Of mine, and me, and all the insane tribe
Of us, who having strength in poverty
Will not lie down and starve--blot off the world
Our having been--the crime of our killed hopes,
And gradual infamy!"

The fever gleam
Was in his eyes--the future! There it burned
A moment, while he stood to see the door
Swing darkly open, and the guard salute.
She stood beside him. And together in
High union of their fainting hearts, they faced
The hour that brought them to their level graves.

* * * * *

March, 1912.

TO A TAWNY THRUSH

Pine spirit!
Breath and voice of a wild glade!
In the wild forest near it,
In the cool hemlock or the leafy limb,
Whereunder
Thou didst run and wander
Thro' the sun and shade,
An elvish echo and a shadow dim,
There in the twilight thou dost lift thy song,
And give the stilly woods a silver tongue.
Out of what liquid is thy laughing made?
A sister of the water thou dost seem,
The quivering cataract thou singest near,
Whose glistening stream,
Unto the listening ear,
Thou dost outrun with thy cascade
Of music beautiful and swift and clear--
A joy unto the mournful forest given!
As when afar
A travelling star
Across our midnight races,
A moving gleam that quickly ceases,
Lost in the blue black abyss of heaven,
So doth thy light and silver singing
Start and thrill
The silence round thy piney hill,
Unto the sober hour a jewel bringing--
A mystery--a strain of rhythm fleeing--
A vagrant echo winging
Back to the unuttered theme of being!

THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES

Poet, thy dreams are grateful to the air
And the light loves them. Tho' they murmur not,
Their carven stillness is a music rare,
And like the song of one whose tongue hath caught
The clear ethereal essence of his thought.

I hear the talkers come, the changing throngs
That with the fashions of a day surround
Thy visions, and I hear them quell their tongues,
And hush their querulous shoes upon the ground;
Thy dreams are with the crown of silence crowned--

Though they feel not the glowing diadem,
Who sleep for aye in their cool shapes of stone.
Nor ever will the sunlight waken them,
Nor ever will they turn their eyes and moan,
To think that their brief Poet's life is gone.

The tender and the lofty soul is gone,
Who eyed them forth from darkness, and confessed
His spirit's motion in unmoving stone.
His praise upon no mortal tongue doth rest;
By these unwhispering lips it is expressed.

Soon will the ample arms of night withdraw
Her shuffling children from the twilit hall--
From that heroic presence, in dim awe
Of whom the dark withholds a while her pall,
And leaves him luminous above them all.

Then are ye lost in darkness and alone,
Ye ghostly spirits! And the moment rare
Doth quicken that too sad and nameless stone,
To move her robe, and spill her sable hair,
And be in silence mingled with the air;

For she is one with the dim glimmering hour,
And the white spirits beautiful and still,
And the veiled memory of the vanished power
That moulded them, the high and infinite will
That earth begets and earth does not fulfil.

* * * * *

These statues were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum after
the sculptor's death. The figures alluded to are the famous
statue of Abraham Lincoln, and the monument in memory of Mrs.
Henry Adams, the original of which is in the Rock Creek
Cemetery at Washington.

SUMMER SUNDAY

Borne on the low lake wind there floats to me,
Out of the distant hill, a sigh of bells,
Mystic, worshipful, almost unheard,
As though the past should answer me, and I
In pagan solitude bow down my head.

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.

Punctuation has been corrected without note.

Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained
from the original.

It is not always possible to determine if a new stanza begins at
the top of a printed page, but every effort has been made by the
transcriber to retain stanza breaks where appropriate.

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