Chapter II

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!

AUTUMN

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!

FACES

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

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!

LIFE-DRUNK

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

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!

ONE NIGHT IN THE NORTHWEST

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!

DREAMERS

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
Carpentered of Song!

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!

THE QUESTION

I

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.