 | The poetical works of Edward Rowland Sill |  |
18
COMMENCEMENT POEM
I.
1
Four years!Four waves of that wide sea which rings the world
Broken upon the shore, eternity.
Upon whose crests, like waifs tossed by the tide,
We neared, touched, floated side by side, and now
Sad is their murmur on the shadowy sand,
And sad our parting as we drift away.
2
Four years!Fled like the phantoms of a morning dream—
A strange, fair dream, and now the sun has risen,
And the day's work begun. Yet blame us not
If, while we gird ourselves, we linger still
Wistfully musing over what we dreamed.
II.
O hours of Yale—vanished hours!Memory, sorrowfully singing,
Makes a far-off sound, like ringing
Of a chime of silver bells,
Whose soft music sinks and swells,
19
Fainter, sweeter fragrance bringing
Than from odorous island-dells,
Kissed all night by summer showers.
III
1
Mornings were there, richer than of Eastern story,When the dark, wet trunks the sun-bathed elms uphold,
Bedded in the leaves whose lustrous glory
Half was sheen of emeralds, half of lucent gold.
2
Evenings when the sun set, like a king departedUnto other lands with revel, pomp, and light,
While the queenly moon, deserted, pale, proud-hearted,
Paces the still corridors of the stars all night.
3
Hours of golden noonday, when the blood up-leapingLike a soft, swift lightning pulses through the veins;
Hours of shrouded midnight, when the soul unsleeping
Calm self-knowledge, wider trust, and patience gains.
4
Friendships truer than all woman's brittle passion,Love that in its fullness, even while we stand
Here, to part, has only stammering expression,
Dumb and half-embarrassed clinging hand to hand.
20
IV
1
Here at last to part—the darkness lyingIn that parting not as yet we know;
Like a child who sees his father dying,
With a vague, half-wondering sense of woe.
2
As, when some Beloved has departed,In the after years, unfelt before,
Haunting wishes vex the heavy-hearted,—
“Would to God that we had loved him more!”
3
So we, o'er these buried years low-bending,Shall regret each lightest cause of pain,
Trivial hurts in silent heartaches ending,
Till we sigh, “Would we might live again!”
4
All our foolish pride and willful blindness,Darkening round us like a cloud of dust,
Careless scorn, where should have been all kindness,
Cold suspicion in the place of trust,
5
Many a word we might have left unspoken,Many a deed that should have been undone,
Shall reproach us from each treasured token
With a separate sting for every one.
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6
When the world is heavy on our shoulders,And the heart is fretted with its care,—
When the glory of ambition moulders,
And our load seems more than we can bear,—
7
When the days and nights, like shuttles weavingIn a senseless loom, pass to and fro,
Sombre hues in faded patterns leaving
On the woof of life that lies below,
8
Through the dim, long years old forms will glimmer,Ghostly lips will haunt us with their tone,
Kind eyes will look forth, and seem the dimmer
For the memories brimming in their own.
9
We go forth, like children in the morningScattering to spend the summer hours,—
Some their brows with laurel wreaths adorning,
Some to saunter through a field of flowers;
10
One to lose his way, and wander, straying,Till the twilight, frighted and alone,—
One, it may be, weary with his playing,
Wending home his footsteps ere the noon.
22
11
But whatever fate to us is given,All, when day is done, again shall meet,
And at night-fall, 'neath the stars of heaven,
Shall be gathered at our Father's feet.
V
RETROSPECT
Not all which we have beenDo we remain,
Nor on the dial-hearts of men
Do the years mark themselves in vain;
But every cloud that in our sky hath passed,
Some gloom or glory hath upon us cast;
And there have fallen from us, as we traveled,
Many a burden of an ancient pain—
Many a tangled cord hath been unraveled,
Never to bind our foolish hearts again.
Old loves have left us, lingeringly and slow,
As melts away the distant strain of low
Sweet music—waking us from troubled dreams,
Lulling to holier ones—that dies afar
On the deep night, as if by silver beams
Claspt to the trembling breast of some charmed star.
And we have stood and watched, all wistfully,
While fluttering hopes have died out of our lives,
As one who follows with a straining eye
A bird that far, far-off fades in the sky,
23
A moment to recover it—in vain,
Then slowly turns back to his work again.
But loves and hopes have left us in their place,
Thank God! a gentle grace,
A patience, a belief in His good time,
Worth more than all earth's joys to which we climb.
VI
The pleasant path of youth that we have rangedEnds here; as children we lie down this even,
But while we sleep there is a stir in heaven—
A hundred guardian angels have been changed.
Those of our childhood gently have departed
With its pure record, writ on lilies, sealed;
And in their place stand spirits sterner-hearted,
To grave our manhood on a brazen shield.
VII
1
Well, the world is before us,—let us go forth and live,God's fair stars overhead, and the breath of God within,
Steadfast as we may amid the whirl and the din;
Let us challenge the fates,—what answer do they give?
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2
Work, work, work!All action is noble and grand—
Whirling the wheel or tilling the land,
In the honest blows of the brawny hand
Is the kingliest crown of living won:
Work, work, work!
3
Ah! but the hollowness will lurkUnder the shell of all that is done.
Where is the labor so noble and great,
Among all vanities under the sun?
What is the grandeur of serving a state,
Whose tail is stinging its head to death like a scorpion?
To simper over a counter, to lie for a piece of coin,
To be shrewd and cunning, to cheat and steal,
Business-like and mercantile,—
An army of rats and foxes—who will join?
Each little busy brain forever at work
Webbing out its mite of a plan,
Each hypocritical face with smile and smirk,
Thinking to mask its spleen from another man:
And then the apish mummery
Of the thing they call Society!
And its poor, sour fools that smiling stand,
With a smile that is overdone,—
With a hand that graspeth each man's hand,
And a heart that loveth none.
25
Turns God's image to a machine:
Oh! it makes one proud of our civilization—
Proud of a place in the noble nation,
Where a human soul—
A human soul—
Passes the years as they onward roll,
Making a million of heads for pins, or a thousand knives;
Such are the miracles men call lives!
4
No wonder, when the future is forgot,If earth, and man, and all that being brings,
Seem but a blank, unmeaning blot,
That God has scattered, writing higher things,
And the soul, poor ghost!
So bitterly, bitterly tempest-tost,
So base and cowardly doth lie,
That it would give—
Ah! gladly give—
All this life that it dare not live,
To shun the death it dare not die.
Life—poor thing—that wastes its painful breath,
And walks the road that the fates have given,
Tossing its fettered hands to heaven,
Like an ironed criminal struggling and praying his way to death!
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5
DISCONTENT
Oh, that one could arise and fleeUnto blue-eyed Italy,
Far from mechanical clank and hum!
There to sit by the sighing sea,
And to dream of the days that shall be—shall be—
And the glory of years to come.
Or on some far ocean-isle,
Under the palm and the cocoa-tree,
To build of the coral boughs a home,—
Or floating and falling adown the Nile,
To drown one's cares in the deeps of Time
And the desert's brooding mystery.
Yet howsoever we plot or plan,
In every age—through every clime—
Still the littleness of man
Would follow us, fast as we might flee:
And the wrangling world break in on whatever is tender and sweet,
As on a beautiful tune the rattling and noise of the street.
6
Oh, the world—the world!Mockery—knavery—cheat;
Down at your angry feet
Let the lying thing be hurled:
27
Worth not even a sigh;
But the scorn which a murdered purpose hurls on a butchering mob,—
Which the pale, dead lips of a truth smile back on a conquering lie.
VIII
THE FOUNTAIN
Were it not horrible?After all the dreams we dream,
Our yearnings and our prayers,
If this “I” were but a stream
Of thoughts, sensations, joys, and pains,
Which being clogged, no soul remains;
Even as the fountain seems to be
A shape of one identity,
But only is a stream of drops,
And when the swift succession stops,
The fountain melts and disappears,
Leaving no trace but scattered tears.
Yet even here, O foolish heart,
Thou wert not cheated of thy part;
Were it not better, even here,
To keep thy current pure and clear,
With pearly drops of dew to wet
The amaranth and violet,
28
Blessings and beauty every hour—
Better than in a sullen flow
To creep along the ground, and go
Wasting and sinking through the sand,
To make no single spot of land
Happier or holier for thy being—
Refresh no flower, no grass-blade, seeing
Thou wert not always thus to stand?
IX
SOLITUDE
All alone—alone,Calm, as on a kingly throne,
Take thy place in the crowded land,
Self-centred in free self-command.
Let thy manhood leave behind
The narrow ways of the lesser mind:
What to thee are its little cares,
The feeble love or the spite it bears?
Let the noisy crowd go by—
In thy lonely watch on high,
Far from the chattering tongues of men,
Sitting above their call or ken,
Free from links of manner and form
Thou shalt learn of the winged storm—
God shall speak to thee out of the sky.
29
X
Well—well,Why need the hurrying brain to trouble itself?
Threescore years is swiftly worn away—
In some summer when our heads are gray,
We perhaps shall wander back from our power or pelf,
To muse on the days when all these things befell.
Nothing will then be changed:
Calm as of yore through the slumberous summer noon
Will the Old Rock rest in its majesty;
All the paths that we have ranged
Still will wear the glory of their June,—
Nothing changed but we.
The years will bring us, hastening to their goal,
A little more of calmness, and of trust,
With still the old, old doubt of death and dust,
And still the expectancy within the soul.
O Father, as we go to meet the years,
We ask not joy that fame or pleasure brings,
But some calm knowledge of the sum of things—
A hint of glory glimmering over tears;
That he, who walks with sanction from Thy hand,
Some token of its presence may have seen,
Beneath which we may tread the path serene
Into the stillness of the unknown land.
| The poetical works of Edward Rowland Sill | |