THE HOMESTEAD
I
Here stays the house, here stay the selfsame places,
Here the white lilacs and the buttonwoods;
Here the dark pine-groves, there the river-floods,
And there the threading brook that interlaces
Green meadow-bank with meadow-bank the same.
The melancholy nightly chorus came
Long, long ago from the same pool, and yonder
Stark poplars lift in the same twilight air
Their ancient lonelinesses; nearer, fonder,
The black-heart cherry-tree's gaunt branches bare
Rasp on the same old window where I ponder.
II
And we, the only living, only pass;
We come and go, whither and whence we know not.
From birth to bound the same house keeps, alas!
New lives as gently as the old; there show not
Among the haunts that each had thought his own
The looks that partings bring to human faces.
The black-heart there, that heard my earliest moan,
And yet shall hear my last, like all these places
I love so well, unloving lives from child
To child; from morning joy to evening sorrow—
Untouched by joy, by anguish undefiled;
All one the generations gone, and new;
All one dark yesterday and bright to-morrow;
To the old tree's insensate sympathy
All one the morning and the evening dew—
My far, forgotten ancestor and I.
