Joaquin Miller's Poems | ||
XXIV
The battle seem'd to nerve the man
To superhuman strength. He rose,
Held up his head, began to scan
The heavens and to take his breath
Resumed his part, and with his eye
Fix'd on a star that filter'd through
The farther west, push'd bare his brow,
And kept his course with head held high,
As if he strode his deck and drew
His keel below some lofty light
That watch'd the rocky reef at night.
Upon that lonesome sandy sea!
It were a sad, unpleasant sight
To follow them through all the night,
Until the time they lifted hand,
And touch'd at last a water'd land.
[OMITTED]
And scarcely turn'd to let them pass.
There was no sign of man, nor sign
Of savage beast. 'Twas so divine,
It seem'd as if the bended skies
Were rounded for this Paradise.
From off their windy hills, and blew
Their whistles as they wander'd through
The open groves of water'd wood;
They came as light as if on wing,
And reached their noses wet and brown
And stamp'd their little feet and stood
Close up before them, wondering.
They found in this heart of the new
Where date and history had birth,
And man began first wandering
To go the girdle of the earth,
And find the beautiful and true?
An island in a sea of sand;
With reedy waters and the balm
Of an eternal summer air;
Some blowy pines toss here and there;
And there are grasses long and strong,
And tropic fruits that never fail:
The Manzanita pulp, the palm,
The prickly pear, with all the song
Of summer birds. And there the quail
Makes nest, and you may hear her call
All day from out the chaparral.
And Morgan seems some demi-god,
That haunts the red man's spirit land.
A land where never red man's hand
Is lifted up in strife at all,
But holds it sacred unto those
Who bravely fell before their foes,
And rarely dares its desert wall.
Rare times a chieftain comes this way,
Alone, and battle-scarr'd and gray,
And then he bends devout before
The maid who keeps the cabin-door,
And deems her something all divine.
Tall trees are bending down with bread,
And that a fountain pure as Truth,
And deep and mossy-bound and fair,
Is bubbling from the forest there,—
Perchance the fabled fount of youth!
An isle where skies are ever fair,
Where men keep never date nor day,
Where Time has thrown his glass away.
The flight by day, the watch by night.
Dark Sybal twines about the door
The scarlet blooms, the blossoms white
And winds red berries in her hair,
And never knows the name of care.
In rainbow clouds, in clouds of snow;
The birds take berries from her hand;
They come and go at her command.
That sing her summer songs all day;
Small, black-hoof'd antelope in herds,
And squirrels bushy-tail'd and gray,
With round and sparkling eyes of pink,
And cunning-faced as you can think.
And is she happy in her isle,
With all her feather'd friends and herds?
For when has Morgan seen her smile?
They would build nestings in her hair,
She has brown antelope in herds;
She never knows the name of care;
Why, then, is she not happy there?
She has a thousand birdlings there,
These birds they would build in her hair;
But not one bird builds in her heart.
Would give ten thousand cheerfully,
All bright of plume and clear of tongue,
And sweet as ever trilled or sung,
For one small flutter'd bird to come
And build within her heart, though dumb.
Is lost, and, lo! she is undone.
She sighs sometimes. She looks away,
And yet she does not weep or say.
“The Ship in the Desert” was first published in London—Chapman and Hall, 1876. It was nearly twice its present length and was dedicated To my Parents in Oregon, as follows:
With deep reverence I inscribe these lines, my dear parents, to you. I see you now, away beyond the seas—beyond the lands where the sun goes down in the Pacific like some great ship of fire, resting still on the green hills, waiting
“Where rolls the OregonAnd hears no sound save its own dashing.”
Nearly a quarter of a century ago you took me the long and lonesome half-year's journey across the mighty continent, wild and rent and broken up and sown with sand and ashes and crossed by tumbling wooded rivers that ran as if glad to get
We who toil and earn our bread, still have our masters.”
A ragged and broken story it is, with long deserts, with alkali and ashes, yet it may, like the land it deals of, have some green places, and woods and running waters, where you can rest.
Three times now I have ranged the great West in fancy, as I did in fact for twenty years and gathered unknown and unnamed blossoms from mountain top, from desert land, where man never ranged before, and asked the West to receive my weeds, my grasses and blue-eyed blossoms. But here it ends. Good or bad, I have done enough of this work on the border. The Orient promises a more grateful harvest. I have been true to my West. She has been my only love. I have remembered her greatness. I have done my work to show to the world her vastness, her riches, her resources, her valor and her dignity, her poetry and her grandeur. Yet while I was going on working so in silence, what were the things she said of me? But let that
I had bought land near Naples, where I wrote most of this, along with a young Englishman intending to settle down there; but we both were stricken with malarial fever; he died, and I, broken and sick at heart for my mountains, finally came home.
The author of Cleopatra, a man of great and varied endowments, laid a strong hand to the fashioning of this poem, and in return I made mention of his Sybals and Semiramis. We knew, in Rome, and loved much the woman herein described. In truth, I never created any one of my men or women or scenes entirely.
As for the story of the ship in the desert, it is old, old. You can see the tide marks of an ocean even from your car window as you glide around Salt Lake, hundreds of feet up the steeps. The mighty Colorado Cañon was made by the breaking away of this ocean, you find oyster shells and petrified salt water fish in the Rocky Mountains, and a ship in the desert is quite in line with these facts.
The body of this poem was first published in the Atlantic Monthly. The purpose of it was the same as induced the Isles of the Amazons, but the work is better because more true and nearer to the heart. Bear in mind it was done when the heart of the continent was indeed a desert, or at least a wilderness. How much or how little it may have had to do in bringing Europe this way to seek for the lost Edens, and to make the desert blossom as the rose, matters nothing now; but, “He hath brought many captives home to Rome whose ransom did the generous coffers fill.”
Joaquin Miller's Poems | ||