University of Virginia Library

2. PART II

“THE POET'S DAY”

The poet's day is different from another,
Tho' he doth count each man his own heart's brother.
So crystal-clear the air that he looks through,
It gives each color an intenser hue;
Each bush doth burn, and every flower flame;
The stars are sighing; silence breathes a name.
The world wherein he wanders, dreams, and sings
Thrills with the beating of invisible wings;
And all day long he hears from hidden birds
The low, melodious pour of musicked words.

“HOW TO THE SINGER COMES THE SONG?”

“LIKE THE BRIGHT PICTURE”

Like the bright picture ere the lamp is lit,
Or silent page whereon keen notes are writ;
So was my love, all vacant, all unsaid,
Ere she the lamp did light, ere she the music read.

REMEMBRANCE OF BEAUTY

Love's look finds loveliness in all the world:
Ah, who shall say—This, this is loveliest!
Forgetting that pure beauty is impearled
A thousand perfect ways, and none is best.
Sometimes I deem that dawn upon the ocean
Thrills deeper than all else; but, sudden, there,
With serpent gleam and hue, and fixèd motion,
Niagara curves its scimitar in air.
So when I dream of sunset, oft I gaze
Again from Bellosguardo's misty hight,
Or memory ends once more one day of days—
Carrara's mountains purpling into night.
There is no loveliest, dear Love, but thee—
Through whom all loveliness I breathe and see.

MUSIC IN SOLITUDE

“A POWER THERE IS”

A power there is that trembles through the earth;
It lives in nature's mirth,
Making that fearful as the touch of pain;
It strikes the sunlit plain,
And harvests flash, or bend with rushing rain;
It is not far when tempests make their moan,
And lightnings leap, and bursts the thunder-stone.
It comes in morning's beam of living light,
And the imperial night
Knows it, and all its company of stars,
And the auroral bars.
Through nature all, the subtile current thrills;
It built in flood and fire the crystal hills;
It molds the flowers,
And all the branchèd forests that abide
Forever on the teeming mountain-side.
It lives where music times the soft, processional hours;
And where on that lone hill of art
Proud Phidias carved in stone his lyric heart;
And where wild battle is, and where
Glad lovers breathe in starry night the quivering air.

THE SONG'S ANSWER

Me mystic? Have your way!
But sing me, if ye may;—
Then shall ye know the power
Of the seed's thought of the flower,
Of the dawn's thought of the day.

THE 'CELLO

When late I heard the trembling 'cello play,
In every face I read sad memories
That from dark, secret chambers where they lay
Rose, and looked forth from melancholy eyes.
So every mournful thought found there a tone
To match despondence; sorrow knew its mate;
Ill fortune sighed, and mute despair made moan;
And one deep chord gave answer, “Late,—too late.”
Then ceased the quivering strain, and swift returned
Into its depths the secret of each heart;
Each face took on its mask, where lately burned
A spirit charmed to sight by music's art;
But unto one who caught that inner flame
No face of all can ever seem the same.

THE VALLEY ROAD

HAWTHORNE IN BERKSHIRE

Mountains and valleys! dear ye are to me:
Your streams wild-wandering, ever-tranquil lakes,
And forests that make murmur like the sea;
And this keen air that from the hurt soul takes
Its pain and languor.—Doubly dear ye are
For many a lofty memory that throws
A splendor on these hights.—'Neath yon low star,
That like a dewdrop melts in heaven's rose,
Dwelt once a starry spirit; there he smote
Life from the living hills; a little while
He rested from the raging of the world.
This Brook of Shadows, whose dark waters purled
Solace to his deep mind, it felt his smile—
Haunted, and melancholy, and remote.

LATE SUMMER

AN HOUR IN A STUDIO

Each picture was a painted memory
Of the far plains he loved, and of their life,—
Weird, mystical, dark, inarticulate,—
And cities hidden high against the blue,
Whose sky-hung steps one Indian could guard.
The enchanted Mesa there its fated wall
Lifted, and all its story lived again—
How, in the happy planting time, the strong
Went down to push the seeds into the sand,
Leaving the old and sick. Then reeled the world
And toppled to the plain the perilous path.
Death climbed another way to them who stayed.
He showed us pictured thirst, a dreadful sight;
And many tales he told that might have come,
Brought by some planet-wanderer—fresh from Mars,
Or from the silver deserts of the moon.
But I remember better than all else
One night he told of in that land of fright—
The love-songs swarthy men sang to their herds
On the high plains to keep the beasts in heart;
Piercing the silence one keen tenor voice
Singing “Ai nostri monti” clear and high:
Instead of stakes and fences round about
They circled them with music in the night.

ILLUSION

What strange, fond trick is this mine eyes are playing!
I know 't is but the visioning mind perplexes,—
The inward sight the outer sense betraying,—
Yet the sweet lie the spirit wounds and vexes:
As at still midnight pondering here, and reading,
Right on the book's white page, and 'twixt the lines,
And wreathing through the words, and quick receding,
Only to come again (as 'mid the vines
The dryads flash and hide), white arms are gleaming,
A light hand hovers, curvèd lips are red,
Locks in a warm and soundless wind are streaming
Across the image of one glorious head;
No more,—no more,—shut now the volume lies
On that swift, piercing look, those haunting eyes.

A SONG OF THE ROAD

Speed, speed, speed
Through the day, through the night!
Cities are beads on the thread of our flight;
Peaks melt in peaks and are lost in the air.
Speed, speed, speed—
But, O, the dearth of it,
Thou not there!
Every journey is good if love be the goal of it.
What's all the world if love's not the soul of it;
What were the worth of it—
Thou not there!

“NOT HERE”

“‘NO, NO,’ SHE SAID”

A SOUL LOST, AND FOUND

“THIS HOUR MY HEART WENT FORTH, AS IN OLD DAYS”

This hour my heart went forth, as in old days,
To one I loved, forgetting she was dead—
So fluttered back the message, like the dove
That found no rest in all the weltering world.
Is it then so—all blankness and black void,
No welcome, no response, no voice, no sign?
Ah, Heaven! let us be foolish—give us faith
In what is not; cheat us a little longer;
Comfort us mortals with envisioned forms;
Let us, tho' but in dreams, see spirits near,
And touch the draperies of imagined shapes
That hold the souls we love—that have gone forth
Into the land of shadows, but still live
In memory, O, most dear! Beguile our lives
With dim, half-fashioned phantoms of dead hours,
Lest the long way grow hateful; give us faith
Unreasoned, vague, unsubstanced, but still faith;
For faith is hope, and hope alone is life.

“EVEN WHEN JOY IS NEAR”

Even when joy is near
These ghosts of banished thoughts do haunt the mind:
The awful void of space wherein our earth,
An atom in the unending whirl of stars,
Circles, all helpless, to a nameless doom;
The swift, indifferent marshaling of fate
Whereby the world moves on, rewarding vice
And punishing angelic innocence
As 't were the crime of crimes; the brute, dull, slow
Persistence in the stifled mind of man
Of forces that drive all his being back
Into the slime; the silent cruelty
Of nature, that doth crush the unseen soul
Hidden within its sensitive shell of flesh;
The anguish and the sorrow of all time,—
These are forever with me,—but grow dim
When I remember my sweet mother's face.
Somewhere, at heart of all, the right must reign
If in the garden of the infinite
Such loveliness be brought to perfect bloom.

RESURRECTION

Back to my body came I in the gray of the dawning,
Back to my bed in the mold, 'neath the sod and the blossoms;
Not strange seemed my natural couch, not new, not afflicting;
But strange now, and new, and afflicting my natural body,
Alien long while my soul took the wings of the morning.
I lifted my hands to the light—then swiftly I followed,
With fingers that carefully prest, the curve of the muscles;
All was familiar; this was the frame I had nurtured,
I had loved as a man loves the body so long his companion;
Again was I 'ware of the brow where the dew of sweet kisses
Fell, ere forth went the stripling to life and the shudder
Of battle;—again from the mirror of waters the features
Not unloved of dear comrades looked forth. I beheld in amazement
The bodily presence so long laid aside and forgotten;
Overwhelmed was my soul with its shackles; I grieved, I lamented
As a prisoner dragged back to his cell, as an eagle recaptured.

“AS SOARS THE EAGLE”