The poems of Madison Cawein :: :: University of Virginia Library

[NEW WORLD IDYLLS]

[O lyrist of the lowly and the true]

O lyrist of the lowly and the true,
The song I sought for you
Still bides-unsung. What hope for me to find,
Lost in the dædal mind,
The living utterance with lovely tongue,
To sing,—as once he sung,
Rare Ariosto, of Knight-Errantry,—
How you in Poesy,
Song's Paladin, Knight of the Dream and Day,
The shield of magic sway!
Of that Atlantes' power, sweet and terse,
The skyey-builded verse!
The shield that dazzles, brilliant with surprise,
Our unanointed eyes.—
Oh, could I write as it were worthy you,
Each word, a spark of dew,—
As once Ferdusi wrote in Persia,—
Would string each rosy spray
Of each unfolding flower of my song;
And Iran's bulbul tongue
Would sob its heart out o'er the fountain's slab
In gardens of Afrasiab.

ONE DAY AND ANOTHER

A Lyrical Eclogue

1. PART I
LATE SPRING

The mottled moth at eventide
Beats glimmering wings against the pane;
The slow, sweet lily opens wide,
White in the dusk like some dim stain;
The garden dreams on every side
And breathes faint scents of rain:
Among the flowering stocks they stand;
A crimson rose is in her hand.

I

Outside her garden. He waits musing:

Herein the dearness of her is;
The thirty perfect days of June
Made one, in maiden loveliness
Were not more sweet to clasp and kiss,
With love not more in tune.

Ah me! I think she is too true,
Too spiritual for life's rough way:
So say her eyes,—her soul looks through,—
Two bluet blossoms, watchet-blue,
Are not more pure than they.

So kind, so beautiful is she,
So soft and white, so fond and fair,
Sometimes my heart fears she may be
Not long for Earth, and secretly
Sweet sister to the air.

II

Dusk deepens. A whippoorwill calls.

The whippoorwills are calling where
The golden west is graying;
“'Tis time,” they say, “to meet him there—
Why are you still delaying?

“He waits you where the old beech throws
Its gnarly shadow over
Wood violet and the bramble rose,
Frail lady-fern and clover.

“Where elder and the sumac peep
Above your garden's paling,

Whereon, at noon, the lizards sleep,
Like lichen on the railing.

“Come! ere the early rising moon's
Gold floods the violet valleys;
Where mists, like phantom picaroons
Anchor their stealthy galleys.

“Come! while the deepening amethyst
Of dusk above is falling—
'Tis time to tryst! 'tis time to tryst!”
The whippoorwills are calling.

They call you to these twilight ways
With dewy odor dripping—
Ah, girlhood, through the rosy haze
Come like a moonbeam slipping.

III

He
enters the garden, speaking dreamily:

There is a fading inward of the day,
And all the pansy sunset clasps one star;
The twilight acres, eastward, glimmer gray,
While all the world to westward smoulders far.

Now to your glass will you pass for the last time?
Pass! humming some ballad, I know.
Here where I wait it is late and is past time—
Late! and the moments are slow, are slow.

There is a drawing downward of the night;
The bridegroom Heaven bends down to kiss the moon:
Above, the heights hang silver in her light;
Below, the vales stretch purple, deep with June.

There in the dew is it you hiding lawny?
You? or a moth in the vines?—
You!—by your hand! where the band twinkles tawny!
You!—by your ring, like a glow-worm that shines!

IV

She approaches, laughing. She speaks:
You'd given up hope?

He
Believe me!

She
Why! is your love so poor?

He
No. Yet you might deceive me!

She
As many a girl before.—
Ah, dear, you will forgive me?

He
Say no more, sweet, say no more!

She
Love trusts; and that's enough, my dear.
Trust wins through love; whereof, my dear,
Love holds through trust: and love, my dear,
Is—all my life and lore.

He
Come, pay me or I'll scold you.—
Give me the kiss you owe.—
You run when I would hold you?

She
No! no! I say! now, no!—
How often have I told you,
You must not use me so?

He
More sweet the dusk for this is,
For lips that meet in kisses.—
Come! come! why run from blisses
As from a dreadful foe?

V

She
stands smiling at him, shyly, then speaks:
How many words in the asking!
How easily I can grieve you!—
My “yes” in a “no” was a-masking,
Nor thought, dear, to deceive you.—
A kiss?—the humming-bird happiness here
In my heart consents. ... But what are words,
When the thought of two souls in speech accords?
Affirmative, negative—what are they, dear?
I wished to say “yes,” but somehow said “no.”

The woman within me knew you would know,
Knew that your heart would hear.

He
speaks:
So many words in the doing!—
Therein you could not deceive me;
Some things are sweeter for the pursuing:
I knew what you meant, believe me.—
Bunched bells of the blush pomegranate, to fix
At your throat ... Six drops of fire they are ...
Will you look—where the moon and its following star
Rise silvery over yon meadow ricks?
While I hold—while I bend your head back, so ...
For I know it is “yes” though you whisper “no,”
And my kisses, sweet, are six.

VI

Moths flutter around them. She speaks:

Look!—where the fiery
Glow-worm in briery
Banks of the moon-mellowed bowers

Sparkles—how hazily
Pinioned and airily
Delicate, warily,
Drowsily, lazily,
Flutter the moths to the flowers.

White as the dreamiest
Bud of the creamiest
Rose in the garden that dozes,
See how they cling to them!
Held in the heart of their
Hearts, like a part of their
Perfume, they swing to them
Wings that are soft as a rose is.

Dim as the forming of
Dew in the warming of
Moonlight, they light on the petals;
All is revealed to them;
All!—from the sunniest
Tips to the honiest
Heart, whence they yield to them
Spice, through the darkness that settles.

So to our tremulous
Souls come the emulous
Agents of love; through whose power

All that is best in us,
All that is beautiful,
Selfless and dutiful,
Is manifest in us,
Even as the scent of a flower.

VII

Taking her hand he says:
What makes you beautiful?
Answer, now, answer!—
Is it that dutiful
Souls are all beautiful?
Is it romance or
Beauty of spirit,
Which souls, that merit,
Of heaven inherit?—
Have you an answer?

She,
roguishly:
What makes you lovable?
Answer, now, answer!—
Is it not provable
That man is lovable
Just because chance, or
Nature, makes woman

Love him?—Her human
Part 's to illumine.—
Have you an answer?

VIII

Then, regarding him seriously, she continues:

Could I recall every joy that befell me
There in the past with its anguish and bliss,
Here in my heart it hath whispered to tell me,—
They were no joys like this.

Were it not well if our love could forget them,
Veiling the Was with the dawn of the Is?
Dead with the past we should never regret them,
Being no joys like this.

Now they are gone and the Present stands speechful,
Ardent of word and of look and of kiss,—
What though we know that their eyes are beseechful!—
They were no joys like this.

Were it not well to have more of the spirit,
Living high Futures this earthly must miss?
Less of the flesh, with the Past pining near it?
Knowing no joys like this!

IX

Leaving the garden for the lane. He, with lightness of heart:
We will leave reason,
Sweet, for a season:
Reason were treason
Now that the nether
Spaces are clad, oh,
In silvery shadow—
We will be glad, oh,
Glad as this weather!

She,
responding to his mood:
Heart unto heart! where the moonlight is slanted,
Let us believe that our souls are enchanted:—
I in the castle-keep; you are the airy
Prince who comes seeking me; love is the fairy
Bringing us two together.

He
Starlight in masses
Over us passes;
And in the grass is
Many a flower.—

Now will you tell me
How 'd you enspell me?
What once befell me
There in your bower?

She
Soul unto soul!—in the moon's wizard glory,
Let us believe we are parts in a story:—
I am a poem; a poet you hear it
Whispered in star and in flower; a spirit,
Love, puts my soul in your power.

X

He,
suddenly and very earnestly:

Perhaps we lived in the days
Of the Khalif Haroun er Reshid;
And loved, as the story says
Did the Sultan's favorite one
And the Persian Emperor's son,
Ali ben Bekkar, he
Of the Kisra dynasty.

Do you know the story?—Well,
You were Haroun's Sultana.
When night on the palace fell,

A slave, through a secret door,—
Low-arched on the Tigris' shore,—
By a hidden winding stair
Brought me to your bower there.

Then there was laughter and mirth,
And feasting and singing together,
In a chamber of wonderful worth;
In a chamber vaulted high
On columns of ivory;
Its dome, like the irised skies,
Mooned over with peacock eyes;
Its curtains and furniture,
Damask and juniper.

Ten slave girls—so many blooms—
Stand, holding tamarisk torches,
Silk-clad from the Irak looms;
Ten handmaidens serve the feast,
Each maid like a star in the east;
Ten lutanists, lutes a-tune,
Wait, each like the Ramadan moon.

For you, in a stuff of Merv
Blue-clad, unveiled and jeweled,
No metaphor made may serve:
Scarved deep with your raven hair,

The jewels like fireflies there—
Blossom and moon and star,
The Lady Shemsennehar.

The zone that girdles your waist
Would ransom a Prince and Emeer;
In your coronet's gold enchased,
And your bracelet's twisted bar,
Burn rubies of Istakhar;
And pearls of the Jamshid race
Hang looped on your bosom's lace.

You stand like the letter I;
Dawn-faced, with eyes that sparkle
Black stars in a rosy sky;
Mouth, like a cloven peach,
Sweet with your smiling speech;
Cheeks, that the blood presumes
To make pomegranate blooms.

With roses of Rocknabad,
Hyacinths of Bokhara,—
Creamily cool and clad
In gauze,—girls scatter the floor
From pillar to cedarn door.
Then, a pomegranate bloom in each ear,
Come the dancing-girls of Kashmeer.

Kohl in their eyes, down the room,—
That opaline casting-bottles
Have showered with rose-perfume,—
They glitter and drift and swoon
To the dulcimer's languishing tune;
In the liquid light like stars
And moons and nenuphars.

Carbuncles, tragacanth-red,
Smoulder in armlet and anklet:
Gleaming on breast and on head,
Bangles of coins, that are angled,
Tinkle: and veils, that are spangled,
Flutter from coiffure and wrist
Like a star-bewildered mist.

Each dancing-girl is a flower
Of the Tuba from vales of El Liwa.—
How the bronzen censers glower!
And scents of ambergris pour,
And of myrrh, brought out of Lahore,
And of musk of Khoten! how good
Is the scent of the sandalwood!

A lutanist smites her lute,
Sings loves of Mejnoon and Leila:—
Her voice is an Houri flute;—

While the fragrant flambeaux wave,
Barbaric, o'er free and slave,
O'er fabrics and bezels of gems
And roses in anadems.

Sherbets in ewers of gold,
Fruits in salvers carnelian;
Flagons of grotesque mold,
Made of a sapphire glass,
Brimmed with wine of Shirâz;
Shaddock and melon and grape
On plate of an antique shape.

Vases of frosted rose,
Of alabaster graven,
Filled with the mountain snows;
Goblets of mother-of-pearl,
One filigree silver-swirl;
Vessels of gold foamed up
With spray of spar on the cup.

Then a slave bursts in with a cry:
“The eunuchs! the Khalif's eunuchs!—
With scimitars bared draw nigh!
Wesif and Afif and he,
Chief of the hideous three,
Mesrour!—the Sultan 's seen
'Mid a hundred weapons' sheen!”

Did we part when we heard this?—No!
It seems that my soul remembers
How I clasped and kissed you, so. ...
When they came they found us—dead,
On the flowers our blood dyed red;
Our lips together, and
The dagger in my hand.

XI

She,
musingly:

How it was I can not tell,
For I know not where nor why;
But I know we loved too well
In some world that does not lie
East or west of where we dwell,
And beneath no earthly sky.

Was it in the golden ages?—
Or the iron?—that I heard,—
In the prophecy of sages,—
Haply, how had come a bird,
Underneath whose wing were pages
Of an unknown lover's word.

I forget. You may remember
How the earthquake shook our ships;

How our city, one huge ember,
Blazed within the thick eclipse:
When you found me—deep December
Sealed my icy eyes and lips.

I forget. No one may say
That such things can not be true:—
Here a flower dies to-day,
There, to-morrow, blooms anew. ...
Death is silent.—Tell me, pray,
Why men doubt what God can do?

XII

He,
with conviction:

As to that, nothing to tell!
You being all my belief,
Doubt can not enter or dwell
Here where your image is chief;
Here where your name is a spell,
Potent in joy and in grief.

Is it the glamour of spring
Working in us so we seem
Aye to have loved? that we cling
Even to some fancy or dream,
Rainbowing everything,
Here in our souls, with its gleam?

See! how the synod is met
There of the planets to preach us:—
Freed from the earth's oubliette,
See how the blossoms beseech us!—
Were it not well to forget
Winter and death as they teach us?

Dew and a bud and a star,
All,—like a beautiful thought,
Over man's wisdom how far!—
God for some purpose hath wrought.—
Could we but know why they are,
And that they end not in naught!

Stars and the moon; and they roll
Over our way that is white.—
Here shall we end the long stroll?
Here shall I kiss you good night?
Or, for a while, soul to soul,
Linger and dream of delight?

XIII

They reënter the garden. She speaks somewhat pensively:

Myths tell of walls and cities, lyred of love,
That rose to music.—Were that power my own,

Had I that harp, that magic barbiton,
What had I builded for our lives thereof?—

In docile shadows under bluebell skies,
A home upon the poppied edge of eve,
Beneath pale peaks the splendors never leave,
'Mid lemon orchards whence the egret flies.

Where, pitiless, the ruined hand of death
Should never reach. No bud, no flower fade:
Where all were perfect, pure and unafraid:
And life serener than an angel's breath.

The days should move to music: song should tame
The nights, attentive with their listening stars:
And morn outrival eve in opal bars,
Each preaching beauty with rose-tongues of flame.

O home! O life! desired and to be!
How shall we reach you?—Far the way and dim.—
Give me your hand, sweet! let us follow him,
Love with the madness and the melody.

XIV

He,
observing the various flowers around them:

Violets and anemones
The surrendered Hours
Pour, as handsels, round the knees
Of the Spring, who to the breeze
Flings her myriad flowers.

Like to coins, the sumptuous day
Strews with blossoms golden
Every furlong of his way,—
Like a Sultan gone to pray
At a Kaaba olden.

Warlock Night, with spark on spark,
Clad in dim attire,
Dots with stars the haloed dark,—
As a priest around the Ark
Lights his lamps of fire.

These are but the cosmic strings
Of the harp of Beauty,
Of that instrument which sings,
In our souls, of love, that brings
Peace and faith and duty.

XV

She,
seriously:

Duty?—Comfort of the sinner
And the saint!—When grief and trial
Weigh us, and within our inner
Selves,—responsive to love's viol,—
Hope's soft voice grows thin and thinner.
It is kin to self-denial.

Self-denial! Through whose feeling
We are gainer though we 're loser;
All the finer force revealing
Of our natures. No accuser
Is the conscience then, but healing
Of the wound of which we 're chooser.

Who the loser, who the winner,
If the ardor fail as preacher?—
None who loved was yet beginner,
Though another's love-beseecher:
Love's revealment 's of the inner
Life and God Himself is teacher.

Heine said “no flower knoweth
Of the fragrance it revealeth;
Song, its heart that overfloweth,

Never nightingale's heart feeleth”—
Such is love the spirit groweth,
Love unconscious if it healeth.

XVI

He,
looking smilingly into her eyes, after a pause, lightly:

An elf there is who stables the hot
Red wasp that sucks on the apricot;
An elf, who rowels his spiteful bay,
Like a mote on a ray, away, away;
An elf, who saddles the hornet lean
And dins i' the ear o' the swinging bean;
Who straddles, with cap cocked, all awry,
The bottle-green back o' the dragon-fly.

And this is the elf who sips and sips
From clover-horns whence the perfume drips;
And, drunk with dew, in the glimmering gloam
Awaits the wild-bee's coming home;
In ambush lies where none may see,
And robs the caravan bumblebee:
Gold bags of honey the bees must pay
To the bandit elf of the fairy-way.

Another ouphen the butterflies know,
Who paints their wings with the hues that glow

On blossoms: squeezing from tubes of dew
Pansy colors of every hue
On his bloom's pied pallet, he paints the wings
Of the butterflies, moths, and other things.
This is the elf that the hollyhocks hear,
Who dangles a brilliant in each one's ear;
Teases at noon the pane's green fly,
And lights at night the glow-worm's eye.

But the dearest elf, so the poets say,
Is the elf who hides in an eye of gray;
Who curls in a dimple or slips along
The strings of a lute to a lover's song;
Who smiles in her smile and frowns in her frown,
And dreams in the scent of her glove or gown;
Hides and beckons, as all may note,
In the bloom or the bow of a maiden's throat.

XVII

She,
pensively, standing among the flowers:

Soft through the trees the night wind sighs,
And swoons and dies.
Above, the stars hang wanly white;
Here, through the dark,

A drizzled gold, the fireflies
Rain mimic stars in spark on spark.—
'Tis time to part, to say good night.
Good night.

From fern to flower the night-moths cross
At drowsy loss.
The moon drifts, veiled, through clouds of white;
And pearly pale,
In silvery blurs, through beds of moss,
Their tiny moons the glow-worms trail.—
'Tis time to part, to say good night.
Good night.

XVIII

He,
at parting, as they proceed down the garden:

You say we can not marry, now
That roses and the June are here?
To your decision I must bow.—
Ah, well!—perhaps 't is best, my dear.
Let 's swear again each old love vow
And love another year.

Another year of love with you!
Of dreams and days, of sun and rain!

When field and forest bloom anew,
And locust clusters pelt the lane,
When all the song-birds wed and woo,
I'll not take “no” again.

Oft shall I lie awake and mark
The hours by no clanging clock,
But, in the dim and dewy dark,
Far crowing of some punctual cock;
Then up, as early as the lark
To meet you by our rock.

The rock, where first we met at tryst;
Where first I wooed and won your love.—
Remember how the moon and mist
Made mystery of the heaven above
As now to-night?—Where first I kissed
Your lips, you trembling like a dove.

So, then, we will not marry now
That roses and the June are here,
That warmth and fragrance weigh each bough?
And, yet, your reason is not clear ...
Ah, well! We'll swear anew each vow
And wait another year.

2. PART II
EARLY SUMMER

The cricket in the rose-bush hedge
Sings by the vine-entangled gate;
The slim moon slants a timid edge
Of pearl through one low cloud of slate;
Around dark door and window-ledge
Like dreams the shadows wait.
And through the summer dusk she goes,
On her white breast a crimson rose.

I

She
delays, meditating. A rainy afternoon.

Gray skies and a foggy rain
Dripping from streaming eaves;
Over and over again
Dull drop of the trickling leaves:
And the woodward-winding lane,
And the hill with its shocks of sheaves
One scarce perceives.

Shall I go in such wet weather
By the lane or over the hill?—
Where the blossoming milkweed's feather
The diamonded rain-drops fill;
Where, draggled and drenched together,
The ox-eyes rank the rill
By the old corn-mill.

The creek by now is swollen,
And its foaming cascades sound;
And the lilies, smeared with pollen,
In the dam look dull and drowned.
'Tis the path I oft have stolen
To the bridge; that rambles round
With willows bound.

Through a bottom wild with berry,
And packed with the ironweeds
And elder,—washed and very
Fragrant,—the fenced path leads
Past oak and wilding cherry,
Where the tall wild-lettuce seeds,
To a place of reeds.

The sun through the sad sky bleaches—
Is that a thrush that calls?—
A bird in the rain beseeches:

And see! on the balsam's balls,
And leaves of the water-beeches—
One blister of wart-like galls—
No rain-drop falls.

My shawl instead of a bonnet! ...
'Though the woods be dripping yet,
Through the wet to the rock I'll run it!—
How sweet to meet in the wet!—
Our rock with the vine upon it,—
Each flower a fiery jet,—
Where oft we 've met.

II

They meet. He speaks:

How fresh the purple clover
Smells in its veil of rain!
And where the leaves brim over
How musky wild the lane!
See, how the sodden acres,
Forlorn of all their rakers,
Their hay and harvest makers,
Look green as spring again.

Drops from the trumpet-flowers
Rain on us as we pass;

And every zephyr showers,
From tilted leaf or grass,
Clear beads of moisture, seeming
Pale, pointed emeralds gleaming;
Where, through the green boughs streaming,
The daylight strikes like glass.

She
speaks:

How dewy, clean and fragrant
Look now the green and gold!—
And breezes, trailing vagrant,
Spill all the spice they hold.
The west begins to glimmer;
And shadows, stretching slimmer,
Make gray the ways; and dimmer
Grow field and forest old.

Beyond those rainy reaches
Of woodland, far and lone,
A whippoorwill beseeches;
And now an owlet's moan
Drifts faint upon the hearing.—
These say the dusk is nearing.
And, see, the heavens, clearing,
Take on a tender tone.

How feebly chirps the cricket!
How thin the tree-toads cry!
Blurred in the wild-rose thicket
Gleams wet the firefly.—
This way toward home is nearest;
Of weeds and briers clearest. ...
We'll meet to-morrow, dearest;
Till then, dear heart, good-by.

III

They meet again under the greenwood tree. He speaks:

Here at last! And do you know
That again you 've kept me waiting?
Wondering, anticipating
That your “yes” meant “no.”

Now you 're here we'll have our day. ...
Let us take this daisied hollow,
And beneath these beeches follow
This wild strip of way

To the stream; wherein are seen
Stealing gar and darting minnow;
Over which snake-feeders winnow
Wings of black and green.

Like a cactus flames the sun;
And the mighty weaver, Even,
Tenuous colored, there in heaven,
His rich weft 's begun. ...

How I love you! from the time—
You remember, do you not?—
When, within your orchard-plot,
I was reading rhyme,

As I told you. And 't was thus:—
“By the blue Trinacrian sea,
Far in pastoral Sicily
With Theocritus”—

That I answered you who asked.
But the curious part was this:—
That the whole thing was amiss;
That the Greek but masked

Tales of old Boccaccio:
Tall Decameronian maids
Strolled for me among the glades,
Smiling, sweet and slow.

And when you approached,—my book
Dropped in wonder,—seemingly

To myself I said, “'Tis she!”
And arose to look

In Lauretta's eyes and—true!
Found them yours.—You shook your head,
Laughing at me, as you said,
“Did I frighten you?”

You had come for cherries; these
Coatless then I climbed for while
You still questioned with a smile,
And still tried to tease.

Ah, love, just two years have gone
Since then. ... I remember, you
Wore a dress of billowy blue
Muslin.—Was it “lawn”?—

And your apron still I see—
All its whiteness cherry-stained—
Which you held; wherein I rained
Ripeness from the tree.

And I asked you—for, you know,
To my eyes your serious eyes
Said such deep philosophies—
If you 'd read Rousseau.

You remember how a chance,
Somewhat like to mine, one June
Happened him at castle Toune,
Over there in France?

And a cherry dropping fair
On your cheek, I, envying it,
Cried—remembering Rousseau's wit—
“Would my lips were there!” ...

Here we are at last. We'll row
Down the stream.—The west has narrowed
To one streak of rose, deep-arrowed.—
There 's our skiff below.

IV

Entering the skiff, she speaks:

Waters flowing dark and bright
In the sunlight or the moon,
Fill my soul with such delight
As some visible music might;
As some slow, majestic tune
Made material to the sight.

Blossoms colored like the skies,
Sunset-hued and tame or wild,
Fill my soul with such surmise

As the mind might realize
If one's thoughts, all undefiled,
Should take form before the eyes.

So to me do these appeal;
So they sway me every hour:
Letting all their beauty steal
On my soul to make it feel
Through a rivulet or flower,
More than any words reveal.

V

He
speaks, rowing:

See, sweetheart, how the lilies lay
Their lambent leaves about our way;
Or, pollen-dusty, bob and float
Their nenuphars around our boat.—
The middle of the stream is reached
Three strokes from where our boat was beached.

Look up. You scarce can see the sky,
Through trees that lean, dark, dense and high;
That, coiled with grape and trailing vine,
Build vast a roof of shade and shine;
A house of leaves, where shadows walk,
And whispering winds and waters talk.

There is no path. The saplings choke
The trunks they spring from. There an oak,
Floods from the Alleghanies bore,
Lies rotting; and that sycamore,
Which lays its bulk from shore to shore,—
Uprooted by the rain,—perchance
May be the bridge to some romance:
Its heart of punk, a spongy white,
Glows, ghostly foxfire, in the night.

Now opening through a willow fringe
The waters creep, one tawny tinge
Of sunset; and on either marge
The cottonwoods make walls of shade,
With breezy balsam pungent: large,
The gradual hills loom; darkly fade
The waters wherein herons wade,
Or wing, like Faëry birds, from grass
That mats the shore by which we pass.

She
speaks:
On we pass; we rippling pass,
On sunset waters still as glass.
A vesper-sparrow flies above,
Soft twittering, to its woodland love.
A tufted-titmouse calls afar:
And from the west, like some swift star,

A glittering jay flies screaming. Slim
The sand-snipes and kingfishers skim
Before us; and some twilight thrush—
Who may discover where such sing?—
The silence rinses with a gush
Of limpid music bubbling.

He
speaks:
On we pass.—Now let us oar
To yonder strip of ragged shore,
Where, from a rock with lichens hoar,
A ferny spring falls, babbling frore
Through woodland mosses. Gliding by
The sulphur-colored firefly
Lights its pale lamp where mallows gloom,
And wild-bean and wild-mustard bloom.—
Some hunter there within the woods
Last fall encamped, those ashes say
And campfire boughs.—The solitudes
Grow dreamy with the death of day.

VI

She
sings:

Over the fields of millet
A young bird tries its wings;
And wild as a woodland rillet,

Its first mad music rings—
Soul of my soul, where the meadows roll
What is the song it sings?

“Love, and a glad good-morrow,
Heart where the rapture is!
Good-morrow, good-morrow!
Adieu to sorrow!
Here is the road to bliss:
Where all day long you may hearken my song,
And kiss, kiss, kiss;”

Over the fields of clover,
Where the wild bee drones and sways,
The wind, like a shepherd lover,
Flutes on the fragrant ways—
Heart of my heart, where the blossoms part,
What is the air he plays?

“Love, and a song to follow,
Soul with the face a-gleam!
Come follow, come follow,
O'er hill and through hollow,
To the land o' the bloom and beam:
Where, under the flowers, you may listen for hours.
And dream, dream, dream!”

VII

He
speaks, letting the boat drift:

Here the shores are irised; grasses
Clump the water gray, that glasses
Broken wood and deepened distance.
Far the musical persistence
Of a field-lark lingers low
In the west's rich tulip-glow.

White before us flames one pointed
Star; and Day hath Night anointed
King; from out her azure ewer
Pouring starry fire, truer
Than pure gold. Star-crowned he stands
With the starlight in his hands.

Will the moon bleach through the ragged
Tree-tops ere we reach yon jagged
Rock that rises gradually,
Pharos of our homeward valley?—
All the west is smouldering red;
Embers are the stars o'erhead.

At my soul some Protean elf is:
You 're Simætha; I am Delphis,
You are Sappho and your Phaon,

I.—We love.—There lies our way, on,—
Let us say,—Æolian seas,
To the violet Lesbian leas.

On we drift. I love you. Nearer
Looms our Island. Rosier, clearer,
The Leucadian cliff we follow,
Where the temple of Apollo
Shines—a pale and pillared fire. ...
Strike, oh, strike the Lydian lyre!—
Out of Hellas blows the breeze
Singing to the Sapphic seas.

VIII

Landing, he sings:

Night, night, 't is night. The moon drifts low above us,
And all its gold is tangled in the stream:
Love, love, my love, and all the stars, that love us,
The stars smile down and every star 's a dream.

In odorous purple, where the falling warble
Of water cascades and the plunged foam glows,
A columned ruin lifts its sculptured marble
Friezed with the chiselled rebeck and the rose.

She
sings:

Sleep, sleep, sweet sleep sleeps at the drifting tiller,
And in our sail the Spirit of the Rain—
Love, love, my love, ah, bid thy heart be stiller,
And, hark! the music of the singing main.

What flowers are those that blow their balm unto us,
From mouths of wild aroma, each a flame?—
Or is it Love that breathes? sweet Love who drew us,
Who kissed our eyes and made us see the same?

He
speaks:

Dreams; dreams we dream! no dream that we would banish!
The temple and the nightingale are there!
Our love hath made them, nevermore to vanish,
Real as yon moon, this wild-rose in your hair.

Night, night, 't is night!—and Love's own star 's before us,
Its starred reflection in the starry stream.—
Yes, yes, ah yes! his presence shall watch o'er us,
To-night, to-night, and every night we dream.

IX

Homeward through flowers; she speaks:

Behold the offerings of the common hills!
Whose lowly names have made them three times dear:
One evening-primrose and an apron-full
Of violets; and there, in multitudes,
Dim-seen in moonlight, sweet cerulean wan,
The bluet, making heaven of every dell
With morn's ambrosial blue: dew-dropping plumes
Of the mauve beard's-tongue; and the red-freaked cups
Of blackberry-lilies all along the creek,
Where, lulled, the freckled silence sleeps, and vague
The water flows, when, at high noon, the cows
Wade knee-deep, and the heat is honied with
The drone of drowsy bees and dizzy flies.
How bright the moon is on that fleur-de-lis;
Blue, streaked with crystal like a summer day:
And is it moonlight there? or is it flowers?
White violets? lilies? or a daisy bed?
And now the wind, with softest lullaby,
Swings all their cradled heads and rocks-to-sleep

Their fragrant faces and their golden eyes,
Curtained, and frailly wimpled with the dew.

Simple suggestions of a life most fair!
Flowers, you speak of love and untaught faith,
Whose habitation is within the soul,
Not of the Earth, yet for the Earth indeed. ...

What is it halcyons my heart? makes calm,
With calmness not of knowledge, all my soul
This night of nights?—Is 't love? or faith? or both?—
The lore of all the world is less than these
Simple suggestions of a life most fair,
And love most sweet that I have learned to know!

X

He
speaks, musingly:

Yes, I have known its being so;
Long ago was I seeing so—
Beckoning on to a fairer land,
Out of the flowers it waved its hand;
Bidding me on to life and love,
Life with the hope of the love thereof.

What is the value of knowing it,
If you are shy in showing it?—
Need of the earth unfolds the flower,
Dewy sweet, at the proper hour;
And, in the world of the human heart,
Love is the flower's counterpart.

So when the soul is heedable,
Then is the heart made readable.—
I in the book of your heart have read
Words that are truer than truth hath said:
Measures of love, the spirit's song,
Writ of your soul to haunt me long.

Love can hear each laudable
Thought of the loved made audible,
Spoken in wonder, or joy, or pain,
And reëcho it back again:
Ever responsive, ever awake,
Ever replying with ache for ache.

XI

She
speaks, dreamily:

Earth gives its flowers to us
And heaven its stars. Indeed,
These are as lips that woo us,

Those are as lights that lead,
With love that doth pursue us,
With hope that still doth speed.

Yet shall the flowers lie riven,
And lips forget to kiss;
The stars fade out of heaven,
And lights lead us amiss—
As love for which we 've striven;
As hope that promises.

XII

He
laughs, wishing to dispel her seriousness:
If love I have had of you, you had of me,
Then doubtless our loving were over;
One would be less than the other, you see;
Since what you returned to your lover
Were only his own; and—

XIII

She
interrupts him, speaking impetuously:
But if I lose you, if you part with me,
I will not love you less
Loving so much now. If there is to be
A parting and distress,—

What will avail to comfort or relieve
The soul that 's anguished most?—
The knowledge that it once possessed, perceive,
The love that it has lost.
You must acknowledge, under sun and moon
All that we feel is old;
Let morning flutter from night's brown cocoon
Wide wings of flaxen gold;
The moon burst through the darkness, soaring o'er,
Like some great moth and white,
These have been seen a myriad times before
And with renewed delight.—
So 'tis with love;—how old yet new it is!—
This only should we heed,—
To once have known, to once have felt love's bliss,
Is to be rich indeed.—
Whether we win or lose, we lose or win,
Within our gain or loss
Some purpose lies, some end unseen of sin,
Beyond our crown or cross.

XIV

Nearing her home, he speaks:

True, true!—Perhaps it would be best
To be that lone star in the west;

Above the earth, within the skies,
Yet shining here in your blue eyes.

Or, haply, better here to blow
A flower beneath your window low;
That, brief of life and frail and fair,
Finds yet a heaven in your hair.

Or well, perhaps, to be the breeze
That sighs its soul out to the trees;
A voice, a breath of rain or drouth,
That has its wild will with your mouth.

These things I long to be. I long
To be the burthen of some song
You love to sing; a melody,
Sure of sweet immortality.

XV

At the gate. She speaks:

Sunday shall we ride together?
Not the root-rough, rambling way
Through the wood we went that day,
In last summer's sultry weather.

Past the Methodist camp-meeting,
Where religion helped the hymn

Gather volume; and a slim
Minister, with textful greeting,

Welcomed us and still expounded.—
From the service on the hill
We had passed three hills and still
Loud, though far, the singing sounded.

Nor that road through weed and berry
Drowsy days led me and you
To the old-time barbecue,
Where the country-side made merry.

Dusty vehicles together;
Darkies with the horses near
Tied to trees; the atmosphere
Redolent of bark and leather,

And of burgoo and of beef; there
Roasting whole within the trench;
Near which spread the long pine bench
Under shading limb and leaf there.

As we went the homeward journey
You exclaimed, “They intermix
Pleasure there and politics,
Love and war: our modern tourney.”

And the fiddles!—through the thickets,
How they thumped the old quadrille!
Scraping, droning on the hill,
It was like a swarm of crickets. ...

Neither road! The shady quiet
Of that path by beech and birch,
Winding to the ruined church
Near the stream that sparkles by it.

Where the silent Sundays listen
For the preacher—Love—we bring
In our hearts to preach and sing
Week-day shade to Sabbath glisten.

XVI

He,
at parting:

Yes, to-morrow. Early morn.—
When the House of Day uncloses
Portals that the stars adorn,—
Whence Light's golden presence throws his
Flaming lilies, burning roses,
At the wide wood's world of wall,
Spears of sparkle at each fall:

Then together we will ride
To the wood's cathedral places;

Where, like prayers, the wildflowers hide,
Sabbath in their fairy faces;
Where, in truest, untaught phrases,
Worship in each rhythmic word,
God is praised by many a bird.

Look above you.—Pearly white,
Star on star now crystallizes
Out of darkness: Afric night
Hangs them round her like devices
Of strange jewels. Vapor rises,
Glimmering, from each wood and dell.—
Till to-morrow, then, farewell.

XVII

She
tarries at the gate a moment, watching him disappear down the lane. He sings, and the sound of his singing grows fainter and fainter and at last dies away in the distance:

Say, my heart, O my heart,
These be the eves for speaking!
There is no wight will work us spite
Beneath the sunset's streaking.

Yes, my sweet, O my sweet,
Now is the time for telling!

To walk together in starry weather
Down lanes with elder smelling.

O my heart, yes, my heart,
Now is the time for saying!
When lost in dreams each wildflower seems
And every blossom praying.

Lean, my sweet, listen, sweet,—
No sweeter time than this is,—
So says the rose, the moth that knows,—
To take sweet toll in kisses.

3. PART III
LATE SUMMER

Heat lightning flickers in one cloud,
As in a flower a firefly;
Some rain-drops, that the rose-bush bowed,
Jar through the leaves and dimly lie:
Among the trees, now low, now loud,
The whispering breezes sigh.
The place is lone; the night is hushed;
Upon the path a rose lies crushed.

I

Musing, he strolls among the quiet lanes by farm and field:

Now rests the season in forgetfulness,
Careless in beauty of maturity;
The ripened roses round brown temples, she
Fulfils completion in a dreamy guess.
Now Time grants night the more and day the less:
The gray decides; and brown,

Dim golds and drabs in dulling green express
Themselves and redden as the year goes down.
Sadder the fields where, thrusting hoary high
Their tasseled heads, the Lear-like corn-stocks die,
And, Falstaff-like, buff-bellied pumpkins lie.—
Deeper to tenderness,
Sadder the blue of hills that lounge along
The lonesome west; sadder the song
Of the wild red-bird in the leafage yellow.—
Deeper and dreamier, ay!
Than woods or waters, leans the languid sky
Above lone orchards where the cider-press
Drips and the russets mellow.

Nature grows liberal: from the beechen leaves
The beech-nuts' burrs their little pockets thrust,
Bulged with the copper of the nuts that rust;
Above the grass the spendthrift spider weaves
A web of silver for which dawn designs
Thrice twenty rows of pearls: beneath the oak,
That rolls old roots in many gnarly lines,—
The polished acorns, from their saucers broke,
Strew oval agates.—On sonorous pines
The far wind organs; but the forest near
Is silent; and the blue-white smoke

Of burning brush, beyond that field of hay,
Hangs like a pillar in the atmosphere;
But now it shakes—it breaks and all the vines
And tree-tops tremble;—see! the wind is here!
Billowing and boisterous; and the smiling day
Rejoices in its clamor. Earth and sky
Resound with glory of its majesty,
Impetuous splendor of its rushing by.—
But on those heights the forest still is still,
Expectant of its coming. ... Far away
Each anxious tree upon each waiting hill
Tingles anticipation, as in gray
Surmise of rapture. Now the first gusts play,
Like laughter low, about their rippling spines;
And now the wildwood, one exultant sway,
Shouts—and the light at each tumultuous pause,
The light that glooms and shines,
Seems hands in wild applause.

How glows that garden! though the white mists keep
The vagabonding flowers reminded of
Decay that comes to slay in open love,

When the full moon hangs cold and night is deep;
Unheeding still, their cardinal colors leap
And laugh encircled of the scythe of death,—
Like lovely children he prepares to reap,—
Staying his blade a breath
To mark their beauty ere, with one last sweep,
He lays them dead and turns away to weep.—
Let me admire,—
Before the sickle of the coming cold
Shall mow them down,—their beauties manifold:
How like to spurts of fire
That scarlet salvia lifts its blooms, which heap
Yon square of sunlight. And, as sparkles creep
Through charring parchment, up that window's screen
The cypress dots with crimson all its green,
The haunt of many bees.
Cascading dark those porch-built lattices,
The nightshade bleeds with berries; drops of blood,
Hanging in clusters, 'mid the blue monk'shood.

There, in that garden old,
The bright-hued clumps of zinnias unfold
Their formal flowers; and the marigold
Lifts its pinched shred of orange sunset caught
And elfed in petals. The nasturtium,
All pungent leaved and acrid of perfume,
Hangs up its goblin bonnet, fairy-brought
From Gnomeland. There, predominant red,
And arrogant, the dahlia lifts its head,
Beside the balsam's rose-stained horns of honey,
Deep in the mumuring, sunny
Dry wildness of the weedy flower-bed;
Where crickets and the weed-bugs, noon and night,
Shrill dirges for the flowers that soon will die,
And flowers already dead.—
I seem to hear the passing Summer sigh:
A voice, that seems to weep,
“Too soon, too soon the Beautiful passes by!
And soon, amid her bowers,
Will dripping Autumn mourn with all her flowers.”—
If I, perchance, might peep
Beneath those leaves of podded hollyhocks,
That the bland wind with odorous whispers rocks,

I might behold her,—white
And weary,—Summer, 'mid her flowers asleep,
Her drowsy flowers asleep,
The withered poppies knotted in her locks.

II

He
is reminded of another day with her:

The hips were reddening on this rose,
Those haws were hung with fire,
That day we went this way that goes
Up hills of bough and brier.
This hooked thorn caught her gown and seemed
Imploring her to linger;
Upon her hair a sun-ray streamed
Like some baptizing finger.

This false-foxglove, so golden now
With yellow blooms, like bangles,
Was bloomless then. But yonder bough,—
The sumac's plume entangles,—
Was like an Indian's painted face;
And, like a squaw, attended
That bush, in vague vermilion grace,
With beads of berries splendid.

And here we turned to mount that hill,
Down which the wild brook tumbles;
And, like to-day, that day was still,
And mild winds swayed the umbels
Of these wild-carrots, lawny gray:
And there, deep-dappled o'er us,
An orchard stretched; and in our way
Dropped ripened fruit before us.

With muffled thud the pippin fell,
And at our feet rolled dusty;
A hornet clinging to its bell,
The pear lay bruised and rusty:
The smell of pulpy peach and plum,
From which the juice oozed yellow,—
Around which bees made sleepy hum,—
Made warm the air and mellow.

And then we came where, many-hued,
The wet wild morning-glory
Hung its balloons in shadows dewed
For dawning's offertory:
With bush and bramble, far away,
Beneath us stretched the valley,
Cleft of one creek, as clear as day,
That rippled musically.

The brown, the bronze, the green, the red
Of weed and brier ran riot
To walls of woods, whose pathways led
To nooks of whispering quiet:
Long waves of feathering goldenrod
Ran through the gray in patches,
As in a cloud the gold of God
Burns, that the sunset catches.

And there, above the blue hills rolled,
Like some far conflagration,
The sunset, flaming marigold,
We watched in exultation:
Then, turning homeward, she and I
Went in love's sweet derangement—
How different now seem earth and sky,
Since this undreamed estrangement.

III

He
enters the woods. He sits down despondently:

Here where the day is dimmest,
And silence company,
Some might find sympathy
For loss, or grief the grimmest,
In each great-hearted tree—

Here where the day is dimmest—
But, ah, there 's none for me!

In leaves might find communion,
Returning sigh for sigh,
For love the heavens deny;
The love that yearns for union,
Yet parts and knows not why.—
In leaves might find communion—
But, ah, not I, not I!

My eyes with tears are aching.—
Why has she written me?
And will no longer see?—
My heart with grief is breaking,
With grief that this should be.—
My eyes with tears are aching—
Why has she written me?

IV

He
proceeds in the direction of a stream:
Better is death than sleep,
Better for tired eyes.—
Why do we weep and weep
When near us the solace lies?
There, in that stream, that, deep,—

Reflecting woods and skies,—
Could comfort all our sighs.
The mystery of things,
Of dreams, philosophies,
To which the mortal clings,
That can unriddle these.—
What is 't the water sings?
What is 't it promises?—
End to my miseries!

V

He
seats himself on a rock and gazes steadily into the stream:

And here alone I sit and it is so!—
O vales and hills! O valley-lands and knobs!
What cure have you for woe?
What balm that robs
The brain of thought, the knowledge of its woe?
None! none! ah me! that my sick heart may know!—
The wearying sameness!—yet this thing is so!
This thing is so, and still the waters flow,
The leaves drop slowly down; the daylight throbs
With sun and wind, and yet this thing is so!

There is no sympathy in heaven or earth
For human sorrow! all we see is mirth,
Or madness; cruelty or lust;
Nature is heedless of her children's grief;
Man is to her no more than is a leaf,
That buds and has its summer, that is brief,
Then falls, and mixes with the common dust.
Here, at this culvert's mouth,
The shadowy water, flowing toward the south,
Seems deepest, stagnant-stayed.—
What is it yonder that makes me afraid?
Of my own self afraid?—I do not know!—
What power draws me to the striate stream?
What evil? or what dream?
Me! dropping pebbles in the quiet wave,
That echoes, strange as music in a cave,
Hollow and thin; vibrating in the shade,
As if 't were tears that fell, and, falling, made
A crystal sound, a shadow wail of woe,
Wrung from the rocks and waters there below;
An ailing phantom that will not be laid;
Complaining ghosts of sobs that fill my breast,—
That will not forth,—and give my heart no rest.

There, in the water, how the lank sword-grass
Mats its long blades, each blade a crooked kris,
Making a marsh; 'mid which the currents miss
Their rock-born melodies.
But there and there, one sees
The wide-belled mallow, as within a glass,
Long-pistiled, leaning o'er
The root-contorted shore,
As if its own pink image it would kiss.
And there the tangled wild-potato vine
Lifts beakered blossoms, each a cup of wine,
As pale as moonlight is:—
No mandrake, curling convolutions up,
Loops heavier blossoms, each a conical cup
That swoons moon-nectar and a serpent's hiss.—
And there tall gipsy lilies, all a-sway,
Of coppery hue
Streaked as with crimson dew,
Mirror fierce faces in the deeps,
O'er which they lean, bent in inverted view.—
And where the stream around those rushes creeps,
The dragon-fly, in endless error, keeps
Sewing the pale-gold gown of day
With tangled stitches of a burning blue:

Its brilliant body is a needle fine,
A thread of azure ray,
Black-pinioned, shuttling the shade and shine.
But here before me where my pensive shade
Looks up at me, the stale stream, stagnant, lies,
Deep, dark, but clear and silent; streaked with hues
Of ragweed pollen, and of spawny ooze,
Through which the seeping bubbles, bursting, rise.—
All flowers here refuse
To grow or blossom; beauties, too, are few,
That haunt its depths: no glittering minnows braid
Its sleepy crystal; and no gravels strew
With colored orbs its bottom. Half afraid
I shrink from my own eyes
There in its cairngorm of reflected skies.—
I know not why, and yet it seems I see—
What is 't I see there moving stealthily?

I know not what!—But where the kildees wade,
Slim in the foamy scum,
From that direction hither doth it come,
Whate'er it is, that makes my soul afraid.

Nearer it draws to where those low rocks ail,
Warm rocks, on which some water-snake hath clomb,
Basking its spotted body, coiling numb,
Brown in the brindled shade.—
At first it seemed a prism on the grail,
A bubble's prism, like the shadow made
Of water-striders; then a trail,
An angled sparkle in a webby veil
Of duckweed, green as verdigris, it swayed
Frog-like through deeps, to crouch, a flaccid, pale,
Squat bulk below. ...
I gaze, and though I would, I can not go.
Reflected trees and skies,
And breeze-blown clouds that lounge at sunny loss,
Seem in its stolid eyes,
Its fishy gaze, that holds me in strange wise.
Ghoul-like it seems to rise,
And now to sink; its eldritch features fail,
Then come again in rhythmic waviness,
With arms like tentacles that seem to press
Thro' weed and water: limbs that writhe and fade,
And clench, and twist, and toss,

Root-like and gnarled, and cross and inter-cross
Through flabby hair of smoky moss.

How horrible to see this thing at night!
Or when the sunset slants its brimstone light
Above the pool! when, blue, in phantom flight,
The will-o'-the-wisps, perhaps, above it reel.
Then, haply, would it rise, a rotting green,
Up, up, and gather me with arms of steel,
Soft steel, and drag me where the wave is white,
Beneath that boulder brown, that plants a keel
Against the ripple there, a shoulder lean.—
No, no! I must away before 't is night!
Before the fireflies dot
The dark with sulphur blurrings bright!
Before, upon that height,
The white wild-carrots vanish from the sight;
And boneset blossoms, tossing there in clusters,
Fade to a ridge, a streak of ghostly lustres:
And, in that sunlit spot,
Yon cedar tree is not!
But a huge cap instead, that, half-asleep,
Some giant dropped while driving home his sheep:
And 'mid those fallow browns

And russet grays, the fragrant peak
Of yonder timothy stack,
Is not a stack, but something hideous, black,
That threatens and, grotesquely demon, frowns.

I must away from here.—
Already dusk draws near.
The owlet's dolorous hoot
Sounds quavering as a gnome's wild flute;
The toad, within the wet,
Begins to tune its goblin flageolet:
The slow sun sinks behind
Those hills; and, like a withered cheek
Of Quaker quiet, sorrow-burdened, there
The spectral moon 's defined
Above those trees,—as in a wild-beast's lair
A golden woman, dead, with golden hair,—
Above that mass of fox-grape vines
That, like a wrecked appentice, roofs those pines.—
Oh, I am faint and weak.—
I must away, away!
Before the close of day!—
Already at my back
I feel the woods grow black;
And sense the evening wind,

Guttural and gaunt and blind,
Whining behind me like an unseen wolf.
Deeper now seems the gulf
Into whose deeps I gaze;
From which, with madness and amaze,
That seems to rise, the horror there,
With webby hands and mossy eyes and hair.—
Oh, will it pierce,
With all its feelers fierce,
Beyond the pool's unhallowed water-streak?—

Yes; I must go, must go!
Must leave this ghastly creek,
This place of hideous fear!
For everywhere I hear
A dripping footstep near,
A voice, like water, gurgling at my ear,
Saying, “Come to me! come and rest below!
Sleep and forget her and with her thy woe!”—
I try to fly.—I can not.—Yes, and no!—
What madness holds me!—God! that obscene, slow,
Sure mastering chimera there,
Perhaps, has fastened round my neck,
Or in my matted hair,
Some horrible feeler, dire, invisible!—
Off, off! thou hoop of Hell!

Thou devil's coil! ...
Back, back into thy cesspool! Off of me!—
See, how the waters thrash and boil!
At last! at last! thank God! my soul is free!
My mind is freed of that vile mesmerism
That drew me to—what end? my God! what end?
Haply 'twas merely fancy, that strange fiend:
My fancy, and a prism
Of sunset in the stream, a firefly fleck,
That now, a lamp of golden fairy oil,
Lights me my homeward way, the way I flee.
No more I stare, magnetic-fixed; nor reck,
Nor little care to foil
The madness there! the murder there! that slips
Back to its lair of slime, that seeps and drips,
That sought in vain to fasten on my lips.

VI

Taking a letter from his pocket, he hurries away:

What can it mean for me? what have I done to her?
I, in our season of love as a sun to her:
She, all my heaven of silvery, numberless

Stars and its moon, shining golden and slumberless;
Who on my life, that was thorny and lowery,
Came—and made beautiful; smiled—and made flowery.
She, to my heart and my soul a divinity!
She, who—I dreamed!—seemed my spirit-affinity!—
What have I done to her? what have I done?

What can she mean by this?—what have I said to her?
I, who have idolized, worshiped, and pled to her;
Sung with her, laughed with her, sorrowed and sighed for her;
Lived for her only; and gladly had died for her!
See! she has written me thus! she has written me—
Sooner would dagger or serpent had smitten me!—
Would you had shriveled ere ever you 'd read of it,
Eyes, that are wide to the grief and the dread of it!—
What have I said to her? what have I said?

What shall I make of it? I who am trembling,
Fearful of losing.—A moth, the dissembling
Flame of a taper attracts with its guttering,
Flattering on till its body lies fluttering,
Scorched in the summer night.—Foolish, importunate,
Why didst thou quit the cool flowers, unfortunate!—
Such has she been to me, making me such to her!—
Slaying me, saying I never was much to her!—
What shall I make of it? what can I make?

Love, in thy everglades, moaning and motionless,
Look, I have fallen; the evil is potionless:
I, with no thought but the day that did lock us in,
Set naked feet 'mid the cottonmouth-moccasin,
Under the roses, the Cherokee, eying me:—
I,—in the heav'n with the egrets that, flying me,
Winging like blooms from magnolias, rose slenderly,
Pearl and pale pink: where the mocking-bird tenderly

Sang, making vistas of mosses melodious,
Wandered,—unheeding my steps,—in the odious
Ooze and the venom. I followed the wiry
Violet curve of thy star falling fiery—
So was I lost in night! thus am undone!

Have I not told to her—living alone for her—
Purposed unfoldments of deeds I had sown for her
Here in the soil of my soul? their variety
Endless—and ever she answered with piety.
See! it has come to this—all the tale's suavity
At the ninth chapter grows hateful with gravity;
Cruel as death all our beautiful history—
Close it!—the final is more than a mystery.—
Yes; I will go to her; yes; and will speak.

VII

After the final meeting; the day following:

I seem to see her still; to see
That blue-hung room. Her perfume comes
From lavender folds, draped dreamily,—

A-blossom with brocaded blooms,—
Some stuff of orient looms.

I seem to hear her speak; and back,
Where sleeps the sun on books and piles
Of porcelain and bric-à-brac,
A tall clock ticks above the tiles,
Where Love's framed profile smiles.

I hear her say, “Ah, had I known!—
I suffer too for what has been—
For what must be.”—A wild ache shone
In her sad gaze that seemed to lean
On something far, unseen.

And as in sleep my own self seems
Outside my suffering self.—I flush
'Twixt facts and undetermined dreams,
And stand, as silent as that hush
Of lilac light and plush.

Smiling, but suffering, I feel,
Beneath that face, so sweet and sad,
In those pale temples, thoughts, like steel,
Pierce burningly. ... I had gone mad
Had I once thought her glad.—

Unconsciously, with eyes that yearn
To look beyond the present far,
For one faint future hope, I turn—
There, in her garden, one fierce star,
A cactus, red as war,

Vermilion as a storm-sunk sun,
Flames torrid splendor,—brings to life
A sunset; memory of one
Rich eve she said she 'd be my wife;
An eve with beauty rife.

Again amid the heavy hues,
Soft crimson, seal, and satiny gold
Of flowers there, I stood 'mid dews
With her; deep in her garden old,
While sunset's flame unrolled.

And now! ... It can not be! and yet
To see 'tis so!—In heart and brain
To know 'tis so!—While, warm and wet,
I seem to smell those scents again,
Verbena scents and rain.

I turn, in hope she'll bid me stay.
Again her cameo beauty mark
Set in that smile.—She turns away.

No farewell! no regret! no spark
Of hope to cheer the dark!

That sepia sketch—conceive it so—
A jaunty head with mouth and eyes
Tragic beneath a rose-chapeau,
Silk-masked, unmasking—it denies
The look we half surmise,

We know is there. 'Tis thus we read
The true beneath the false; perceive
The ache beneath the smile.—Indeed!
Whose soul unmasks? ... Not mine!—I grieve,—
Oh God!—but laugh and leave. ...

VIII

He
walks aimlessly on:

Beyond those knotted apple-trees,
That partly hide the old brick barn,
Its tattered arms and tattered knees
A scarecrow tosses to the breeze
Among the shocks of corn.

My heart is gray as is the day,
In which the rain-wind drearily

Makes all the rusty branches sway,
And in the hollows, by each way,
The dead leaves rustle wearily.

And soon we'll hear the far wild-geese
Honk in frost-bitten heavens under
Arcturus; when my walks must cease,
And by the fireside's log-heaped peace
I'll sit and nod and ponder.—

When every fall of this loud creek
Is silent with the frost; and tented
Brown acres of the corn stretch bleak
And shaggy with the snows, that streak
The hillsides, hollow-dented;

I'll sit and dream of that glad morn
We met by banks with elder snowing;
That dusk we strolled through flower and thorn,
By tasseled meads of cane and corn,
To where the stream was flowing.

Again I'll oar our boat among
The dripping lilies of the river,
To reach her hat, the grape-vine long
Struck in the stream; we'll row to song;
And then ... I'll wake and shiver.

Why is it that my mind reverts
To that sweet past? while full of parting
The present is: so full of hurts
And heartache, that what it asserts
Adds only to the smarting.

How often shall I sit and think
Of that sweet past! through lowered lashes
What-might-have-been trace link by link;
Then watch it gradually sink
And crumble into ashes.

Outside I'll hear the sad wind weep
Like some lone spirit, grieved, forsaken;
Then, shuddering, to bed will creep,
To lie awake, or, haply, sleep
A sleep by visions shaken.

By visions of the past, that draw
The present in a hue that 's wanting;
A scarecrow thing of sticks and straw,—
Like that just now I, passing, saw,—
Its empty tatters flaunting.

IX

He
compares the present day with a past one:

The sun a splintered splendor was
In trees, whose waving branches blurred

Its disc, that day we went together,
'Mid wild-bee hum and whirring buzz
Of locusts, through the fields that purred
With summer in the perfect weather.

So sweet it was to look, and lean
To her young face and feel the light
Of eyes that met my own unsaddened!
Her laugh that left lips more serene;
Her speech that blossomed like the white
Life-everlasting there and gladdened.

Maturing summer, you were fraught
With more of beauty then than now
Parades the pageant of September:
Where What-is-now contrasts in thought
With What-was-once, that bloom and bough
Can only help me to remember.

X

He
pauses before a deserted house by the wayside:

Through ironweeds and roses
And scraggy beech and oak,
Old porches it discloses
Above the weeds and roses
The drizzling raindrops soak.

Neglected walks a-tangle
With dodder-strangled grass;
And every mildewed angle
Heaped with dead leaves that spangle.
The paths that round it pass.

The creatures there that bury
Or hide within its rooms
And spidered closets—very
Dim with old webs—will hurry
Out when the evening glooms.

Owls roost on beam and basement;
Bats haunt its hearth and porch;
And, by each ruined casement,
Flits, in the moon's enlacement,
The wisp, like some wild torch.

There is a sense of frost here,
And winds that sigh alway
Of something that was lost here,
Long, long ago was lost here,
But what, they can not say.

My foot, perhaps, would startle
Some owl that mopes within;
Some bat above its portal,

That frights the daring mortal,
And guards its cellared sin.

The creaking road winds by it
This side the dusty toll.—
Why do I stop to eye it?
My heart can not deny it—
The house is like my soul.

XI

He
proceeds on his way:

I bear a burden—look not therein!
Naught will you find save sorrow and sin;
Sorrow and sin that wend with me
Wherever I go. And misery,
A gaunt companion, my wretched bride,
Goes ever with me, side by side.

Sick of myself and all the earth,
I ask my soul now: Is life worth
The little pleasure that we gain
For all our sorrow and our pain?
The love, to which we gave our best,
That turns a mockery and a jest?

XII

Among the twilight fields:

The things we love, the loveliest things we cherish,
Pass from us soonest, vanish utterly.
Dust are our deeds, and dust our dreams that perish
Ere we can say They be!

I have loved man and learned we are not brothers—
Within myself, perhaps, may lie the cause;—
Then set one woman high above all others,
And found her full of flaws.

Made unseen stars my keblahs of devotion;
Aspired to knowledge, and remained a clod:
With heart and soul, led on by blind emotion,
The way to failure trod.

Chance, say, or fate, that works through good and evil;
Or destiny, that nothing may retard,
That to some end, above life's empty level,
Perhaps withholds reward.

4. PART IV
LATE AUTUMN

They who die young are blest.—
Should we not envy such?—
They are Earth's happiest,
God-loved and favored much!—
They who die young are blest.

I

Sick and sad, propped with pillows, she sits at her window:

When the dog's-tooth violet comes
With April showers,
And the wild-bee haunts and hums
About the flowers,
We shall never wend as when
Love laughed leading us from men
Over violet vale and glen,
Where the red-bird sang for hours,
And we heard the flicker drum.

Now November heavens are gray:
Autumn kills
Every joy—like leaves of May
In the rills.—
Here I sit and lean and listen
To a voice that has arisen
In my heart; with eyes that glisten
Gazing at the happy hills,
Fading dark blue, far away.

II

She
looks down upon the dying garden:

There rank death clutches at the flowers
And drags them down and stamps in earth.
At morn the thin, malignant hours,
Shrill-voiced, among the wind-torn bowers,
Clamor a bitter mirth—
Or is it heartbreak that, forlorn,
Would so conceal itself in scorn.

At noon the weak, white sunlight crawls,
Like feeble age, once beautiful,
From mildewed walks to mildewed walls,
Down which the oozing moisture falls
Upon the cold toadstool:—
Faint on the leaves it drips and creeps—
Or is it tears of love who weeps?

At night a misty blur of moon
Slips through the trees,—pale as a face
Of melancholy marble hewn;—
And, like the phantom of some tune,
Winds whisper in the place—
Or is it love come back again,
Seeking its perished joy in vain?

III

She
muses upon the past:

When, in her cloudy chiton,
Spring freed the frozen rills,
And walked in rainbowed light on
The blossom-blowing hills;
Beyond the world's horizon,
That no such glory lies on,
And no such hues bedizen,
Love led us far from ills.

When Summer came, a sickle
Stuck in her sheaf of beams,
And let the honey trickle
From out her bee-hives' seams;
Within the violet-blotted
Sweet book to us allotted,—
Whose lines are flower-dotted,—
Love read us many dreams.

Then Autumn came,—a liar,
A fair-faced heretic;—
In gypsy garb of fire,
Throned on a harvest rick.—
Our lives, that fate had thwarted,
Stood pale and broken-hearted,—
Though smiling when we parted,—
Where love to death lay sick.

Now is the Winter waited,
The tyrant hoar and old,
With death and hunger mated,
Who counts his crimes like gold.—
Once more, before forever
We part—once more, then never!—
Once more before we sever,
Must I his face behold!

IV

She
takes up a book and reads:

What little things are those
That hold our happiness!
A smile, a glance; a rose
Dropped from her hair or dress;
A word, a look, a touch,—
These are so much, so much.

An air we can't forget;
A sunset's gold that gleams;
A spray of mignonette,
Will fill the soul with dreams,
More than all history says,
Or romance of old days.

For, of the human heart,
Not brain, is memory;
These things it makes a part
Of its own entity;
The joys, the pains whereof
Are the very food of love.

V

She
lays down the book, and sits musing:

How true! how true!—but words are weak,
In sympathy they give the soul,
To music—music, that can speak
All the heart's pain and dole;
All that the sad heart treasures most
Of love that 's lost, of love that 's lost.—
I would not hear sweet music now.
My heart would break to hear it now.

So weary am I, and so fain
To see his face, to feel his kiss
Thrill rapture through my soul again!—
There is no hell like this!—
Ah, God! my God, were it not best
To give me rest, to give me rest!—
Come, death, and breathe upon my brow.
Sweet death, come kiss my mouth and brow.

VI

She
writes to her lover to come to her:

Dead lie the dreams we cherished,
The dreams we loved so well;
Like forest leaves they perished,
Like autumn leaves they fell.
Alas! that dreams so soon should pass!
Alas! alas!

The stream lies bleak and arid,
That once went singing on;
The flowers once that varied
Its banks are dead and gone:
Where these were once are thorns and thirst—
The place is curst.

Come to me. I am lonely.
Forget all that occurred.
Come to me; if for only
One last, sad, parting word:
For one last word. Then let the pall
Fall over all.

The day and hour are suited
For what I 'd say to you
Of love that I uprooted.—
But I have suffered, too!—
Come to me; I would say good-by
Before I die.

VII

The wind rises; the trees are agitated:

Woods that beat the wind with frantic
Gestures and sow darkly round
Acorns gnarled and leaves that antic
Wildly on the rustling ground,

Is it tragic grief that saddens
Through your souls this autumn day?
Or the joy of death that gladdens
In exultance of decay?

Arrogant you lift defiant
Boughs against the moaning blast,
That, like some invisible giant,
Wrapped in tumult, thunders past.

Is it that in such insurgent
Fury, tossed from tree to tree,
You would quench the fiercely urgent
Pangs of some old memory?

As in toil and violent action,
That still help them to forget,
Mortals drown the dark distraction
And insistence of regret.

VIII

She
sits musing in the gathering twilight:

Last night I slept till midnight; then woke, and, far away,
A cock crowed; lonely and distant I heard a watch-dog bay:
But lonelier yet the tedious old clock ticked on to'ards day.

And what a day!—remember those morns of summer and spring,

That bound our lives together! each morn a wedding-ring
Of dew, aroma, and sparkle, and buds and birds a-wing.

Clear morns, when I strolled my garden, awaiting him, the rose
Expected too, with blushes,—the Giant-of-battle that grows
A bank of radiance and fragrance, and the Maréchal-Niel that glows.

Not in vain did I wait, departed summer, amid your phlox!
'Mid the powdery crystal and crimson of your hollow hollyhocks;
Your fairy-bells and poppies, and the bee that in them rocks.

Cool-clad 'mid the pendulous purple of the morning-glory vine,
By the jewel-mine of the pansies and the snap-dragons in line,
I waited, and there he met me whose heart was one with mine.

Around us bloomed my mealy-white dusty-millers gay,

My lady-slippers, bashful of butterfly and ray;
My gillyflowers, spicy, each one, as a day of May.

Ah me! when I think of the handfuls of little gold coins, amass,
My bachelor's-buttons scattered over the garden grass,
The marigolds that boasted their bits of burning brass;

More bitter I feel the autumn tighten on spirit and heart;
And regret those days, remembered as lost, that stand apart,
A chapter holy and sacred, I read with eyes that smart.

How warm was the breath of the garden when he met me there that day!
How the burnished beetle and humming-bird flew past us, each a ray!—
The memory of those meetings still bears me far away:

Again to the woods a-trysting by the water-mill I steal,

Where the lilies tumble together, the madcap wind at heel;
And meet him among the flowers, the rocks and the moss conceal:

Or the wild-cat gray of the meadows that the black-eyed Susans dot,
Fawn-eyed and leopard-yellow, that tangle a tawny spot
Of languid panther beauty that dozes, summer-hot. ...

Ah! back again in the present! with the winds that pinch and twist
The leaves in their peevish passion, and whirl wherever they list;
With the autumn, hoary and nipping, whose mausolean mist

Entombs the sun and the daylight: each morning shaggy with fog,
That fits gray wigs on the cedars, and furs with frost each log;
That velvets white the meadows, and marbles brook and bog.—

Alone at dawn—indifferent: alone at eve—I sigh:

And wait, like the wind complaining: complain and know not why:
But ailing and longing and pining because I can not die.

How dull is that sunset! dreary and cold, and hard and dead!
The ghost of those last August that, mulberry-rich and red,
The wine of God's own vintage, poured purple overhead.

But now I sit with the sighing dead dreams of a dying year;
Like the fallen leaves and the acorns, am worthless and feel as sere,
With a soul that 's sick of the body, whose heart is one big tear.

As I stare from my window the daylight, like a bravo, its cloak puts on.
The moon, like a cautious lanthorn, glitters, and then is gone.—
Will he come to-night? will he answer?—Ah, God! would it were dawn!

IX

He
enters. Taking her in his arms he speaks:

They said you were dying.—
You shall not die! ...
Why are you crying?
Why do you sigh?—
Cease that sad sighing!—
Love, it is I.

All is forgiven!—
Love is not poor;
Though he was driven
Once from your door,
Back he has striven,
To part nevermore!

Will you remember
When I forget
Words, each an ember,
That you regret,
Now in November,
Now we have met?

What if love wept once!
What though you knew!
What if he crept once

Pleading to you!—
He never slept once,
Nor was untrue.

Often forgetful,
Love may forget;
Froward and fretful,
Dear, he will fret;
Ever regretful,
He will regret.

Life is completer
Through his control;
Lifted, made sweeter,
Filled and made whole,
Hearing love's metre
Sing in the soul.

Flesh may not hear it,
Being impure;
But in the spirit,
There we are sure;
There we come near it,
There we endure.

So when to-morrow
Ceases and we
Quit this we borrow,

Mortality,
What chastens sorrow
So it may see?—

(When friends are sighing
Round one, and one
Nearer is lying,
Nearer the sun,
When one is dying
And all is done?

When there is weeping,
Weary and deep,—
God's be the keeping
Of those who weep!—
When our loved, sleeping,
Sleep their long sleep?—)

Love! that is dearer
Than we 're aware;
Bringing us nearer,
Nearer than prayer;
Being the mirror
That our souls share.

Still you are weeping!
Why do you weep?—
Are tears in keeping

With joy so deep?
Gladness so sweeping?
Hearts so in keep?

Speak to me, dearest!
Say it is true!
That I am nearest,
Dearest to you.—
Smile, with those clearest
Eyes of gray blue.

X

She
smiles on him through her tears; holding his hand she speaks:

They did not say I could not live beyond this weary night,
But now I know that I shall die before the morning's light.
How weak I am!—but you'll forgive me when I tell you how
I loved you—love you; and the pain it is to leave you now?

We could not wed!—Alas! the flesh, that clothes the soul of me,
Ordained at birth a sacrifice to this heredity,

Denied, forbade.—Ah, you have seen the bright spots in my cheeks
Glow hectic, as before comes night the west burns blood-red streaks?

Consumption.—“But I promised you my hand?”—a thing forlorn
Of life; diseased!—O God!—and so, far better so, forsworn!—
Oh, I was jealous of your love. But think: if I had died
Ere babe of mine had come to be a solace at your side!

Had it been little then—your grief, when Heaven had made us one
In everything that 's good on earth and then the good undone?
No! no! and had I had a child—what grief and agony
To know that blight born in him, too, against all help of me!

Just when we cherished him the most, and youthful, sunny pride
Sat on his curly front, to see him die ere we had died.—

Whose fault?—Ah, God!—not mine! but his, that ancestor who gave
Escutcheon to our sorrowful house, a Death's-head and a Grave.

Beneath the pomp of those grim arms we live and may not move;
Nor faith, nor truth, nor wealth avail to hurl them down, nor love!
How could I tell you this?—not then! when all the world was spun
Of morning colors for our love to walk and dance upon.

I could not tell you how disease hid here a viper germ,
Precedence slowly claiming and so slowly fixing firm.
And when I broke my plighted troth and would not tell you why,
I loved you, thinking, “time enough when I have come to die.”

Draw off my rings and let my hands rest so ... the wretched cough
Will interrupt my feeble speech and will not be put off ...

100

Ah, anyhow, my anodyne is this: to know that you
Are near and love me!—Kiss me now, as you were wont to do.

And tell me you forgive me all; and say you will forget
The sorrow of that breaking-off, the fever and the fret.—
Now set those roses near me here, and tell me death 's a lie—
Once it was hard for me to live ... now it is hard to die.

101

5. PART V
WINTER

We, whom God sets a task,
Striving, who ne'er attain,
We are the curst!—who ask
Death, and still ask in vain.
We, whom God sets a task.

I

In the silence of his room. After many days:

All, all are shadows. All must pass
As writing in the sand or sea:
Reflections in a looking-glass
Are not less permanent than we.

The days that mold us—what are they?
That break us on their whirling wheel?
What but the potters! we the clay
They fashion and yet leave unreal.

102

Linked through the ages, one and all,
In long anthropomorphous chain,
The human and the animal
Inseparably must remain.

Within us still the monstrous shape
That shrieked in air and howled in slime,
What are we?—partly man and ape—
The tools of fate, the toys of time!

II

The bitterness of his bereavement speaks in him:

Vased in her bedroom window, white
As her glad girlhood, never lost,
I smelt the roses—and the night
Outside was fog and frost.

What though I claimed her dying there!
God nor one angel understood
Nor cared, who from sweet feet to hair
Had changed to snow her blood.

She had been mine so long, so long!
Our harp of life was one in word—
Why did death thrust his hand among
The chords and break one chord!

103

What lily lilier than her face!
More virgin than her lips I kissed!
When morn, like God, with gold and grace,
Broke massed in mist! broke massed in mist!

III

Her dead face seems to rise up before him:

The face that I said farewell to,
Pillowed a flower on flowers,
Comes back, with its eyes to tell to
My soul what my heart should quell to
Calm, that is mine at hours.

Dear, is your soul still daggered
There by something amiss?
Love—is he ever laggard?
Hope—is her face still haggard?
Tell me what it is!

You, who are done with to-morrow!
Done with these worldly skies!
Done with our pain and sorrow!
Done with the griefs we borrow!
Joys that are born of sighs!

Must we say “gone forever?”
Or will it all come true?

104

Does mine touch your thought ever?
And, over the doubts that sever,
Rise to the fact that 's you?

Love, in my flesh so fearful,
Medicine me this pain!—
Love, with the eyes so tearful,
How can my soul be cheerful,
Seeing its joy is slain! ...

Gone!—'t was only a vision!—
Gone! like a thought, a gleam!—
Such to our indecision
Utter no empty mission;—
Truth is in all we dream!

IV

He
sinks into deep thought:

There are shadows that compel us,
There are powers that control:
More than substance these can tell us,
Speaking to the human soul.

In the moonlight, when it glistened
On my window, white of glow,
Once I woke and, leaning, listened
To a voice that sang below.

105

Full of gladness, full of yearning,
Strange with dreamy melody,
Like a bird whose heart was burning,
Wildly sweet it sang to me.

I arose; and by the starlight,
Pale beneath the summer sky,
There I saw it, full of far light,—
My dead joy go singing by.

In the darkness, when the glimmer
Of the storm was on the pane,
Once I sat and heard a dimmer
Voice lamenting in the rain.

Full of parting and unspoken
Heartbreak, faint with agony,
Like a bird whose heart was broken,
Moaning low it cried to me.

I arose; and in the darkness,
Wan beneath the winter sky,
There I saw it, cold to starkness,—
My dead love go wailing by.

106

V

He
arouses from his abstraction, buries his face in his hands and thinks:

So long it seems since last I saw her face,
So long ago it seems,
Like some sad soul in unconjectured space,
Still seeking happiness through perished grace
And unrealities, a little while
Illusions lead me, ending in the smile
Of Death, triumphant in a thorny place,
Among Love's ruined roses and dead dreams.

Since she is gone, no more I feel the light,—
Since she has left all dark,—
Cleave, with its revelation, all the night.
I wander blindly, on a crumbling height,
Among the fragments and the wrecks and stones
Of Life, where Hope, amid Life's skulls and bones,
With weary face, disheartened, wild and white,
Trims her pale lamp with its expiring spark.

Now she is dead, the Soul, naught can o'erawe,—
Now she is gone from me,—
Questions God's justice that seems full of flaw,
As is His world, where misery is law,

107

And all men fools, too willing to be slaves.—
My House of Faith, built up on dust of graves,
The wind of doubt sweeps down as made of straw,
And all is night and I no longer see.

VI

He
looks from his window toward the sombre west:

Ridged and bleak the gray, forsaken
Twilight at the night has guessed;
And no star of dusk has taken
Flame unshaken in the west.

All day long the woodlands, dying,
Moaned, and drippings as of grief
Rained from barren boughs with sighing
Death of flying twig and leaf.

Ah, to live a life unbroken
Of the flings and scorns of fate!
Like that tree, with branches oaken,
Strength's unspoken intimate.—

Who can say that we have never
Lived the life of plants and trees?—
Not so wide the lines that sever
Us forever here from these.

108

Colors, odors, that are cherished,
Haply hint we once were flowers:
Memory alone has perished
In this garnished world that's ours.

Music,—that all things expresses,
All for which we 've sought and sinned,—
Haply in our treey tresses
Once was guesses of the wind.

But I dream!—The dusk, dark braiding
Locks that lack both moon and star,
Deepens; and, the darkness aiding,
Earth seems fading, faint and far.

And within me doubt keeps saying—
“What is wrong, and what is right?
Hear the cursing! hear the praying!
All are straying on in night.”

VII

He
turns from the window, takes up a book, and reads:

The soul, like Earth, hath silences
Which speak not, yet are heard:
The voices mute of memories
Are louder than a word.

109

Theirs is a speech which is not speech;
A language that is bound
To soul-vibrations, vague, that reach
Deeper than any sound.

No words are theirs. They speak through things,
A visible utterance
Of thoughts—like those some sunset brings,
Or withered rose, perchance.

The heavens that once, in purple and flame,
Spake to two hearts as one,
In after years may speak the same
To one sad heart alone.

Through it the vanished face and eyes
Of her, the sweet and fair,
Of her the lost, again shall rise
To comfort his despair.

And so the love that led him long
From golden scene to scene,
Within the sunset is a tongue
That speaks of what has been.—

How loud it speaks of that dead day,
The rose whose bloom is fled!

110

Of her who died; who, clasped in clay,
Lies numbered with the dead.

The dead are dead; with them 't is well
Within their narrow room;—
No memories haunt their hearts who dwell
Within the grave and tomb.

But what of those—the dead who live!
The living dead, whose lot
Is still to love—ah, God forgive!—
To live and love, forgot!

VIII

The storm is heard sounding wildly outside with wind and hail:

The night is wild with rain and sleet;
Each loose-warped casement claps or groans:
I hear the plangent woodland beat
The tempest with long blatant moans,
Like one who fears defeat.

And sitting here beyond the storm,
Alone within the lonely house,
It seems that some mesmeric charm
Holds all things—even the gnawing mouse
Has ceased its faint alarm.

111

And in the silence, stolen o'er
Familiar objects, lo, I fear—
I fear—that, opening yon door,
I'll find my dead self standing near,
With face that once I wore.

The stairway creaks with ghostly gusts:
The flue moans; all its gorgon throat
One wail of winds: ancestral dusts,—
Which yonder Indian war-gear coat
With gray, whose quiver rusts,—

Are shaken down.—Or, can it be,
That he who wore it in the dance,
Or battle, now fills shadowy
Its wampumed skins? and shakes his lance
And spectral plume at me?—

Mere fancy!—Yet those curtains toss
Mysteriously as if some dark
Hand moved them.—And I would not cross
The shadow there, that hearthstone's spark,
A glow-worm sunk in moss.

Outside 't were better!—Yes, I yearn
To walk the waste where sway and dip
Deep, dark December boughs—where burn
Some late last leaves, that drip and drip
No matter where you turn.

112

Where sodden soil, you scarce have trod,
Fills oozy footprints—but the blind
Night there, though like the frown of God,
Presents no fancies to the mind,
Like those that have o'erawed.—

The months I count: how long it seems
Since summer! summer, when with her,
When on her porch, in rainy gleams
We watched the flickering lightning stir
In heavens gray as dreams.

When all the west, a sheet of gold,
Flared,—like some Titan's opened forge,—
With storm; revealing, manifold,
Vast peaks of clouds with crag and gorge,
Where thunder-torrents rolled.

Then came the wind: again, again
Storm lit the instant earth—and how
The forest rang with roaring rain!—
We could not read—where is it now?—
That tale of Charlemagne:

That old romance! that tale, which we
Were reading; till we heard the plunge
Of distant thunder sullenly,
And left to watch the lightning lunge,
And storm-winds toss each tree.

113

That summer!—How it built us there,
Of sorcery and necromance,
A mental-world, where all was fair;
A land like one great pearl, a-trance
With lilied light and air.

Where every flower was a thought;
And every bird, a melody;
And every fragrance, zephyr brought,
Was but the rainbowed drapery
Of some sweet dream long sought.

'Mid which we reared our heart's high home,
Fair on the hills; with terraces,
Vine-hung and wooded, o'er the foam
Of undiscovered fairy seas,
All violet in the gloam.

O land of shadows! shadow-home,
Within my world of memories!
Around whose ruins sweeps the foam
Of sorrow's immemorial seas,
To whose dark shores I come!

How long in your wrecked halls, alone
With ghosts of joys must I remain?
Between the unknown and the known,
Still hearing through the wind and rain
My lost love moan and moan.

114

IX

He
sits by the slowly dying fire. The storm is heard with increased violence:

Wild weather. The lash of the sleet
On the gusty casement, clapping—
The sound of the storm like a sheet
My soul and senses wrapping.

Wild weather. And how is she,
Now the rush of the rain falls serried
There on the turf and the tree
Of the place where she is buried?

Wild weather. How black and deep
Is the night where the mad winds scurry!—
Do I sleep? do I dream in my sleep
That I hear her footsteps hurry?

Hither they come like flowers—
And I see her raiment glisten,
Like the robes of one of the hours
Where the stars to the angels listen.

Before me, behold, how she stands!
With lips high thoughts have weighted,
With testifying hands,
And eyes with glory sated.

115

I have spoken and I have kneeled:
I have kissed her feet in wonder—
But, lo! her lips—they are sealed,
God-sealed, and will not sunder.

Though I sob, “Your stay was long!
You are come,—but your feet were laggard!—
With mansuetude and song
For the heart your death has daggered.”

Never a word replies,
Never, to all my weeping—
Only a sound of sighs,
And of raiment past me sweeping. ...

I wake; and a clock tolls three—
And the night and the storm beat serried
There on the turf and the tree
Of the place where she is buried.

116

RED LEAVES AND ROSES

I

And he had lived such loveless years
That suffering had made him wise;
And she had known no graver tears
Than those of girlhood's eyes.

And he, perhaps, had loved before—
One, who had wedded, or had died;—
So life to him had been but poor
In love for which he sighed.

In years and heart she was so young
Love paused and beckoned at the gate,
And bade her hear his songs, unsung;
She laughed that “love must wait.”

He understood. She only knew
Love's hair was faded, face was gray—
Nor saw the rose his autumn blew
There in her heedless way.

117

II

If he had come to her when May
Danced down the wildwood,—every way
Marked with white flow'rs, as if her gown
Had torn and fallen,—it might be
She had not met him with a frown,
Nor used his love so bitterly.

Or if he had but come when June
Set stars and roses to one tune,
And breathed in honeysuckle throats
Clove-honey of her spicy mouth,
His heart had found some loving notes
In hers to cheer his life's long drouth.

He came when Fall made mad the sky,
And on the hills leapt like a cry
Of battle; when his youth was dead;
To her, the young, the wild, the white;
Whose symbol was the rose, blood-red,
And his the red leaf pinched with blight.

He might have known, since youth was flown,
And autumn claimed him for its own;
And winter neared with snow, wild whirled,
His love to her would seem absurd;
To youth like hers; whose lip had curled
Yet heard him to his last sad word.

118

Then laughed and—well, his heart denied
The words he uttered then in pride;
And he remembered how the gray
Was his of autumn, ah! and hers,
The rose-hued colors of the May,
And May was all her universe.

And then he left her: and, like blood,
In her deep hair, the rose; whose bud
Was badge to her: while unto him,
His middle-age, must still remain
The red-leaf, withering at the rim,
As symbol of the all-in-vain.

III

“Such days as these,” she said, and bent
Among her marigolds, all dew,
And dripping zinnia stems, “were meant
For spring not autumn; days we knew
In childhood; these endearing those;
Much dearer since they have grown old:
Days, once imperfect with the rose,
Now perfect with the marigold.”

“Such days as these,” he said, and gazed
Long with unlifted eyes that held

119

Sad autumn nights, “our hopes have raised
In futures that are mist-enspelled.
And so it is the fog blows in
Days dearer for the death they paint
With hues of life and joy,—as sin,
At death, puts off all earthly taint.”

IV

Like deeds of hearts that have not kept
Their riches, as a miser, when
Sad souls have asked, with eyes that wept,
Among the toiling tribes of men,
The summer days gave Earth sweet alms
In silver of white lilies, while
Each night, with healing, outstretched palms
Stood Christ-like with its starry smile.

Will she remember him when dull
Months drag their duller hours by?
With feet that crush the beautiful
And leave the beautiful to die?
Or never see? nor sit with lost
Dreams withered, 'mid hope's empty husks,
And wait, heart-counting-up the cost
Of love's illusions 'mid life's dusks?

120

V

He is as one who, treading salty scurf
Of lonely sea-sands, hears the roaring rocks
Of some lost isle of misty crags and lochs;
Who sees no sea, but, through a world of surf,
Gray ghosts of gulls and screaming petrel flocks:
When, from the deep's white ruin and wild wreck,
Above the fog, beneath the ghostly gull,
The iron ribs of some storm-shattered hull
Loom, packed with pirate treasure to the deck
A century rotten: feels his wealth replete,
When long-baulked ocean claims it; and one dull
Wave flings, derisive at despondent feet,
A skull, one doubloon rattling in the skull.

VI

And when full autumn sets the dahlia stems
On fire with flowers, and the chill dew turns
The maple trees, above geranium urns,
To Emir tents, and strings with flawless gems
The moon-flower and the wahoo-bush that burns;
Calmly she sees the year grow sad and strange,

121

And stands with one among the wilted walks
Of the old garden of the gray, old grange,
And feels no sorrow for the frost-maimed stalks
Since—though the wailing autumn to her talks—
Youth marks swift spring on life's far mountain-range.
Or she will lean to her old harpsichord;
A youthful face beside her; and the glow
Of hickory on the hearth will balk the blow
Of blustering rain that beats the casement hard;
And sing of summer and so thwart the snow.

“Haply, some day, she yet may sit alone,”
He thinks, “within the shadow-saddened house,
When round the gables stormy echoes moan,
And in the closet gnaws the lonesome mouse;
And Memory come stealing down the stair
From dusty attics where is piled the Past—
Like so much rubbish that we hate to keep—
And turn the knob; and, framed in frosty hair,
A grave, forgotten face look in at last,
And she will know, and bow her head and weep.”

122

WILD THORN AND LILY

I

That night, returning to the farm, we rode
Before a storm. Uprolling from the west,
Incessant with distending fire, loomed
The multitudes of tempest: towering here
A shadowy Shasta, there a cloudy Hood,
Veined as with agonies, aurora-born,
Of torrent gold; resplendent heaven to heaven,
Far peak to peak, terrific spoke; the vast
Sierras of the storm, within which beat
The caverned thunder like a mighty stream:
Vibrating on, with rushing wind and flame,
Now th' opening welkin shone, one livid sheet
Of instantaneous gold, a giant's forge,
Wild-clanging; now, with streak on angled streak
Of momentary light, a labyrinth
Where shouting Darkness stalked with Titan torch:
Again the firmament hung hewn with fire

123

Whence leapt the thunder; and it seemed that hosts
Of Heaven rushed to war with blazing shields
And swords of splendor. And before the storm
We galloped, while the frantic trees above
Went wild with rain, through whose mad limbs and leaves
Splashed black the first big drops. On, on we drove,
And gained the gates, pillaring the avenue
Of ancient beech, at whose far, flickering end,
At last, beaconed the lights of home.

And she?
Was it the lightning that lent lividness
And terror to her countenance? or fear
Of her own heart? revulsion? memory?
Did deep regret, that, now the thing was done,
That she was mine, a yearning to be free,
Away from me, assail her? or, the thought,
The knowledge, that she did not love the man
Whom she had wedded? knowing better now
That all her heart was Julien's from the first,
And would be Julien's until the end.
And did she now look backward on the past?
Or forward—on the barrier that the church

124

For all the future years had placed between
The possible and impossible? God knows!

Yet I had won her honestly with words
Love, only, uttered out of its soul's truth;
Had won her—was it openly?—perhaps!—
Although engaged to Julien.—What else
Had led us to elopement?—Well, 't was done!
The whole, mad, lovely, miserable affair
Of love and youthful folly. Being done
We must abide the reckoning. That is,
I would; and she?—she saw her duty there
Beside her husband. And within myself,
When we alighted from the carriage, thus,—
Beneath the porch,—my mind resolved the thing:
“I am her husband now, and she my wife.
Less than her husband, I, much less a man,
Were I not able to regain and keep
The love she gave me, that she thinks is his,
That is not his. 'T is pity merely now
That makes her pensive. I am pensive, too,
For Julien, the poet and the friend;
The dreamer and the lover.—But all 's fair
In love they say; and I,—well, willingly
I'll bear the burthen of the blame of all.”

125

Scarce had we entered when high heaven oped
Vast gates of bronze and doors of booming brass
That dammed a deluge, and the deluge poured.—
I thought of him still; for I felt that she
Was thinking too of Julien and his moods,
That often swept his soul with storm like this,
Yet oftener with sunlight than with storm;
That soul of sun and tempest, ray and rain,
My school-friend Julien! whom once she won
To think she loved—I know not how. My play
Was open as the morning, and as fair.
His poverty and genius here, and here
My wealth and—platitude; and I had won.
But it was hard for him. I did not dream
That it would end so. And when Gwendolyn
Used every gentleness—and that is much—
I did not dream his poet's temperament
Were so affected of a love affair,
A wrong or right; he, whose sole aim seemed song.
I did not dream he 'd take it desperately,
And end so tragically. Who 'd have thought
His character, although so sensitive,
Would fall into extremes of morbidness

126

And melancholy! Had it now been I,
Whose heart had lost in the great game of love,
None would have wondered; for I am of those
Whose vigorous iron does not bend, but break
At one decisive blow: his should have sprung—
Or so I think, not broken as it had—
Elastic as fine-tempered steel that bends
And then resumes its usual usefulness.

A pale smile strained the corners of her mouth
When, from the porch, into the parlor's blaze
I led her. And her mother met us there,
Her mother and her father. And I saw
The slow reflection of their happiness
Make glad her eyes, as their approval grew
From half-severe rebukes, that were well meant,
To open, glad avowal of their joy.
She had done well, and we were soon forgiven. ...

But I resumed his letter when alone:
His letter written her three months before,
When all was over, and we two were one,
And well upon our way to Italy

127

For six sweet months of honeymoon. His word,
His letter, all of her, that came to me
At Venice, that I opened in mistake,
Amid a lot of papers sent from home.
She had not read, and never should while I
Had power to conceal until I 'd read.
I would not let the dead scrawl mar or soil
My late-won joy, my testament of love.
No! I would read it, afterwards destroy.
Thoughts made of music for a last farewell,
When he knew all and asked her to perpend
Expressions of past things her gift of love
Had given speech to in the happy days.
And so I read:—

II

“The rhyme is mine, but yours
The thought and all the music, springing from
The rareness of the love that dawned on me
A little while to make my sad life glad.
Should I regret the sunset it refused,
Since all my morn was richer than the world?
Or that my day should stride without a change
Of crimson, or of purple, or of gold,
Into the barren blackness where the moon

128

And all God's stars lay dead? Should I complain,
Upbraid or censure or one moment curse,
I with my morning? 'T is a memory
That stains the midnight now: one wild-rose ray
Laid like a finger pointing me the path
I follow, and I go rejoicingly.

Our love was very young (nor had it aged—
If we had lived long lifetimes—here in me),
When one day, strolling in the sun, you spoke
Words I perceived should hint a coming change:
I made three stanzas of the thought, you see:
But now 't is like the sea-shell that suggests,
And still associates us with the sea
In its vague song and elfland workmanship.
Yet it has lost a something that it had
There by the far sand's foaming; something rare,
A different beauty like an element:

I wonder on what life will do
When love is loser of all love;
When life still longs to love anew
And has not love enough:—
I'll turn my heart into a ray,
And wait—a day?

I wonder on what love will hold
When life is weary of all life;

129

And life and love have both grown old
With scars of sin and strife:—
I'll change my soul into a flower,
And wait—an hour?

I wonder on why men forget
The life that love made laugh; and why
Weak women will remember yet
The life that love made sigh:—
I'll sing my thought into a song,
And wait—how long?

III

“And once you questioned of our mocking-bird,
And of the German nightingale, and I
Knowing a sweeter bird than those sweet two,
Made fast associates of birds and brooks
And learned their numbers. Middle April made
The path of lilac leading to your porch
A rift of fallen Paradise; a blue
So full of fragrance that the birds that built
Among the lilacs thought that God was there,
And of God's goodness they would sing and sing,
Till every throat seemed bursting with its song,

130

Note on wild note, diviner each than each.
And waiting by the gate, that reached the lane,
For you, who gave sweet eloquence to all,
The afternoon, the lilacs and the spring,
My heart was singing and it sang of you:

Two glow-worms are the jewels in
Her ears; and underneath her chin
A diamond like a firefly:
There is no starlight in the sky
When Gwendolyn stands in the maze
Of woodbine, near the portico;
For all the stars are in her gaze,
The night and stars I know.

A clinging dream of mist the lawn
She wears; and like a bit of dawn
Her fan with one red jewel pinned:
Among the boughs there breathes no wind
When Gwendolyn comes down the path
Of lilacs from the portico;
For all the breeze her coming hath,
The beam and breeze I know.

Two locust-blooms her hands; and slips
Of eglantine her cheeks and lips;
Her hair, a hyacinth of gloom:

131

The balmy buds give no perfume
When Gwendolyn draws near to me,
The gate beyond the portico;
For all aroma sweet is she,
All fragrance that I know.

Life, love, and faith are in her face,
And in her presence all their grace:
And my religion is a word,
A wish of hers. No mocking-bird,
When Gwendolyn laughs near, dare float
One bubble from the portico;
For all of song is in her throat,
All music that I know.

IV

“The mocking-bird! and then weird fancy filled
My soul with vision, and I saw a song
Pursue a bird that was no bird—a voice
Concealed in dim expressions of the spring,—
Who sits among the forests and the fields,
With dark-blue eyes smiling to life the flowers,—
Where we strolled happy as the April hills:

A sunbeam, all the day that fell
Upon the fountain,—

132

Like laughter gurgling in the dell
Below the mountain,—
Drank, with its sparkle, one by one,
The water-words that, in the sun,
Made melody,—the sun-rays tell,—
That never yet was done.

A moon-ray, that had gone astray
'Mid wildwood alleys,
Where Echo haunts the forest way
Among the valleys,
The livelong night upon the rocks
Slept, hid among girl Echo's locks,
And stole her voice,—the moonbeams say,—
That mocks and only mocks.

A shadow, that had made its seat
Amid the roses
And thorns—the bitter and the sweet
That life discloses—
Mixed with the rose-balm and the dew
And crimson thorns that pierced it through,
Until its soul,—the shades repeat,—
Was portion of them, too.

A Fairy found the beam of gold,
And ray of glitter;

133

The shadow, whose dim soul did hold
Both sweet and bitter;
And made a bird, that haunts the morn
And night; that flits from flower to thorn,
A voice of laughter,—it is told,—
Love, mockery, and scorn.

V

“Among the white haw-blossoms, where the creek
Droned under drifts of dogwood and of haw,
The red-bird, like a crimson blossom blown
Against the snow-white bosom of the Spring,
The chaste confusion of her lawny breast,
Sang on, prophetic of serener days,
As confident as June's completer hours.
And I stood listening like a hind, who hears
A wood-nymph breathing in a forest flute
Among gray beech-trees of myth-haunted ways:
And when it ceased, the memory of the air
Blew like a syrinx in my brain: I made
A lyric of the notes that men might know:

He flies with flirt and fluting—
As flies a falling star

134

From flaming star-beds shooting—
From where the roses are.

Wings past and sings; and seven
Notes, sweet as fragrance is,—
That turn to sylphs in heaven,—
Float round him full of bliss.

He sings; each burning feather
Thrills, throbbing at his throat;
A song of glow-worm weather,
And of a firefly boat:

Of Elfland and a princess
Who, born of a perfume,
His music lulls,—where winces
That rose's cradled bloom.

No bird is half so airy,
No bird of dusk or dawn,
O masking King of Fairy!
O red-crowned Oberon.

VI

“Alas! the nightingale I never heard.
Yet I, remembering how your voice would thrill
Me with exalted expectation, felt

135

The passion-throated nightingale would win
Into my soul in some wild way like this,
With reminiscences of dusks long dead,
Presentiments of nights, that mate the flowers
And the prompt stars, and marry them with song.
Of such,—love whispered me when deep in dreams,—
I made my nightingale. It is a voice
Heard in the April of our year of love:

Between the stars and roses
There lies a path no man may see,
Where every breeze that blows is
A wandering melody;
Down which each bright star gazes
Upon each rose that raises
Its face up lovingly,
As if with prayers and praises.

The star and rose are wiser
Than all but love beneath the skies;
No hoard of any miser
Is rich as these are wise:
No bee may reach or rifle,
No mist may cloud or stifle
Their love that never dies,
That knows nor trick nor trifle.

136

There is a bird that carries
Love-messages; and comes and goes
Between each star that tarries,
And every rose that blows:
A bird that can not tire,
Whose throat 's a throbbing lyre,
Whose song is now a rose,
And now a starry fire.

VII

“O May-time woods! O May-time lanes and hours!
And stars, that knew how often there at night
Beside the path, where woodbine odors blew
Between the drowsy eyelids of the dusk,—
When, like a great, white, pearly moth, the moon
Hung, silvering long windows of your room,—
I stood among the shrubs! The dark house slept.
I watched and waited for—I know not what—
Some tremor of your gown: a velvet leaf's
Unfolding to caresses of the spring:
A rustle of your footsteps: or the dew
That softly rolled, a syllable of love,

137

In sweet avowal, from a rose's lips
Of odorous scarlet: or the whispered word
Of something lovelier than new leaf or rose—
The word young lips half murmur in a dream:

Serene with sleep, light visions load her eyes;
And underneath her window blooms a quince.
The night is a sultana who doth rise
In slippered caution, to admit a prince,
Love, who her eunuchs and her lord defies.

Are these her dreams? or is it that the breeze
Pelts me with petals of the quince, and lifts
The Balm-of-Gilead buds? and seems to squeeze
Aroma on aroma through sweet rifts
Of Eden, dripping from the rainy trees?

Along the path the buckeye trees begin
To heap their hills of blossoms.—Oh, that they
Were Romeo ladders, whereby I might win
Her chamber's sanctity,—where love must pray
And guard her soul!—so stainless of all sin!

138

There might I see the balsam scent erase
Its sweet intrusion; and the starry night
Conclude majestic pomp; the virgin grace
Of every bud abashed before the white,
Pure passion-flower of her sleeping face.

VIII

“And once, in early May, a sparrow sang
Among the garden bushes; and you asked
If the suave song stayed knocking at my heart.
I smiled some answer, and, behold, that night
Found that my heart had locked this fancy in:

Rain, rain, and a ribbon of song
Uncurled where the blossoms are sprinkled;
The song-sparrow sings, and I long
For the silver-sweet throat, that has tinkled,
To sing in the bloom and the rain,
Sing again, and again, and again,
Under my window-pane.

Rain, rain, and the trickling tips
Of the million pink blooms of the quinces;
And I hear the song rill from the lips,
The lute-haunted lips of my princess:
O love! in the rain and the bloom,

139

Sing again in the pelting perfume,
Sweetheart, under my room.

Rain, rain, and the dripping of drops
From cups of the blossoms they load, or
Tilt over with tipsiest tops:
And eyes as of sun-beam and odor,
There, under the bloom-blowing tree—
A face like a flower to see,
Love is looking at me.

IX

“Once in the village I had heard a song,
A melody which I wrote down for you,
And which you sang. But, there among your hills,
The dawns and sunsets and the serious stars
Made trite its thought and words, that seemed as stale
As musty parlors of the commonplace.
I changed its words, and here and there its thought,
But, though you praised, you never sang it more,
And so I knew, like some poor poet, it
Had fallen on disfavor, God knows why,
With its high patron. Thus its metre ran:

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Look, happy eyes, and let me know
The timid flower her love hath cherished
Fades not before the fruit shall show,
Seen in the clear truth of your glow
Where naught of love hath perished.

Lift, happy lips, and let me take
The sacred secret of her spirit
To mine in kisses, that shall make
Mute marriage of our souls, and wake
The heart's sweet silence near it.

X

“And so I wrote another filled with birds,
Deliberate twilight and eve's punctual star;
And made the music of that song obey
The metre of my own and melody:

Only to hear that you love me,
Only to feel it is true;
Stars and the gloaming above me,
I in the gloaming with you.
Staining through violet fire,
A sunset of poppy and gold,
Red as a heart with desire,
Rich with a secret untold.

141

Deep where the shadows are doubled,
Deep where the blossoms are long,
Listen!—deep love in the bubbled
Breath of a mocking-bird's song.
You, who have made them the dearer,
Drawing them near from afar!—
Stars and the heaven the nearer,
Sweet, through the joy that you are.

XI

“Confronted with the certainty that I
Had no approval for my love from you,
No visible sign, but my own prompting hope's,
Conforming with my heart's one wild desire,
Who had not dreaded disappointment there!
The shadow of a heart's unformed denial,
That should take form and soon confirm the doubt:
The doubt that would content itself with this:

If I might hold her by the hand,—
Her hands so full of soothing peace!—
Her heart would hear and understand
My heart's demand,
And all her idling cease.

142

If she would let my eyes look in
Her eyes, whose deeps are full of truth,
Her soul might see how mine would win
Her, without sin,
In all her happy youth.

If I might kiss her mouth, and lead
The kiss up to her eyes and hair,
There is no prayer that so could plead,—
And find sure heed,—
My love's divine despair.

XII

“And, uninstructed, smiled and wrote ‘despair,’
Enamoured, yet fearful of the shade that should
Some day come stealing through my silent door
To sit unbidden through the lonely hours.—
I cast the shudder off, and in the fields
Found hope again, and beauty born of dreams:
For it was summer, and all living things,
The common flowers and the birds and bees,
Became interpreters of love for me:

Say that he can not tell her how he loves her—
Words, for such adoration, often fail,—

143

When but a bow of ribbon, glove that gloves her,
Clothes her fair femininity in mail.

So many ways and wisdoms to express what
To th' language of devotion is denied;
Ambassadors to make the maiden guess what
Before her heart's high fortress long has sighed.

A bird to sing his secret—she'll perpend him:
A bee to bid her soul to hear and see:
A blossom, like a sweet appeal, to bend him,
Before her there, upon a worshiping knee.

XIII

“So was my love confessed to you. I thought
You loved me as love led me to believe:
And so, no matter where I, dreaming, went
Among the hills, the woods, and quiet fields,
All had a poetry so intimate,
So happy and so ready that, for me,
'Twas but to stoop and gather as I went,
As one goes reaching roses in the June.
Three withered wild ones that I gathered then
I send you now. Their scent and bloom are dust:

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1

What wild-flower shows perfection
Such as thy face, no blemish mars?
I leave to the selection
Of all the wild-flower stars:
To every wildwood bloom that blows,
Wild phlox, wild daisy, and wild rose.

What cascade hath suspicion
O' the marvel that thy whiteness is?
I leave to the decision
Of each proclaiming breeze:
To winds that kiss the buds awake,
And roll the ripple on the lake.

What bird can sing the naming
Of all the music that thou art?
I leave to the proclaiming
Of that within my heart:
My heart, wherein, the whole day long,
Sits adoration rapt in song.

2

What witch then hast thou met,
Who wrought this amulet?
This charm, that makes each look, love,
Of thine a rose;

145

Thy face an open book, love,
Where beauty gleams and glows,
And thought to music set.

What fairy of the wood,
To whom thou once wast good,
Gave thee this gift?—Thy words, love,
Should be pure gold;
And all thy songs as bird's, love,
Sweet as the Mays of old
With youth and love imbued.

What elfin of the glade
This white enchantment made,
That filled thee with the essence
Of all the Junes?
That made thy soul, thy presence,
Like to the moon's
Above a far cascade.

What wizard of the cave
Hath made my heart thy slave?
That dreams of thee when sleeping,
And, when awake,
My anxious spirit keeping
'Neath spells I can not break,
Sweet spells, whence naught can save.

146

3

Dear, (though given conclusion to),
Songs,—no memory surrenders,—
Still their music breathe in you;
Silence meditation renders
Audible with notes it knew.

Sweet, when all the flowers are dead,
Perfumes,—that the heart remembers
Made of them a marriage-bed,—
Shall not fail me in December's
Gloom, but from your face be shed.

Dear, when night denies a star,
Darkness will not suffer, seeing
Song and fragrance are not far;
Starlight of the summer being
In the loveliness you are.

XIV

“Revealing distant vistas where I thought
I saw your love stand as 'mid lily blooms,
Long, angel goblets molded out of stars,
Pouring aroma at your feet: and life
Took fire with thoughts your soul must help you read:

147

A song; and songs (who does not know?)
Reveal no music but is thine.
Thou singest, and the waters flow,
The breezes blow,
The sunbeams shine,
And all the earth grows young, divine.

Low laughter; and I look away;
Whate'er the time of year, I dream
I walk beneath sweet skies of May
On ways where play
Both gloom and gleam,
And hear a bird and forest stream.

A thought; and straight it seems to me,
However dark, the stars arise,
And rain down memories of thee,—
As, it may be,
From Paradise
One feels an angel-lover's eyes.

XV

“But is it well to tell you what I felt
When I beheld no change beyond the moods
That gloomed or glistened in your raven eyes?
When I sat singing 'neath one steadfast star

148

Of morning with no phantoms of strange fears
To slay the look or word that helped me sing:
When song came easier than come buds in spring,
That make the barren boughs one pomp of pearls:

Oh, let the happy day go past,
And let the night be short or long,
When life and love are one at last,
And hearts are full of song,
'Tis sweet midsummer of the dream,
And all the dreams thou hast
Are truer than they seem.

And once I dreamt in autumn of
Death with cadaverous eyes that gazed
From out a shadow ... It was love
Whose deathless eyes were raised
From the deep darkness that unrolled
Wild splendor; and, amazed,
Thy soul I did behold.

And then it seemed that some one said,
The dead are nearer than dost know.
And when they tell thee love is dead,—
Although it seems 't is so,—

149

Still shalt thou feel in every beat
And heart-throb of thy woe
Love breathing, bitter-sweet.

XVI

“One evening when I came to talk with you,
Impatience hurt me in your brief replies.
And I who had refused,—because we dread
Approaching horror of our lives made maimed,—
The inevitable, could not help but see
Some change in you to'ards me.—That night I dreamed
I wandered 'mid old ruins, where the snake
And scorpion crawled in poison-spotted heat;
Plague-bloated bulks of hideous vine and root
Wrapped fallen fanes; and bristling cacti bloomed
Blood-red and death-white on forgotten tombs.
And from my soul went forth a bitter cry
That pierced the silence that was packed with death
And pale presentiment. And so I went,
A white flame beckoning before my face,
And in my ears sounds of primordial seas
That boasted preadamic gods and men:

150

A flame before me and, beyond, a voice:
But, lo, the white flame when I reached for it
Became thin ashes like a dead man's dust;
And when I thought I should behold the sea,
Stagnation, turned to filth and rottenness,
Rolled out a swamp: the voice became a stench.

If we should pray together now
For sunshine and for rain,
And thou shouldst get fair weather now,
And I the clouds again,
Would ray and rain keep single,
Or for the rainbow mingle?

Dear, if this should be made to me,
That I had asked for light,
And God had given shade to me,
And all to thee that 's bright,
Wouldst thou go by with scorning,
Refusing darkness morning?

If all my life were winter, love,
And all thy life were spring,
And mine with frost should splinter, love,
While thine with birds should sing,
Wouldst thou walk past and glitter,
Forgetful mine is bitter?

151

XVII

“Still on the anguish of a dying hope
An infant hope was nourished; all in vain.
For, at the last, although we parted friends,
The friendship lay like sickness on my soul,
That saw all gladness perish from the world
With loss of thee; and, 'mid the future years,
Love building high a sepulchre for hope.

Ah, could you learn forgetfulness,
And teach my heart how to forget;
And I unlearn all fretfulness,
And teach your soul that still will fret;
The mornings of the world would burn
Before us and we would not turn,
For we would not regret.

Did you but know what sorrow keeps,
That drives the joy of life away,
And I what each to-morrow keeps
For us until it is to-day;
No grief or change would then surprise
Our lives with what our lives were wise,
And nothing could betray.

If you could be interior to
My dreams that are all love's desire;

152

And I could be superior to
Myself and such in you inspire;
Long stairways would the years unroll
To lift us upward, soul to soul,
To what celestial fire!

XVIII

“There came no words of comfort from your lips.
Not that I asked for pity! that had been
As fire unto the scalded or dry bread
Unto the famished fallen 'mid the sands!
But all your actions said that I was wrong,
But how, I know not and have ceased to care;
Still standing like one stricken blind at noon,
Who gropes and fumbles, feeling all grow strange
That once was so familiar; cursing God
Who locks him in with darkness and despair.—
Your judgment had been juster had it had
A lesser love than mine to judge.—O love,
Where lay the justice of thy judge in this?—

‘If thou hadst praised thy God as long
As thou hast praised a woman's eyes,

153

Perhaps thou hadst not suffered wrong,
As now, and sat with sighs:
But, through thy prayer and praise made strong,
Perhaps thou hadst grown wise.

‘If thou hadst bade thy God be more
Than I, thy life had not been sad;
His love to thee had not been poor
As mine. But thou wast mad,
And cam'st, a beggar, to my door,
And had more than I had.

‘If thou hadst taught me how to love,
Nor played with love as monarchs play,
My heart had learned right soon enough,
From thine, love's lowlier way.
But all thy love stood far above,
Nor touched my soul to sway.’

XIX

“Thus did you write me, or in words like these,
When all was over and your heart was led,
Through pity, haply, thus to justify
Yourself, that needed not to justify,
Since all your reason lay in four small words,

154

Enough to wreck my world and all my life,
You did not love: what more is there to tell?—
Yet, haply, it was this: One soul, that still
Demanded more than it could well return;
And, searching inward, yet could never pierce
Beyond its superficiality.
You did not know; yet I had felt in me
The rich fulfillment of a rare accord,
And could not, though the longing lay like song
And music on me, win your soul's response.

Were it well, lifting me
Eyes that give heed,
Down in your soul to see
Thought, the affinity
Of act and deed?
Knowing what naught may tell
Of heart and soul:
Yet were the knowledge whole,
And were it well?

Were it well, giving true
Love all enough,
Still to discover new
Depths of true love for you,
Infinite love?

155

Feeling what naught may tell
Of heart and soul:
Yet were the knowledge whole,
And were it well?

XX

“What else but, laboring for some good, to lift
Ourselves above the despotism of self,
All egoism strangling strength and hope,
To work and work, and, in the love of work,
Which takes the place, in some, of love's real self,
To quench the flame that eats into the heart?
Art, our intensest and our truest love,
Immaculateness that has never led
One of her lovers wrong, his love all soul!
I followed beauty, and my ardor prayed
Your memory would, feature and form and face,
Be blotted out within me; rise no more
To mar the labor that I owed to Art.
I prayed, yea, to forget you, you I loved:
I prayed; and, see!—how Heaven answered me:

I have no song to tell thee
The love that I would sing;

156

The song that should enspell thee
With words, and so compel thee
That thou, with love, must wing
Into my life to-morrow—
For all my songs are sorrow.

My strength is not a giant
To hold thee with strong hands,
To make thee less defiant;
Thy spirit more compliant
With all my love demands:
Alas! my love is meekness,
And all my strength is weakness.

What hope have I to hover—
When wings refuse to rise—
Within thy heart's close cover,
And there to play the lover,
Concealed from mortal eyes?
What hope! to give me boldness,
When all thy looks are coldness?

XXI

“I prayed; and for a time felt strong as strength,
And held both hands out to the loveliness
That lured in the ideal. And I felt

157

Compelling power upon me that would lift
My face to heaven, now, to see the stars,
Now bend it back to earth to see the flowers.
I learned long lessons 'twixt a look and look:

Breezes and linden blooms,
Sunshine and showers;
Rain, that the May perfumes,
Cupped in the flowers:
Clouds and the leaves that patter
Raindrops that glint and glare—
Or be they gems that scatter?
Sapphires the sylphides shake,
When their loose fillets break,
Out of their radiant hair?

Now is my heart a lute!
Now doth it pinion
Song in love's swift pursuit
In thought's dominion!
Dreaming of all thou meanest,
Thou, with uneager eyes,
Nature! of worlds thou queenest,
Whither thy mother hand
Draws us from land to land,
Far from the worldly wise!

158

XXII

“Thus would I scatter grain around my life,
Gold grain of song, to lure them down to me,
Cloud-colored doves of peace to fill my soul,
And find them turn to ravens while they flew,
Black ravens of despair that would not out.
The old, dull, helpless aching at the heart,
As if some scar had turned a wound again.
While idle grief stared at the brutal past,
Which held a loss that made the past more rich
Than all Earth's arts: that marveled how it came
Such puny folly should usurp love's high
Proud pedestal of life that held your form,
In Parian, sculptured by the hands of thought.
And oft I shook myself,—for nightmares weighed
Each sense,—and seemed to wake; yet evermore
Beheld a death's-head grinning at my eyes.

So when the opening of the door doth thrill
My soul with sudden knowledge death is come,
Let me forget you or remember still,
It will not matter then that life went ill,
When death bends to me and my lips are dumb.

159

Then I shall not remember: and shall leave
No memory behind me, and no trace
Of aught my life accomplished. Let none grieve.
There is no heart my passing will bereave;
And there are thousands who can fill my place.

Who knocks?—The night camps on each hill and heath:
And round my door are minions of the night:
And like a weapon, riven from its sheath,
The wind sweeps, and the tempest grinds its teeth
Around me and my wild, hand-hollowed light.

Who knocks?—the door is open!—And I see
The Darkness threatening, with distorted fists
Of cloudy terror, Courage on her knee:
Shine far, O candle! for it so may be
Love is bewildered in the night and mists.—

No wandering wisp art thou, that haunts the rain
With pallid flicker, fading as it flies!—

160

The door is open!—Will he knock again?—
The door is open!—Shall it be in vain?—
Come in! delay not! thou, whose ways are wise!

Who knocked has entered: let the darkness pass,
The door be closed!—Now morning lights shall thrust
It open; and the sunlight shine and mass
Its splendor here where once but darkness was,
And in its rays—motes and a little dust.”

XXIII

And I had read, read to the bitter end;
Half hearing lone surmises of the rain
And trouble of the wind. At last I rose
And went to Gwendolyn. She did not know
The kiss I gave her had a shudder in it;
Nor how the form of Julien rose between
Me and her lips, a blood-stain o'er his heart.

161

THE IDYLL OF THE STANDING-STONE

I

She knows its windings and its crooks;
The wildflowers of its lovely woods;
The crowfoot's golden sisterhoods,
That crowd its sunny nooks:
The iris, whose blue blossoms seem
Mab's bonnets; and, each leaf a-gleam,
The trillium's fairy-books.

He knows its shallows and its pools,
Its stair-like beds of rock that go,
Foaming, with waterfall and flow,
Where dart the minnow schools;
Its grassy banks that herons haunt,
Or where the woodcock call; and gaunt
The mushrooms lift their stools.

She seeks the columbine and phlox,
The bluebell, where the bushes fill
The old stones of the ruined mill;

162

She wades among the rocks:
Her feet are rose-pearl in the stream;
Her eyes are bluet-blue; a beam
Lies on her nut-brown locks.

He comes with fishing-reel and line
To angle in the darker deeps,
Where the reflected forest sleeps
Of sycamore and pine:
And now and then a shadow swoops
Above him of a hawk that stoops
From skies as clear as wine.

And will he see, if they should meet,
That she is fairer than each flower
Her apron fills? and in that hour
Feel life less incomplete? ...
He stops below: she walks above—
The brook floats down, as white as love,
One blossom to his feet.

And she?—should she behold the tan
Of manly face and honest eyes,
Would all her soul idealize
Him? make him more than man? ...
She dropped one blossom when she heard
Soft whistling—was it man or bird,
Whose notes so sweetly ran?

163

They knew before they came to meet;
For some divulging influence
Had touched them thro' the starry lens
God holds to bring in beat
Two hearts—her heart one haunting wish,
And his—forgetful of the fish,
Her flower at his feet.

II

The sassafras twigs had just lit up
The yellow stars of their fragrant candles,
And the dogwood brimmed each blossom-cup
With spring to its brown-tipped handles;
When down the orchard, 'mid apple blooms—
Say, ho, the hum o' the honey-bee!—
A glimpse of Spring in the sprinkled glooms?
Or only a girl? with the warm perfumes
Blown round her breezily.

The maple, as red as the delicate flush
Of an afterglow, was airy crimson;
And the haw-tree, white in the wing-whipped hush,
Gleamed cool as a cloud that the moonlight dims on;
And under the oak, whose branches strung—
Say, heigh, the rap o' the sapsuckér!—

164

Gray buds in tassels that sweetly swung,
They stood and listened a bird that sung,
As glad as the heart in her.

Yellow the bloom of the rattle-weed,
And white the bloom of the plum and cherry;
And red as a stain the red-bud's brede,
And clover the color of sherry:
And a wren sings there in the orchard drift,—
And, ho! the dew from the web that slips!—
And a thrush sings there in the woodland rift,
Where he to his face her doth lift,
Her face with the willing lips.

For a while they sat on the moss and grass,
Where the forest bloomed a great wild garden;—
Then the beam from the hollow—it seemed to pass,
And the ray on the hills to harden,
When she rose to go, and his joy fell flat;—
And, heigh, the wasp i' the pawpaw bell!—
As she waved her hand—why, it seemed at that
'Twas Spring's own self he was gazing at,
And the life of his life as well.

165

III

The teasel and the horsemint spread
The hillsides, as with sunset sown,
Blooming along the Standing-Stone
That ripples in its rocky bed:
There are no treasuries that hold
Gold yellower than the marigold
That crowds its mouth and head.

'T is harvest-time: a mower stands
Among the morning wheat and whets
His scythe, and for a space forgets
The labor of the ripening lands;
Then bends, and through the dewy grain
His long scythe hisses, and again
He swings it in his hands.

And she beholds him where he mows
On acres whence the water sends
Faint music of reflecting bends
And falls that interblend with flows:
She stands among the old bee-gums,—
Where all the apiary hums,—
Like some sweet bramble-rose.

She hears him whistling as he leans,
And, reaping, sweeps the ripe wheat by;
She sighs and smiles and knows not why:—

166

These are but simple country scenes:
He whets his scythe again, and sees
Her smiling near the hives of bees
Beneath the flowering beans.

The peacock-purple lizard creeps
Along the rail; and deep the drone
Of insects makes the country lone
With summer where the water sleeps:
She hears him singing as he swings
His scythe; he thinks of other things—
Not toil, and, singing, reaps.

IV

Into the woods they went again,
Over the wind-blown oats;
Out of the acres of golden grain,
In where the light was a violet stain,
In where the lilies' throats
Were brimmed with the summer rain.

Hung on a bough a reaper's hook,
Over the wind-blown oats;
A girl's glad laugh and a girl's glad look,
And the hush and ripple of tree and brook,
And a wild bird's silvery notes,
And a kiss that a strong man took.

167

Out of the woods the lovers went,
Over the wind-waved wheat;
She with a face, where love was blent,
Like to an open testament;
He, from his head to feet,
Dazed with his hope that was eloquent.

Here how oft had they come to tryst,
Over the wind-waved wheat!
Here how oft had they laughed and kissed!
Talked and tarried where no one wist,
Here where the woods are sweet,
Dim and deep as a dewy mist.

V

Her pearls are blossoms-of-the-vale,
Her only diamonds are the dews;
Such jewels never can grow stale,
Nor any value lose.

Among the millet beards she stands:
The languid wind lolls everywhere:
There are wild roses in her hands,
One wild rose in her hair.

To-morrow, where the shade is warm,
Among the unmown wheat she 'll stop,

168

And from one daisy-loaded arm
One ox-eyed daisy drop.

She 'll meet his brown eyes, true and brave,
With blue eyes, false yet dreamy sweet:
He is her lover and her slave,
Who mows among the wheat.

When buds broke on the apple trees
She wore an apple-blossom dress,
And laughed with him across the leas,
And love was all a guess.

When goose-plums ripened in the rain,
Plum-colored was her gown of red;
He kissed her in the creek-road lane—
She was his life, he said.

When apples thumped the droughty land,
A russet color was her gown:
Another came, and—won her hand?—
Nay! carried off to town. ...

When grapes hung purple in the hot,
None missed her and her simple dress,

169

Save one, whom, haply, she forgot,
Who loved her none the less.

When snow made white each harvest sheaf,
He sought her out amid her show;
Her rubies, redder than the leaf
That autumn forests sow.

Not one regret her shame reveals;
She smiles at him, then puts him by;
He pleads; and she? she merely steels
Her heart and—lives her lie.

VI

And he returned when poppies strewed
Their golden blots o'er moss and leaf,—
Blond little Esaus of the wood,
So fair of face, of life so brief.—
Did he forget?—Not he, in truth!—
“No month,” he thought, “holds so much grace,
No month of spring, such grace and youth,
As the sweet April of her face.”

In fall the frail gerardia
Hung hints of sunset and of dawn
On root and rock, as if to draw

170

Her lips, remind him of one gone:—
Of one unworthy, in pursuit
Of butterflies, who does not dream
A flower, broken by her foot,
Sweeps, helpless, with her down the stream.

171

SOME SUMMER DAYS

I

If you had seen her waiting there
Among the tiger-lily blooms,—
That sowed their jewels everywhere
Among the woodland gleams and glooms,—
You had confessed her very fair,
And sweeter than the wood's perfumes.

A country girl with bare brown feet,
She waits, while day slopes down the deeps:
The afternoon is dead with heat,
And all the weary shadow sleeps
Like toil, arm-pillowed in the wheat,
Beside the scythe with which he reaps.

There is no sound more distant than
The cow-bell on the vine-hung hill;
No nearer than the locust's span
Of noise that makes the silence shrill:
And now there comes a sun-browned man
Through tiger-lilies of the rill.

172

Long will they talk: till, in the end,
The clear west glows, the east grows pale;
Until the glow and pallor blend
Like moonlight on a shifting sail;
And then he'll clasp her; she will bend
Her head, consenting. Day will fail:

The west will flame, then fade away
Through heavy orange, rose, and red,
And leave the heavens violet gray
Above a gypsy-lily bed:
Then they will go; and he will say
Such words to her as none has said.

A million stars the night will win
Above them; and one firefly
Pulse like a tangled starbeam in
The cedar dark against the sky:
Then he will lift her dimpled chin
And take the kiss she'll not deny.

And when the moon, like the great book
Of Judgment, golden with the light
Of God, lies open o'er yon nook
Of darkest wood and wildest height,
Together they will cross the brook
And reach the gate and kiss good night.

173

II

And now he wipes his hand along
The beaded fire of his brow
Hard toil has heated; and the strong
Face flushes fuller health as now
He fills his hay-fork to the prong,
And, tossing it, again doth bow.

And now he rests, and looks away
Across the sun-fierce hills and meads
No rolling cloud has cooled to-day;
And from his face the brawny beads
Drip; and he marks the heaps of hay,
The fields of corn, the fields of weeds.

At last he sees the tempest build
Black battlements along the west,
Black breastworks that are thunder filled;
And bares his brow; and on his chest
The sweat of toil is cooled; and stilled
The pulse of toil within his breast.

A strong wind brings the odorous death
Of far hay-meadows, and the scent
Is good within his nostrils' breath:
The mighty trees are bowed, that leant
For no man, as when Power saith
“Bow down!” and stalwart men are bent.

174

He laughs, long-gazing as he goes
Along the elder-sweetened lane:
He feels the storm wind as it blows
Across the sheaves of golden grain,
And stops to pull one bramble-rose,
And watch the swiftly coming rain.

And there, 'mid locust trees, the farm
Dreams in a martin-haunted place:
He marks the far-off streaks of storm
That, driven of the thunder, race:
He sees his child upon her arm,
And in the door his wife's fair face.

III

Below the sunset's range of rose,
Below the heaven's bending blue,
Down woodways where the balsam blows,
And milkweed tufts hang, gray of hue,
A Jersey heifer stops and lows—
The cows come home by one, by two.

There is no star yet: but the smell
Of hay and pennyroyal mix
With herb-aromas of the dell;
And the root-hidden cricket clicks:

175

Among the ironweeds a bell
Clangs near the rail-fenced clover-ricks.

She waits upon the slope beside
The windlassed well the plum-trees shade,
The well-curb that the goose-plums hide;
Her light hand on the bucket laid,
Unbonneted she waits, glad-eyed,
Her dress as simple as her braid.

She sees fawn-colored backs among
The sumacs now; a tossing horn;
A clashing bell of brass that rung:
Long shadows lean upon the corn,
And all the day dies scarlet-stung,
The cloud in it a rosy thorn.

Below the pleasant moon, that tips
The tree-tops of the hillside, fly
The evening bats; the twilight slips
Some fireflies like spangles by;
She meets him, and their happy lips
Touch; and one star leaps in the sky.

He takes her bucket, and they speak
Of married hopes while in the grass
The plum lies glowing as her cheek;

176

The patient cows look back or pass;
And in the west one golden streak
Burns like a great cathedral glass.

IV

The skies are amber, blue, and green
Before the coming of the sun;
And all the deep hills sleep, serene
As if enchanted; every one
Is ribbed with morning mists that lean
On woods through which vague whispers run.

Birds wake: and on the vine-hung knobs,
Above the brook, a twittering
Confuses songs; one warbler robs
Another of its note; a wing
Beats by; and now a wild throat throbs
Triumphant; all the woodlands sing.

The sun is up: the hills are heaped
With instant splendor; and the vales
Surprised with shimmers that are steeped
In purple where the thin mist trails;
The water-fall, the rock it leaped,
Are burning gold that foams and fails.

177

He drives his horses to the plow
Along the vineyard slopes, where bask
Dew-heavy grapes, half-ripened now,
In sun-shot shafts of shade: no mask
Of joy he wears; his face and brow
Glow as he enters on his task.

Before him, soaring through the mist,
The gray hawk wildly wings and screams;
Its dewy back gleams, sunbeam-kissed,
Above the wood that drips and dreams;
He guides the plow with one strong fist;
The soil rolls back in level seams.

Packed to the right the sassafras
Lifts leafy walls of spice that shade
The blackberries, whose tendrils mass
Big berries in the coolness made;
And drop their ripeness on the grass
Where trumpet-flowers fall and fade.

White on the left the fence and trees
That mark the garden; and the smoke,
Uncurling in the early breeze,
Tells of the roof beneath the oak;
He turns his team, and, turning, sees
The damp, dark soil his coulter broke.

178

Bees hum; and o'er the berries poise
Lean-bodied wasps; loud blackbirds turn
Following the plow: there is a noise
Of insect wings that buzz and burn;—
And now he hears his wife's low voice,
The song she sings to help her churn.

V

There are no clouds that drift around
The moon's pearl-kindled crystal, (white
As some sky-summoned spirit wound
In raiment lit with limbs of light),
That have not softened like the sound
Of harps when Heaven forgets to smite.

The vales are deeper than the dark,
And darker than the vales the woods
That shadowy hill and meadow mark
With broad, blurred lines, whereover broods
Deep calm; and now a fox-hound's bark
Upon the quietude intrudes.

And though the night is never still,
Yet what we name its noises makes
Its silence:—now a whippoorwill;
A frog, whose hoarser tremor breaks

179

The hush; then insect sounds that fill
The night; an owl that hoots and wakes.

They lean against the gate that leads
Into the lane that lies between
The yard and orchard; flowers and weeds
Smell sweeter than the odors keen
That day distils from hotness; beads
Of dew make cool the gray and green.

Their infant sleeps. They feel the peace
Of something done that God has blessed,
Still as the pulse that will not cease
There in the cloud that lights the west:
The peace of love that shall increase
While soul to soul still gives its best.

180

AN EPIC OF SOUTH-FORK

I

The wild brook gleams on the sand and ripples
Over the rocks of the riffle; brimming
Under the elms like a nymph who dripples,
Dips and glimmers and shines in swimming:
Under the linns and the ash-trees lodging,
Loops of the limpid waters lie,
Shaken of schools of the minnows, dodging
The glancing wings of the dragon-fly.

Lower, the loops are lines of laughter
Over the stones and the crystal gravel;
Afar they gloom, like a face seen after
Mirth, where the waters slowly travel;
Shadowy slow where the Fork is shaken
Of the dropping bark of the sycamore,
Where the water-snake, that the footsteps waken,
Slides like a crooked root from shore.

181

Peace of the forest; and silence, dimmer
Than dreams. And now a wing that winnows
The willow leaves, with their shadows slimmer
In the shallow there than a school of minnows:
Calm of the creek; and a huge tree twisted,
Ringed, and turned to a tree of pearl;
A gray-eyed man, who is farmer-fisted,
And a dark-eyed, sinewy country girl.

The brow of the man is gnarled and wrinkled
With the weight of the words that have just been spoken;
And the girl has smiled and her eyes have twinkled,
Though the bonds and the bands of their love lie broken:
She smiles, nor knows how the days have knotted
Her to the heart of the man who says:
“Let us follow the paths that we think allotted.
I will go my ways and you your ways.

“And the man between us is your decision.
Worse or better he is your lover.—
Shall I say he 's worse since the sweet Elysian
Prize he wins where I discover

182

Only the hell of the luckless chooser?—
Shall I say he 's better than I, or more,
Since he is winner and I am loser,
His life 's made rich and mine made poor?”

“I tell you now as I oft and ever
Have told,” she answered, the laughter dying
Down in her eyes, “that his arms have never
Held me!—no!—but you think me lying,
And you are wrong. And I think it better
To part forever than still to dwell
With the sad distrust, like an evil tetter,
On our lives forever, and so farewell.”

And she turned away; and he watched her going,
The girlish pride in her eyes a-smoulder:
He saw her go, and his lips were glowing
Fever that parched. And he stood, one shoulder
Slouched to the tree; and he saw her stooping,
There by the bank, with a reckless foot;
Straighten; and tear from her breast his drooping
Lilies and fasten the pleurisy-root.

183

With its orange fire he saw her passing
On and on; and the blood beat, burning
His brain to madness; and seemingly massing
The weight of the world on his heart in yearning ...
Butterflies swarmed in the moist sand-alleys;
A fairy fleet of Ionian sails
They seemed with their wings, or of pirate galleys,
Maroon and yellow, for Elfland gales.

He watched her going; and harder, thicker
The pulse of his breath and his heart's hard throbbing.—
How should he know that her heart was sicker?
How should he know that her soul was sobbing?—
She never looked back: and he saw her vanish
In swirls of the startled butterflies,
Like a storm of flowers; and he could not banish
The thought he had lost his all through lies.

II

He heard the cocks crow out the lonely hours.
How long the night! how far away the dawn!

184

It seemed long months since he had seen the flowers,
The leaves, the sunlight, and the bee-hived lawn;
Had heard the thrush flute in the tangled showers.

His burning eyes ached, staring at the black
Stolidity of midnight. Would God send
No cool relief unto his mind,—a rack
Of inquisition,—tortures to unbend,
That stretched him forward and now strained him back?

Incomprehensible and undivulged,
The thought that took him back, retraced their walks,
Through woods, on which the sudden perfumes bulged,
The bird-songs and the brilliant-blossomed stalks;
And all the freedom which their talk indulged.

Oh, strong appeal! And he would almost yield;
When, firmly forward, he could feel her fault

185

Oppose the error of a rock-like shield,
And to resisting phalanxes cry halt—
And, lo! bright cohorts broken on the field.

O mulct of morning! to the despot night
Count down unminted gold, and let the day
Walk free from dungeons of the dark; delight
Herself on mountains of the violet ray,
Clad in white maidenhood and morning white!

A melancholy coast, plunged deep in dream
And death and silence, stretched the drowsy dark,
Wherein he heard a round-eyed screech-owl scream,
In lamentation, and a watch-dog bark,
Vague as oblivion, lost in night's deep stream.

And then hope moved him to divide the blinds
To see if those bright sparkles were a star's,
Or but his feverish eyelids, which the mind's
Commotion weighed.—No hint of morning bars
With glimmer heaven's swart tapestry he finds.

So he remained, impatient, till the first
Exploring crevices of Aztec morn,

186

Dim cracks of treasure, Eldorados burst:
Then could he face his cowardice and scorn
His jealousy that thus his life had cursed.

Love knew no barriers now. And where he went
Each woodland path was musical with birds;
Each flow'r was richer, more divine of scent;
For love sought love with such expressive words
That dawn's delivery was less eloquent.

III

Who is it hunts with his dog
There where the heron is flying
Gray through the feathering fog
Over the Fork, where is lying,
Bridge-like, a butternut log,
There where the horsemint is drying?

Who is it hunts in the brush,
Under the linns and the beeches,
Here where the water-falls rush,
Dark, where the noon never reaches?
Here where the Fork is one crush
Of flags with a bloom like the peach's?

187

He is handsome and supple and tall,
Blond-haired and vigorous-chested,
Blue-eyed as the bud by the fall
Where he listens,—his rifle half rested,
Half leaned on the crumbling stone wall,—
Whose briers he lately has breasted.

He waits; and the sun on the dew
Of the cedars and leaves of the bushes
Strikes glittering frostiness through ...
If a covey of partridges flushes
What good will a Winchester do,
Or the dog to his feet that he crushes?

Then a man breaks strong through the weeds
Where the buck-bushes toss and the spires
Of the white-blossomed cohosh; 'mid reeds
Wild-carrots, and trammelling briers:
It is he! to his loved one who speeds—
And the man in the bushes—he fires. ...

From leaves of the wind-shaken wood
The dew of the dawn is still falling:
He is gone from the place where he stood,
Just there where the black crow is calling:
There is blood on the weeds: is it blood
On the face of the man who is crawling?

188

Red blood or a smudge of the dawn?—
Now he lies with his gray eyes wide, staring,
Stiff, still at the sun: he has drawn
His limbs in a heap: and the faring
Bee-martins light near or pass on,
Not one of them knowing or caring.

It is noon: and the wood-dove is deep
In the calm of its cooing: and over
The tops of the forest trees sweep
The shadows of buzzards that hover:
Wide-winged they sail on as asleep:
And the bob-white is whistling from cover.

It is dusk: and the heat, that made wilt
The leaves and the wildflowers' faces,
Gives place to the dew-drops that tilt
With coolness the weeds where are traces
Of horror and darkness and guilt,
That nothing can wash from those places.

It is night: and the hoot-owlet mocks
The dove of the day with wild weeping,
The Fork is scarce heard on its rocks
Where the man is so quietly sleeping:
Through the woods snaps the bark of a fox;
The lightning is fitfully leaping.

189

IV

All day, 'twixt hope and fear,
She waited at the gate,
Looking for him, more dear
Now that he made her wait:
Day went and night draws near:
Stormy it grows and late.

Still, still she waits: great limbs
The winds rend from the ridge;
Each swollen shallow swims
Head-deep below the bridge;
The drift, that breaks and brims
Swirls lighter than the midge.

The night grows wildly gray
With lightning-litten rain;
The forests sound and sway,
An oak is rent in twain;
The thunder rolls away
Like some vast bolt and chain.

The Fork is whirling wreck
Of field and farm and wood;
And many a foaming fleck
Drives where the rock-fence stood;—
A torrent sweeps break-neck
Above the washed-out blood.

190

Night deepens: still she waits
Expectant in despair:
The Fork has reached the gates,
The wood's wreck everywhere.
But when the storm abates,
She thinks, he will be there.

She sees the lightning rush
Its blazing hells above;
She hears the thunder crush
Heaven as if earthquake-clove—
Loud in the tempest's hush
She calls with all her love.

He comes, she feels; and stands
The rushing waters o'er
Her feet, and on her hands
And hair the wild down-pour,
The lightnings are wild brands
To light him to her door.

Night deepens: but she knows
God will not fail to send
Her love to soothe her woes,
And one day's errors mend.—
The wild stream foams and flows
Booming in fall and bend.

191

Again the lightnings light
The night like some wild torch;
The waters foam and fight;
And one uprooted larch
Sweeps down, with something white
Wedged in it, by her porch.

She stoops: the lurid rain
Beats on her back and head—
Ay! he hath come again!
With livid lips once red!
A bullet in his brain
The night hath brought him—dead!

192

A NIELLO

I

It is not early spring and yet
Of bloodroot blooms along the stream,
And blotted banks of violet,
My heart will dream.

Is it because the wind-flower apes
The beauty that was once her brow,
That the white thought of it still shapes
The April now?

Because the wild-rose learned its blush
From her fresh cheeks of maidenhood,
Their thought makes June of barren brush
And empty wood?

And then I think how young she died—
Straight, barren death stalks down the trees,
The hard-eyed hours by his side
That kill and freeze.

193

II

When orchards are in bloom again
My heart will bound, my blood will beat,
To hear the red-bird so repeat,
On boughs of rosy stain,
His blithe, loud song,—like some far strain
From out the past,—among the bloom,—
(Where bee, and wasp, and hornet boom)—
Fresh, redolent with rain.

When orchards are in bloom once more,
Invasions of lost dreams will draw
My feet, like some insistent law,
Through blossoms to her door:
In dreams I'll ask her, as before,
To let me help her at the well;
And fill her pail; and long to tell
My love as once of yore.

I shall not speak until we quit
The farm-gate, leading to the lane
And orchard, all in bloom again,
'Mid which the wood-doves sit
And coo; and through whose blossoms flit
The cat-birds crying while they fly:
Then tenderly I'll speak, and try
To tell her all of it.

194

And in my dream again she'll place
Her hand in mine, as oft before,—
When orchards are in bloom once more,—
With all her old-time grace:
And we will tarry till a trace
Of sunset dyes the heav'ns; and then—
We'll part, and, parting, I again
Will bend and kiss her face.

And homeward, dreaming, I will go
Along the cricket-chirring ways,
While sunset, like one crimson blaze
Of blossoms, lingers low:
And my lost youth again I'll know,
And all her love, when spring is here—
Hers! hers! now dead this many a year
Whose love still haunts me so.

III

I would not die when Springtime lifts
The white world to her maiden mouth,
And heaps its cradle with gay gifts,
Breeze-blown from out the singing South:
Too full of life and loves that cling,
Too heedless of all mortal woe,
The young, unsympathetic Spring,
That death should never know.

195

I would not die when Summer shakes
Her daisied locks below her hips,
And, naked as a star that takes
A cloud, into the silence slips.
Too rich is Summer; poor in needs;
Wrapped in her own warm loveliness
Her pomp goes by, and never heeds
If one be more or less.

But I would die when Autumn goes,
The sad rain dripping from her hair,
Through forests where the wild wind blows
Death and the red wreck everywhere:
Sweet as love's last farewells and tears
'T would be to die, when heavens are gray,
In the old autumn of my years,
Like a dead leaf borne far away.

196

DEEP IN THE FOREST

I
SPRING ON THE HILLS

Ah, shall I follow, on the hills,
The Spring, as wild wings follow?
Where wild-plum trees make wan the hills,
Crab-apple trees the hollow,
Haunts of the bee and swallow?

In red-bud brakes and flowery
Acclivities of berry;
In dogwood dingles, showery
With dew, where wrens make merry?
Or drifts of swarming cherry?

In valleys of wild-strawberries,
And of the clumped May-apple;
Or cloud-like trees of hawberries,
With which the south-winds grapple,
That brook and pathway dapple?

197

With eyes of far forgetfulness,—
Like some white wood-thing's daughter,
Whose feet are bee-like fretfulness,—
To see her run like water
Through boughs that slipped or caught her.

O Spring, to seek, yet find you not,
To search and still continue;
To glimpse, to touch, but bind you not,
To lose and then to win you,
All sweet evasion in you.

In pearly, peach-blush distances
You gleam; the woods are braided
Of myths, of dream-existences;—
There, where the brook is shaded,
Some splendor surely faded.

O presence, like the primrose's,
Once more I feel your power!
In rainy scents of dim roses
I breathe you for an hour,
Elusive as a flower.

II
THE WOOD SPIRIT

Ah me! I still remember
How flushed, before the shower,

198

The dusk was; like a scarlet rose,
Or blood-red poppy-flower.

Now heaven is starred; the moonlight
Lays blurs upon the grain—
You may not know it from white frost,
The moonlight on the rain.

And all the forest utters
A restless moan in rest,
For all the deep, dark shadow lies
Like iron on its breast.

I mark the moveless shadow,
I mark the unreaped corn,
Then something whispers overhead,
“Come to me, mortal-born.”

I sit alone and listen;
The low leaves sound and sigh;
The dew drips from the bearded grain,
A mist slips from the sky.—

I hear her whisper, whisper,
And breathe in some dim place;
Her feet are easier than the dew,
And than the mist her face.

199

I may not clasp her ever,
This spirit made for song,
Who dwelleth in the young, young oak
The old, old oaks among.

Her limbs are molded moonlight;
Her breasts are silver moons:
She glimmers and she glitters where
The purple shadow swoons.

And since she knows I love her,
She says my soul has died,
And laughs and mocks me in the mist
That haunts the forest-side.

When winds run mad in woodlands
And all the great boughs swing,
I see her wild hair blow and blow
Black as a raven's wing.

When winds are tamed and tethered
And stars are keen as frost,
I search and seek within the wood,
There where my soul was lost.

I seek her, and she flies me;
I follow; and the whole
Dim woodland echoes with her voice,
Soft calling to my soul.

200

III
OWL ROOST

The slope is a mass of vines:
If you walk in the daylight there,
A gleam as of twilight shines
Through the vines massed everywhere:
Each trunk, that a creeper twines,
Is a column, strong to bear
The dome of its leaves that wave,
Cathedral-dim and grave.

Black moss makes silent the feet:
And, above, the fox-grapes lace
So thick that the noonday heat
Is chill as a murdered face:
And the winds for miles repeat
The fugue of a rolling bass:
The deep leaves twinkle and turn
But over no flower or fern.

An angular spider weaves
Great webs between the trees,
Webs that are witches' sieves:
And honey-and bumblebees
Go droning among the leaves,
Like the fairies' oboës:

201

At dark the owlets croon
To the stars and the sickle-moon.

At dark I will not go
There where the branches sigh;
Where naught but the glow-worms glow,
Each one like a demon's eye:
O'er which, like a battle-bow,
With an arrow that it lets fly,
The new-moon and one star
Hang and glimmer afar.

At dawn, if my mood be dim,
And the day be a cloudless one,
There where the sad winds hymn
I'll walk, but its shade will shun;
Its shade, where I feel the grim
Horror of something done
Here in the years long past,
That the place conceals to the last.

IV
MOSS AND FERN

Where rise the brakes of bramble there,
Wrapped with the trailing rose,

202

Through cane where waters ramble, there
Where deep the green cress grows,
Who knows?
Perhaps, unseen of eyes of man,
Hides Pan.

Perhaps the creek, whose pebbles make
A foothold for the mint,
May bear,—where soft its trebles make
Confession,—some vague hint—
(The print,
Goat-hoofed, of one who lightly ran)—
Of Pan.

Where, in the hollow of the hills
Ferns deepen to the knees,
What sounds are those above the hills,
And now among the trees?—
No breeze!—
The syrinx, haply, none may scan,
Of Pan.

In woods where waters break upon
The hush like some soft word;
Where sun-shot shadows shake upon
The moss, who has not heard—
No bird!—

203

The flute, as breezy as a fan,
Of Pan?

Far in, where mosses lay for us
Still carpets, cool and plush;
Where bloom and branch and ray for us
Swoon in the noonday flush,
The hush
May sound the satyr hoof a span
Of Pan.

In woods where thrushes sing to us,
And brooks dance sparkling heels;
Where wild aromas cling to us,
And all our worship kneels,—
Who steals
Upon us, haunch and face of tan,
But Pan?

V
WOODLAND WATERS

Through leaves of the nodding trees,
Where blossoms sway in the breeze,
Pink bag-pipes made for the bees,
Whose slogan is droning and drawling:
Where the columbine scatters its bells,

204

And the wild bleeding-heart its shells,
O'er mosses and rocks of the dells
The brook of the forest is falling.

You can hear it under the hill
When the wind in the wood is still,
And, strokes of a fairy drill,
Sounds the bill of the yellow-hammer:
By the solomon's-seal it slips,
Cohosh and the grass that drips—
Like the words of an Undine's lips,
Is the sound of its falls that stammer.

I lie in the woods: and the scent
Of the honeysuckle is blent
With the sound: and a Sultan's tent
Is my dream, with the East enmeshéd:—
A slave-girl sings; and I hear
The languor of lute-strings near,
And a dancing-girl of Cashmere
In the harem of good Er Reshid.

From ripples of Irak lace
She flashes the amorous grace
Of her naked limbs and her face,
While her golden anklets tinkle:
Then over mosaic floors

205

Open seraglio doors
Of cedar: by twos, by fours,—
Like stars that tremble and twinkle,—

While the dulcimers sing, unseen,
The handmaids come of the Queen
'Neath silvern lamps, one sheen
Of jewels of Afrite treasure:
And I see the Arabia rise
Of the Nights that were rich and wise,
Beautiful, dark, in the eyes
Of Zubeideh, the Queen of Pleasure.

VI
THE THORN-TREE

The night is sad with silver and the day is glad with gold,
And the woodland silence listens to a legend never old,
Of the Lady of the Fountain, whom the fairy people know,
With her limbs of samite whiteness and her hair of golden glow,
Whom the boyish South-wind seeks for and the girlish-stepping rain,

206

Whom the sleepy leaves still whisper men shall never see again;
She whose Vivien charms were mistress of the magic Merlin knew,
That could change the dew to glow-worms and the glow-worms into dew.

There 's a thorn-tree in the forest, and the fairies know the tree,
With its branches gnarled and wrinkled as a face with sorcery;
But the May-time brings it clusters of a rainy fragrant white,
Like the bloom-bright brows of beauty or a hand of lifted light.
And all day the silence whispers to the sun-ray of the morn
How the bloom is lovely Vivien and how Merlin is the thorn:
How she won the doting wizard with her naked loveliness
Till he told her demon secrets that but made his magic less.

How she charmed him and enchanted in the thorn-tree's thorns to lie
Forever with his passion that should never dim or die:

207

And with wicked laughter looking on this thing that she had done,
Like a visible aroma lingered sparkling in the sun;
How she stooped to kiss the pathos of an elflock of his beard,
All in mockery, at parting, and mock pity of his weird:
But her magic had forgotten that “who bends to give a kiss
Will bring down the curse upon them of the person whose it is”:
So the silence tells the secret.—And at night the fairies see
How the tossing bloom is Vivien, who is struggling to be free,
In the thorny arms of Merlin, who, forever, is the tree.

VII
THE HAMADRYAD

She stood among the longest ferns
The valley held; and in her hand
One blossom like the light that burns,
Vermilion, o'er a sunset land;
And round her hair a twisted band

208

Of pink-pierced mountain-laurel blooms:
And darker than dark pools, that stand
Below the star-communing glooms,
Her eyes beneath her hair's perfumes.

I saw the moon-pearl sandals on
Her flower-white feet, that seemed too chaste
To tread pure gold: and, like the dawn
On splendid peaks that lord a waste
Of solitude lost gods have graced,
Her face: she stood there, faultless-hipped,
Bound with the cestused silver,—chased
With acorn-cup and crown, and tipped
With oak-leaves,—whence her chiton slipped.

Limbs that the gods call loveliness!—
The grace and glory of all Greece
Wrought in one marble form were less
Than her perfection!—'Mid the trees
I saw her; and time seemed to cease
For me—And, lo! I lived my old
Greek life again of classic ease,
Barbarian as the myths that rolled
Me back into the Age of Gold.

209

WRECKAGE

I

Love and the drift of many dreams,
Under the moon of a Florida night,
Over the beach with its silvery seams
White as a sail is white.

Love that entered into two lives
Out of the dreams that the nights have borne,
Over the waves where the vapor drives,
Mists that the stars have torn.

Love that welded two hearts and hands
There by the sea, 'neath the shell-white moon,
Like to the stars and the mists and the sands
Setting two lives in tune.

Nights of love that one still keeps
Sacred;—nights, that the faith of one
Heartened there in the treacherous deeps,
Under a tropic sun.

210

II

Parting he said to her: “Let us be true to them,—
All of our dreams, of the night, of the morning:
What is our present, its hope, but a clew to them?
What is our past but a dream and a warning?
Have you considered the life that regretfully
Foldeth weak arms to the fate it might master?—
Had I been true to my dreams, never fretfully
Halted, my future and joy had been faster.”

They had come down to the ocean that, bellowing,
Boiled on the sand and the shells that were broken;
All of the summer was fading and yellowing;
Now they must part and their vows had been spoken.
It had befallen that heaven was lowering;
Over the sea, like the wraith of a wrecker,
Clamored the gull; and the mist in the showering
East seemed the ghost of a lofty three-decker.

211

Infinite foam; and the boom of the hollowing
Breakers that buried the rocks to their shoulders;
Battle and boast of the deep in the wallowing
World of the waves where the red sunset smoulders.
Long was the leap of the foam on the thunderous
Beach; and each end of the beach was a flying
Fog of the spray: and she said, “Let it sunder us!
Still we will love, for love is undying!”

Yet, if it comes to the thing he has said to her?—
Wreckage and death?—the love she has given
Turned into sorrow?—Oh, that was a dread to her!
He, like a weed, by the waters far driven!
Weeping, her bosom with shudders was shaken as
She for a moment hard clung to her sailor,
Kissed him and—parted. His boat had been taken; as
Paler it grew the woman grew paler.

212

III

All day the rain drove, falling
Upon the sombre sea;
All day, his wet sail hauling,
The sailor tacked a-lea;
And through the wild rain calling,
What was it?—was it he?

At dusk the gull clanged, drifting
Above the boiling brine;
And, through the wan west sifting,
Streamed one red sunset line;
And in its wild light shifting,
His far sail seemed to shine.

All night the wind wailed, sighing
Along the wreck-strewn coast;
All night the surf, defying,
Rolled thunder in and boast;
All night she heard a crying—
The sea? or some lost ghost?

IV

The balm of the night and the glory,
The music and scent of the sea,
Are as song to her heart or a story
Of the never-to-be.

213

The stars and the night and the whiteness
Of foam on the stretch of the sand;
Faint foam that is tossed, like the brightness
Of a mermaiden's hand.

No sail on the ocean; no sailor
On shore, and the winds all asleep;
And her face in the starlight far paler
Than women who weep.
A mist on the deep; and the ghostly
White moon in the deep of the night;
And a light that is neither; that mostly
Is shadow not light.

No sea-gull, that vanished with gleaming
Of wings, in the swing of the spray;
Perhaps it was only her dreaming,
Or merely a ray
Of moonlight; the glimmering essence
Of all that is grayest and dim—
But never his face, or his presence
That dripped in each limb.

And she cried through the night, “Let me perish!
O God, let me die of despair!
If he whom I love, whom I cherish,
Is weltering there!”

214

She seemed but a sea-mist made woman,
And he but a sound of the sea
Made man where nothing was human,
And never would be.

V

Long he sailed the deep that glasses
The face of God and His majesty;
Passed the Horn and the Seas of Grasses,
Drifting aimlessly.
Time went by with its days that ever
Burden the hearts of those who be
Far away from their love; whom sever
Leagues of the shapeless sea.

Land at last, whose reefs rolled broken
Foam of the balked waves everywhere;
Land; one tangle of weeds and oaken
Wreck and of rocks laid bare.
Here and there the sand stretched livid
Leagues of famine, one blinding glare;
Crags, o'er which gaunt birds winged vivid,
Harsh in the earthquake air.

A little cloud in the sunset's splendor;
A little cloud that the sunset stains:
Night, and a wisp of a moon that, slender,
Dreams of the hurricanes.

215

Winds that stride as with sounding sandals;
Winds that the tempest has loosed from chains:
Light that leaps like a spear he handles,
Shaking his thunder-manes.

Wrenching the world in wreck asunder,
Black rebellion of hell and night;
Wrath and roar of the rocks and thunder,
Flame and the winds that fight ...
Beating the drift and the hush together,
Waves and winds that the morn makes white;
Calm and peace of the tropic weather
After the typhoon's might.

Clouds blow by and the storm 's forgotten.
Savage coasts where the sea-cow feeds.
Wash of weeds and the sea-weeds rotten.
And a dead face in the weeds.
None to know him or name him brother;
Only the savage in feathers and beads;
The South-Sea Islander, fitting another
Barb in the shaft he speeds.

Far away where the sea-gulls gather;
Far away where the evening falls,
Lone she stands where the wild waves lather,
Rolling the sea in walls.—

216

Who shall tell her, the lonely tryster?
Tell her of him on whom she calls?—
Suns that beat on his face and blister?
Stars? or the sea that crawls?

VI

She dreamed that there, beside the ocean sitting,
Alone she watched, when, at her feet, behold!
Between the foam-ridge and the sea-gull's flitting,
His body rolled.

All was not as it was before they parted;
She dreamed he had remembered, she forgot;
He 'd said he would forget her, angry-hearted,
And yet could not.

And then it seemed that, had she known, she surely
Had given pity when she could not give
Her love to him, who loved her madly, purely,
And bade him live.

And then she dreamed she looked upon the slanted
Hulk of a wreck: and high above the wave,
Worn of the wind and of the cactus planted,
His nameless grave.

217

SIREN SANDS

I

The rhododendrons bloom and shake
Their petals wide and gleam and sway
Among palmettoes, by the lake,
Beyond the bay.

Shores where we watched the eve reveal
Her cloudy sanctuaries, while
The bay lay lavaed into steel
For mile on mile.

We watched the purple coast confuse
Soft outlines with the graying light;
And towards the gulf a vessel lose
Itself in night.

We saw the sea-gulls dip and soar;
The wild-fowl gather past the pier;
And from rich skies, as from God's door,
Gold far and near.

218

Two foreign seamen passed and we
Heard mellow Spanish; like twin stars,
Where they lounged smoking, we could see
Their faint cigars.

Night; and the heavens stained and strewn
With stars the waters idealized,
Until their light the rising moon
Epitomized.

Morn; and the pine-wood balms awake;
Winds roll the dew-drop from the rose;
The wide lake burns; and, on the lake,
The ripple glows.

Far coasts detach deep purple from
The blue horizon, and the day
Beholds the sunburnt sailor come
And sail away.

The bird that slept at dusk, at dawn
Awakes again within the thorn.—
Sweet was the night to it, now gone;
And sweet is morn.

II

Through halls of columned scarlet,
Like some dark queen, the Dusk
Trails skirts of myrrh and musk,

219

Hung in each ear, a starlet
Gleams,—gems the clouds' gaunt Jinn
Guard; and, beneath her chin,
The moon, an opal tusk.

There lies a ghostly glory
Upon the sea and sand;
A gleam, as of a hand,
Stretched from the realms of story,
Of rosy golden ray;
Pointing the world the way
To some far Fairyland.

As fades the west's vermilion
Above the distant coasts,
The stars come out in hosts;
Within the night's pavilion,
As flower speaks to flower,
Dim hour calls to hour,
Pale with the past's sweet ghosts.

III

Music that melts through moonlight,
Faint on the summer breeze;
Fireflies, moonlight, and foaming
Susurrus of the seas.

220

Music that drifts like perfume,
And touches like a hand;
Dreams and stars and the ocean,
And we alone on the sand.

Glimmers and vague reflections,
And the white swirl of the foam;
Pale on the purple a vessel,
And a light that beckons home.

And I seem to see the music,
On a moonbeam bar that floats,
For the music is moonlight magic,
And the flies are its golden notes.

And I seem to hear one singing
Of a brown old coast and sea,
Of lives that were filled with passion,
And old-world tragedy.

And I hear the harsh reef's calling
For a noble ship at sea,
And the winds of the ocean singing
A dirge for the dead to be.

Till it seems that I am the pilot,
And you are the mermaidén,
Who lures him on to the wrecking
And into her arms again.

221

Song

Over the hills where the winds are waking
All is lone as the soul of me;
Over the hills where the stars are shaking,
Breton hills by the sea.

These were with me to tell me often
How she pined in her Croisic home,
Winds that sing and the stars that soften
Over the miles of foam.

Fishers' nets and the sailor faces;
Sad salt marshes and granite piers;
Brown, loud coast where the long foam races—
And a parting full of tears.

A gray sail's ghost where the autumn lies on
Wraiths of the mist and the squall-blown rain;
Her dark girl eyes that search the horizon,
Grave with a haunting pain.

Stars may burn and the wild winds whistle
Over the rocks where the sea-gulls rave—
My heart is bleak as the wind-worn thistle
Dead on her seaside grave.

222

IV

Sad as sad eyes that ache with tears
The stars of night shine through the leaves;
And shadowy as the Fates' dim shears
The weft that twilight weaves.

The summer sunset marched long hosts
Of gold adown one golden peak,
That flamed and fell; and now gray ghosts
Of mist the far west streak.

They seem the shades of things that weep,
Wan things the heavens would conceal;
Blood-stained; that bear within them, deep,
Red wounds that will not heal.

Night comes, and with it storm, that slips
Wild angles of the jagged light:—
I feel the wild rain on my lips,—
A wild girl is the Night.

A moaning tremor sweeps the trees;
And all the stars are packed with death:—
She holds me by the neck and knees,
I feel her wild, wet breath.

223

Hell and its hags drive on the rain:—
Night holds me by the hair and pleads;
Her kisses fall like blows again;
My brow is dewed with beads.

The thunder plants wild beacons on
Each volleying height.—My soul seems blown
Far out to sea. The world is gone,
And night and I alone.

Tampa, Florida, February, 1893.

224

WAR-TIME SILHOUETTES.

I
THE BATTLE

The night had passed. The day had come,
Bright-born, into a cloudless sky:
We heard the rolling of the drum,
And saw the war-flags fly.

And noon had crowded upon morn
Ere Conflict shook her red locks far,
And blew her brazen battle-horn
Upon the hills of War.

Noon darkened into dusk—one blot
Of nightmare lit with hell-born suns;—
We heard the scream of shell and shot
And booming of the guns.

On batteries of belching grape
We saw the thundering cavalry
Hurl headlong,—iron shape on shape,—
With shout and bugle-cry.

225

When dusk had moaned and died, and night
Came on, wind-swept and wild with rain,
We slept, 'mid many a bivouac light,
And vast fields heaped with slain.

II
IN HOSPITAL

Wounded to death he lay and dreamed
The drums of battle beat afar,
And round the roaring trenches screamed
The hell of war.

Then woke; and, weeping, spoke one word
To the kind nurse who bent above;
Then in the whitewashed ward was heard
A song of love.

The song she sang him when she gave
The portrait that he kissed; then sighed,
“Lay it beside me in the grave!”
And smiled and died.

III
THE SOLDIER'S RETURN

A brown wing beat the apple leaves and shook
Some blossoms on her hair. Then, note on note,

226

The bird's wild music bubbled. In her book,
Her old romance, she seemed to read. No look
Betrayed the tumult in her trembling throat.

The thrush sang on. A dreamy wind came down
From one white cloud of afternoon and fanned
The dropping petals on her book and gown,
And touched her hair, whose braids of quiet brown
Gently she smoothed with one white jeweled hand.

Then, with her soul, it seemed, from feet to brow
She felt him coming: 't was his heart, his breath
That stirred the blossom on the apple bough;
His step the wood-thrush warbled to. And now
Her cheek went crimson, now as white as death.

Then on the dappled page his shadow—yes,
Not unexpected, yet her haste assumed
Fright's startle; and low laughter did confess
His presence there, soft with his soul's caress
And happy manhood, where the rambo bloomed.

227

Quickly she rose and all her gladness sent
Wild welcome to him. Her his unhurt arm
Drew unresisted; and the soldier leant
Fond lips to hers. She wept. And so they went
Deep in the orchard towards the old brick farm.

IV
THE APPARITION

A day of drought, foreboding rain and wind,
As if stern heaven, feeling earth had sinned,
Frowned all its hatred. When the evening came,
Along the west, from bank on bank unthinned
Of clouds, the storm unfurled its oriflamme.

Then lightning signaled, and the thunder woke
Its monster drums, and all God's torrents broke.—
She saw the wild night when the dark pane flashed;
Heard, where she stood, the disemboweled oak
Roar into fragments when the welkin crashed.

Long had she waited for a word. And, lo!
Anticipation still would not say “No:”
He has not written; he will come to her;

228

At dawn!—to-night!—Her heart hath told her so;
And so expectancy and love aver.

She seems to hear his fingers on the pane—
The glass is blurred, she can not see for rain:
Is that his horse?—the wind is never still:
And that his cloak?—ah, surely that is plain!—
A torn vine tossing at the window-sill.

She hurries forth to meet him; pale and wet,
She sees his face; the war-soiled epaulet;
A sabre-scar that bleeds from brow to cheek;
And now he smiles, and now their lips have met,
And now ... Dear heart, he fell at Cedar Creek!

V
WOUNDED

It was in August that they brought her news
Of his bad wounds; the leg that he must lose.
And August passed, and when October raised
Red rebel standards on the hills that blazed,
They brought a haggard wreck; she scarce knew whose,
Until they told her, standing stunned and dazed.

229

A shattered shadow of the stalwart lad,
The five-months husband, whom his country had
Enlisted, strong for war; returning this,
Whose broken countenance she feared to kiss,
While health's remembrance stood beside him sad,
And grieved for that which was no longer his.

They brought him on a litter; and the day
Was bright and beautiful. It seemed that May
In woodland rambles had forgot her path
Of season, and, disrobing for a bath,
By the autumnal waters of some bay,
With her white nakedness had conquered Wrath.

Far otherwise she wished it: wind and rain;
The sky, one gray commiserative pain;
Sleet, and the stormy drift of frantic leaves;
To match the misery that each perceives
Aches in her hand-clutched bosom, and is plain
In eyes and mouth and all her form that grieves.

Theirs, a mute meeting of the lips; she stooped
And kissed him once: one long, dark side-lock drooped

230

And brushed against the bandage of his breast;
With feeble hands he held it and caressed;
Then all his happiness in one look grouped,
Saying, “Now I am home, I crave but rest.”

Once it was love! but then the battle killed
All that sweet nonsense of his youth, and filled
His heart with sterner passion.—Ah, well! peace
Must balm its pain with patience; whose surcease
Means reconcilement; e'en as God hath willed,
With war or peace who shapes His ends at ease.—

What else for these but, where their mortal lot
Of weak existence drags rent ends, to knot
The frail unravel up!—while love (afraid
Time will increase the burthen on it laid),
Seeks consolation, that consoleth not,
In toil and prayer, waiting what none evade.

VI
THE MESSAGE

Long shadows toward the east: and in the west

231

A blaze of garnet sunset, wherein rolled
One cloud like some great gnarly log of gold;
Each gabled casement of the farm seemed dressed
In ghosts of roses blossoming manifest.

And she had brought his letter there to read,
There on the porch, that faced the locust glade;
To watch the summer sunset burn and fade,
And breathe the twilight scent of wood and weed,
Forget all care and her soul's hunger feed.

And on his face her fancy mused a while:
“Dark hair, dark eyes.—And now he has a beard
Dark as his hair.”—She smiled; yet almost feared
It changed him so she could not reconcile
Her heart to that which hid his lips and smile.

Then tried to feature, but could only see
The beardless man who bent to her and kissed
Her and their child and left them to enlist:
She heard his horse grind in the gravel: he
Waved them adieu and rode to fight with Lee.

232

Now all around her drowsed the hushful hum
Of evening insects. And his letter spoke
Of love and longings to her: nor awoke
One echo of the bugle and the drum,
But all their future in one kiss did sum.

The stars were thick now; and the western blush
Drained into darkness. With a dreamy sigh
She rocked her chair.—It must have been the cry
Of infancy that made her rise and rush
To where their child slept, and to hug and hush.

Then she returned. But now her ease was gone.
She knew not what, she felt an unknown fear
Press, tightening, at her heart-strings; then a tear
Scalded her eyelids, and her cheeks grew wan
As helpless sorrow's, and her white lips drawn.

With stony eyes she grieved against the skies,
A slow, dull, aching agony that knew
Few tears, and saw no answer shining to

233

Her silent questions in the stars' still eyes,
“Where Peace delays and where her soldier lies.”

They could have told her. Peace was far away,
Beyond the field that belched black batteries
All the red day. 'Mid picket silences,
On woodland mosses, in a suit of gray,
Shot through the heart, he by his rifle lay.

VII
THE WOMAN ON THE HILL

The storm-red sun, through wrecks of wind and rain,
And dead leaves driven from the frantic boughs,
Where, on the hill-top, stood a gaunt, gray house,
Flashed wildest ruby on each rainy pane.

Then woods grew darker than unburdened grief;
And, crimson through the woodland's ruin, streamed
The sunset's glare—a furious eye, which seemed
Watching the moon rise like a yellow leaf.

234

The rising moon, against which, like despair,
High on the hill, a woman, darkly drawn,
The wild leaves round her, stood; with features wan,
And tattered dress and wind-distracted hair.

As still as death, and looking, not through tears,
For the young face of one she knows is lost,
While in her heart the melancholy frost
Gathers of all the unforgotten years.

What if she heard to-night a hurrying hoof,
Wild as the whirling of the withered leaf,
Bring her a more immedicable grief,
A shattered shape to live beneath her roof!

The shadow of him who claimed her once as wife;
Her lover!—no!—the wreck of all their past
Brought back from battle!—Better to the last
A broken heart than heartbreak all her life!

235

MOSBY AT HAMILTON

Down Loudon lanes, with swinging reins,
And clash of spur and sabre,
And bugling of the battle-horn,
Six score and eight we rode that morn,
Six score and eight of Southern born,
All tried in war's hot labor.

Full in the sun, at Hamilton,
We met the South's invaders;
Who, over fifteen hundred strong,
'Mid blazing homes had marched along
All night, with Northern shout and song,
To crush the rebel raiders.

Down Loudon lanes, with streaming manes,
We spurred in wild March weather;
And all along our war-scarred way
The graves of Southern heroes lay—
Our guide-posts to revenge that day,
As we rode grim together.

236

Old tales still tell some miracle
Of Saints in holy writing—
But who shall say why hundreds fled
Before the few that Mosby led,
Unless it was that even the dead
Fought with us then when fighting.

While Yankee cheers still stunned our ears,
Of troops at Harper's Ferry;
While Sheridan led on his Huns,
And Richmond rocked to roaring guns,
We felt the South still had some sons
She would not scorn to bury.

237

THE FEUD

Rocks, trees and rocks; and down a mossy stone
The murmuring ooze and trickle of a stream
Through brambles, where the mountain spring lies lone,—
A gleaming cairngorm where the shadows dream,—
And one wild road winds like a saffron seam.

Here sang the thrush, whose pure, mellifluous note
Dropped golden sweetness on the fragrant June;
Here cat-and blue-bird and wood-sparrow wrote
Their presence on the silence with a tune;
And here the fox drank 'neath the mountain moon.

Frail ferns and dewy mosses and dark brush,—
Impenetrable briers, deep and dense,
And wiry bushes;—brush, that seemed to crush
The struggling saplings with its tangle, whence
Sprawled out the ramble of an old rail-fence.

238

A wasp buzzed by; and then a butterfly
In orange and amber, like a floating flame;
And then a man, hard-eyed and very sly,
Gaunt-cheeked and haggard and a little lame,
With an old rifle, down the mountain came.

He listened, drinking from a flask he took
Out of the ragged pocket of his coat;
Then all around him cast a stealthy look;
Lay down; and watched an eagle soar and float,
His fingers twitching at his hairy throat.

The shades grew longer; and each Cumberland height
Loomed, framed in splendors of the dolphin dusk.
Around the road a horseman rode in sight;
Young, tall, blond-bearded. Silent, grim, and brusque,
He in the thicket aimed—Quick, harsh, then husk,

The echoes barked among the hills and made
Repeated instants of the shot's distress.—
Then silence—and the trampled bushes swayed:—
Then silence, packed with murder and the press
Of distant hoofs that galloped riderless.

239

LYNCHERS

At the moon's down-going, let it be
On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree.

The red-rock road of the underbrush,
Where the woman came through the summer hush.

The sumac high and the elder thick,
Where we found the stone and the ragged stick.

The trampled road of the thicket, full
Of footprints down to the quarry pool.

The rocks that ooze with the hue of lead,
Where we found her lying stark and dead.

The scraggy wood; the negro hut,
With its doors and windows locked and shut.

240

A secret signal; a foot's rough tramp;
A knock at the door; a lifted lamp.

An oath; a scuffle; a ring of masks;
A voice that answers a voice that asks.

A group of shadows; the moon's red fleck;
A running noose and a man's bared neck.

A word, a curse, and a shape that swings;
The lonely night and a bat's black wings.

At the moon's down-going, let it be
On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree.

241

DEAD MAN'S RUN

He rode adown the autumn wood,
A man dark-eyed and brown;
A mountain girl before him stood
Clad in a homespun gown.

“To ride this road is death for you!
My father waits you there;
My father and my brother, too—
You know the oath they swear.”

He holds her by one berry-brown wrist,
And by one berry-brown hand;
And he hath laughed at her and kissed
Her cheek the sun hath tanned.

“The feud is to the death, sweetheart:
But forward must I ride.”—
“And if you ride to death, sweetheart,
My place is by your side.”

242

Low hath he laughed again and kissed
And helped her with his hand;
And they have galloped into the mist
That belts the autumn land.

And they had passed by Devil's Den,
And come to Dead Man's Run,
When in the brush rose up two men,
Each with a levelled gun.

“Down! down! my sister!” cries the one;—
She gives the reins a twirl.—
The other shouts, “He shot my son!
And now he steals my girl!”

The rifles crack: she will not wail:
He will not cease to ride:
But, oh! her face is pale, is pale,
And the red blood stains her side.

“Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart!
The road is rough to ride!”—
The road is rough by gulch and bluff,
And her hair blows wild and wide.

“Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart!
The bank is steep to ride!”—

243

The bank is steep for a strong man's leap,
And her eyes are staring wide.

“Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart!
The Run is swift to ride!”—
The Run is swift with mountain drift,
And she sways from side to side.

Is it a wash of the yellow moss,
Or drift of the autumn's gold,
The mountain torrent foams across
For the dead pine's roots to hold?

Is it the bark of the sycamore,
Or peel of the white birch-tree,
The mountaineer on the other shore
Hath followed and still can see?

No mountain moss or leaves, wild rolled,
No bark of birchen-gray!—
Young hair of gold and a face death-cold
The wild stream sweeps away.

244

THE RAID

I

Far in the forest, where the rude road winds
Through twisted briers and weeds, stamped down and caked
With mountain mire, the clashing boughs are raked
Again with rain whose sobbing frenzy blinds.

There is a noise of winds; a gasp and gulp
Of swollen torrents; and the sodden smell
Of woodland soil, dead trees—that long since fell
Among the moss—red-rotted into pulp.

Fogged by the rain, far up the mountain glen,
Deep in a cave, an elfish wisp of light;
And stealthy shadows stealing through the night
With strong, set faces of determined men.

245

II

'Twixt fog and fire, in pomps of chrysoprase,
Above vague peaks, the morning hesitates
Ere, o'er the threshold of her golden gates,
Speeds the wild splendor of her chariot's rays.

A gleaming glimmer in the sun-speared mist,
A cataract, reverberating, falls:
Upon a pine a gray hawk sits and calls,
Then soars away no bigger than a fist.

Along the wild path, through the oaks and firs,—
Rocks, where the rattler coils himself and suns,—
Big-booted, belted, and with twinkling guns,
The posse marches with its moonshiners.

246

THE BROTHERS

Not far from here, it lies beyond
That low-hilled belt of woods. We'll take
This unused lane where brambles make
A wall of twilight, and the blond
Brier-roses pelt the path and flake
The margin waters of a pond.

This is its fence—or that which was
Its fence once—now, rock rolled from rock,
One tangle of the vine and dock,
Where bloom the wild petunias;
And this its gate, the ragweeds block,
Hot with the insects' dusty buzz.

Two wooden posts, wherefrom has peeled
The weather-blistered paint, still rise;
Gaunt things—that groan when some one tries
The gate whose hinges, rust-congealed,
Snarl open:—on each post still lies
Its carven panther with a shield.

247

We enter; and between great rows
Of locusts winds a grass-grown road;
And at its glimmering end,—o'erflowed
With quiet light,—the white front shows
Of an old mansion, grand and broad,
With grave, Colonial porticoes.

Grown thick around it, dark and deep,
The locust trees make one vast hush;
Their brawny branches crowd and crush
Its very casements, and o'ersweep
Its rotting roofs: their tranquil rush
Haunts all its spacious rooms with sleep.

Still is it called The Locusts; though
None lives here now. A tale 's to tell
Of some dark thing that here befell;
A crime that happened years ago,
When past its walls, with shot and shell,
The war swept on and left it so.

For one black night, within it, shame
Made revel, while, all here about,
With prayer or curse or battle-shout,
Men died and homesteads leapt in flame:
Then passed the conquering Northern rout,
And left it silent and the same.

248

Why should I speak of what has been?
Or what dark part I played in all?
Why ruin sits in porch and hall
Where pride and gladness once were seen;
And why beneath this lichened wall
The grave of Margaret is green.

Heart-broken Margaret! whose fate
Was sadder far than his who won
Her hand—my brother Hamilton—
Or mine, who learned to know too late;
Who learned to know, when all was done,
And naught I did could expiate.

To expiate is still my lot!—
And, like the Ancient Mariner,
To show to others how things were,
And what I am, still helps me blot
A little from that crime's red blur,
That on my life is branded hot.

He was my only brother. She
A sister of my brother's friend.
They met, and married in the end.
And I remember well when he
Brought her rejoicing home, the trend
Of war moved towards us sullenly.

249

And scarce a year of wedlock when
Its red arms tore him from his bride.
With lips by hers thrice sanctified
He left to ride with Morgan's men.
And I—I never could decide—
Remained behind. It happened then.

Long days went by. And, oft delayed,
A letter came of loving word
Scrawled by some camp-fire, sabre-stirred,
Or by a pine-knot's fitful aid,
When in the saddle, armed and spurred
And booted for some hurried raid.

Then weeks went by. I do not know
How long it was before there came,
Blown from the North, the clarion fame
Of Morgan, who, with blow on blow,
Had drawn a line of blood and flame
From Tennessee to Ohio.

Then letters ceased; and days went on.
No word from him. The war rolled back,
And in its turgid crimson track
A rumor grew, like some wild dawn,
All ominous and red and black,
With news of our lost Hamilton.

250

News hinting death or capture. Yet
No word was sure; till one day,—fed
By us,—some men rode up who said
They 'd been with Morgan and had met
Disaster, and that he was dead,
My brother.—I and Margaret

Believed them. Grief was ours too:
But mine was more for her than him:
Grief, that her eyes with tears were dim:
Grief, that became the avenue
For love, who crowned the sombre brim
Of death's dark cup with rose-red hue.

In sympathy,—unconsciously
Though it be given,—I hold, doth dwell
The germ of love that time shall swell
To blossom. Sooner then in me—
When close relations so befell—
That love should spring from sympathy.

Our similar tastes and mutual bents
Combined to make us intimates
From our first meeting. Different states
Of interest then our temperaments
Begot. Then friendship, that abates
No love, whose soul it represents.

251

These led to talks and dreams: how oft
We sat at some wide window while
The sun sank o'er the hills' far file,
Serene; and of the cloud aloft
Made one vast rose; and mile on mile
Of firmament grew sad and soft.

And all in harmony with these
Dim clemencies of dusk, afar
Our talks and dreams went; while the star
Of evening brightened through the trees:
We spoke of home; the end of war;
We dreamed of life and love and peace.

How on our walks, in listening lanes
Or confidences of the wood,
We paused to hear the dove that cooed;
Or gathered wildflowers, taking pains
To find the fairest; or her hood
Filled with wild fruit that left deep stains.

No echo of the drum or fife,
No hint of conflict entered in
Our thoughts then. Will you call it sin—
Indifference to a nation's strife?
What side might lose, what side might win,
Both immaterial to our life.

252

Into the past we did not look:
Beyond what was we did not dream;
While onward rolled the thunderous stream
Of war, that, in its torrent, took
One of our own. No crimson gleam
Of its wild course around us shook.

At last we knew. And when we learned
How he had fallen, Margaret
Wept; and, albeit my eyes were wet,
Within my soul I half discerned
A joy that mingled with regret,
A grief that to relief was turned.

As time went on and confidence
Drew us more strongly each to each,
Why did no intimation reach
Its warning hand into the dense
Soul-silence, and confuse the speech
Of love's unbroken eloquence!

But, no! no hint to turn the poise,
Or check the impulse of our youth;
To chill it with the living truth
As with the awe of God's own voice;
No hint, to make our hope uncouth;
No word, to warn us from our choice.

253

To me a wall seemed overthrown
That social law had raised between;
And o'er its ruin, broad and green
A path went, I possessed alone;
The sky above seemed all serene;
The land around seemed all my own.

What shall I say of Margaret
To justify her part in this?
That her young heart was never his?
But had been mine since first we met?
So would you say!—Enough it is
That when he left she loved him yet.

So passed the spring, and summer sped;
And early autumn brought the day
When she her hand in mine should lay,
And I should take her hand and wed:
And still no hint that might gainsay,
No warning word of quick or dead.

The day arrived; and with it born,
A battle, sullying the East
With boom of cannon, that increased,
And throb of musket and of horn:
Until at last, towards dusk, it ceased;
And men with faces wild and worn,

254

In fierce retreat, swept past; now groups;
Now one by one: now sternly white,
Or blood-stained; now with looks whose fright
Said all was lost: then sullen troops
That, beaten, still kept up the fight.—
Then came the victors: shadowy loops

Of men and horse, that left a crowd
Of officers in hall and porch. ...
While through the land, around, the torch
Circled, and many a fiery cloud
Marked out the army's iron march
In furrows red that pillage plowed,

Here were we wedded. ... Ask the years
How such could be, while over us
A sword of wrath swung ominous,
And on our cheeks its breath struck fierce!—
All I remember is—'t was thus;
And Margaret's eyes were wet with tears.

No other cause my memory sees
Save this, that night was set; and when
I found my home filled with armed men
With whom were all my sympathies
Of Union—why postpone it then?
So argued conscience into peace.

255

And then it was, when night had passed,
There came to me an orderly
With word of a Confederate spy
Just taken; who, with head downcast,
Had asked one favor, this: “That I
Would see him ere he breathed his last.”

I stand alone here. Heavily
My thoughts go back. Had I not gone,
The dead had still been dead! (for none
Had yet believed his story) he,
My dead-deemed brother, Hamilton,
Who in the spy confronted me.

O you who never have been tried,
How can you judge me!—In my place
I saw him standing,—who can trace
My heart-thoughts then!—I turned aside,
A son of some unnatural race,
And did not speak: and so he died. ...

In hospital or prison, when
It was he lay; what had forbid
His home return so long: amid
What hardships he had suffered, then
I dared not ask; and when I did,
Long afterwards, inquire of men,

256

No thing I learned. But this I feel—
He who had so returned to life
Was not a spy. Through stress and strife,—
This makes my conscience hard to heal!—
He had escaped: he sought his wife;
He sought his home that should conceal.

And Margaret! Oh, pity her!
A criminal I sought her side,
Still thinking love was justified
In all for her—whatever were
The price: a brother thrice denied,
Or thrice a brother's murderer.

Since then long years have passed away.
And through those years, perhaps, you'll ask
How to the world I wore my mask
Of honesty?—I can but say
Beyond my powers it was a task;
Before my time it turned me gray.

And when at last the ceaseless hiss
Of conscience drove, and I betrayed
All to her, she knelt down and prayed:
Then rose: and 'twixt us an abyss
Was opened; and she seemed to fade
Out of my life: I came to miss

257

The sweet attentions of a bride:
For each appealing heart's caress
In me her heart assumed a dress
Of dull indifference; till denied
To me was all responsiveness;
And then I knew her love had died.

Ah, had she loaded me, perchance,
With wild reproach or even hate,
Such would have helped me hope and wait
Forgiveness and returned romance:
But 'twixt our souls, instead, a gate
She closed of silent tolerance.

Yet, 't was for love of her I lent
My soul to crime. ... I question me
Often, if less entirely
I'd loved her, then, in that event
She had been justified to see
The deed alone stand prominent.

The deed alone! But love records
In his own heart, I will aver,
No depth I did not feel for her
Beyond the plummet-reach of words:
And though there may be worthier,
No truer love this world affords

258

Than mine was, though it could not rise
Above itself. And so 't was best,
Perhaps, that she saw manifest
The crime, so I,—as saw her eyes,—
Might see; and so, in soul confessed,
Some life atonement might devise.

Sadly my heart one comfort keeps,
That, towards her end, she took my hands
And said,—as one who understands,—
“Had I but seen!—But love that weeps
Sees only as its loss commands.”
And sighed.—Beneath this stone she sleeps.

Yes; I have suffered for that sin:
Yet in no instance would I shun
What I should suffer. Many a one,
Who heard my tale, has tried to win
Me to believe that Hamilton
It was not; and, though proven kin,

This had not saved him. Still the stain
Of the intention—had I erred
And 't was not he—had writ the word
Red on my soul that branded Cain:
For still my error had incurred
The fact of guilt that would remain.

259

Ah, love at best is insecure,
And lives with doubt and vain regret;
And hope and faith, with faces set
Upon the past, are never sure;
And through their fever, grief, and fret
The heart may fail that should endure.

For in ourselves, however blend
The passions that make heaven and hell,
Is evil not accountable
For most the good we comprehend?
And through these two,—or ill, or well,—
Man must evolve his spiritual end.

It is with deeds that we must ask
Forgiveness: for, upon this earth,
Life walks alone from very birth
With death, hope tells us is a mask
For life beyond of vaster worth,
Where sin no more sets love a task.

University of Virginia Library

[NEW WORLD IDYLLS]

[O lyrist of the lowly and the true]

ONE DAY AND ANOTHER

A Lyrical Eclogue

1. PART I LATE SPRING

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

2. PART II EARLY SUMMER

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

3. PART III LATE SUMMER

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

4. PART IV LATE AUTUMN

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

5. PART V WINTER

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

RED LEAVES AND ROSES

I

II

III

1. PART I
LATE SPRING

2. PART II
EARLY SUMMER

3. PART III
LATE SUMMER

4. PART IV
LATE AUTUMN

5. PART V
WINTER

I
SPRING ON THE HILLS

II
THE WOOD SPIRIT

III
OWL ROOST

IV
MOSS AND FERN

V
WOODLAND WATERS

VI
THE THORN-TREE

VII
THE HAMADRYAD