Songs of the silent world and other poems

There is no vacant chair. The loving meet—
A group unbroken—smitten, who knows how?
One sitteth silent only, in his usual seat;
We gave him once that freedom. Why not now?

Perhaps he is too weary, and needs rest;
He needed it too often, nor could we
Bestow. God gave it, knowing how to do so best.
Which of us would disturb him? Let him be.

There is no vacant chair. If he will take
The mood to listen mutely, be it done.
By his least mood we crossed, for which the heart must ache,
Plead not nor question! Let him have this one.

Death is a mood of life. It is no whim
By which life's Giver mocks a broken heart.
Death is life's reticence. Still audible to Him,
The hushed voice, happy, speaketh on, apart.

There is no vacant chair. To love is still
To have. Nearer to memory than to eye,
And dearer yet to anguish than to comfort, will
We hold him by our love, that shall not die.

For while it doth not, thus he cannot. Try!
Who can put out the motion or the smile?

The old ways of being noble all with him laid by?
Because we love, he is. Then trust awhile.

RELEASED.

Oh, joy of the dying!
At last thou art mine.
And leaping to meet thee,
Impatient to greet thee,
A rapid and rapturous, sensitive, fine
Gayety steals through my pulses to-day,
Daring and doubting like pleasure
Forbidden, or Winter looking at May.

Oh, sorrow of living!
Make way for the thrill
Of the soul that is starting—
Onlooking—departing
Across the threshold of clay.
Bend, bow to the will
Of the soul that is up and away!

THE ROOM'S WIDTH.

I think if I should cross the room,
Far as fear;
Should stand beside you like a thought—
Touch you, Dear!

Like a fancy. To your sad heart
It would seem
That my vision passed and prayed you,
Or my dream.

Then you would look with lonely eyes—
Lift your head—
And you would stir, and sigh, and say—
“She is dead.”

Baffled by death and love, I lean
Through the gloom.
O Lord of life! am I forbid
To cross the room?

THE FIRST CHRISTMAS APART.

The shadows watch about the house;
Silent as they, I come.
Oh, it is true that life is deaf,
And not that death is dumb.

The Christmas thrill is on the earth,
The stars throb in the sky.
Love listens in a thousand homes,—
The Christmas bells ring by.

I cross the old familiar door
And take the dear old chair.
You look with desolated eyes
Upon me sitting there.

You gaze and see not, though the tears
In gazing burn and start.
Believe, the living are the blind,
Not that the dead depart.

A year ago some words we said
Kept sacred 'twixt us twain,
'T is you, poor Love, who answer not,
The while I speak again.

I lean above you as before,
Faithful, my arms enfold.
Oh, could you know that life is numb,
Nor think that death is cold!

Senses of earth, how weak ye are!
Joys, joys of Heaven how strong!
Loves of the earth, how short and sad,
Of Heaven how glad and long!

Heart of my heart! if earth or Heaven
Had speech or language fine
Enough, or death or life could give
Me symbol, sound, or sign

To reach you—thought, or touch, or eye,
Body or soul—I 'd die
Again, to make you understand:
My darling! This is I!

THE ANGEL JOY.

Oh, was it a death-dream not dreamed through,
That eyed her like a foe?
Or only a sorrow left over from life,
Half-finished years ago?

How long was it since she died—who told?
Or yet what was death—who knew?
She said: “I am come to Heaven at last,
And I'll do as the blessèd do.”

But the custom of earth was stronger than Heaven,
And the habit of life than death,
How should an anguish as old as thought
Be healed by the end of breath?

Tissue and nerve and pulse of her soul
Had absorbed the disease of woe.

The strangest of all the angels there
Was Joy. (Oh, the wretched know!)

“I am too tired with earth,” she said,
“To rest me in Paradise.
Give me a spot to creep away,
And close my heavy eyes.

“I must learn to be happy in Heaven,” she said,
“As we learned to suffer below.”—
“Our ways are not your ways,” he said,
“And ours the ways you go.”

As love, too wise for a word, puts by
All a woman's weak alarms,
Joy hushed her lips, and gathered her
Into his mighty arms.

He took her to his holy heart,
And there—for he held her fast—
The saddest spirit in the world,
Came to herself at last.

“ABSENT!”

You do not lift your eyes to watch
Us pass the conscious door;
Your startled ear perceiveth not
Our footfall on the floor;
No eager word your lips betray
To greet us when we stand;
We throng to meet you, but you hold
To us no beckoning hand.

Faint as the years in which we breathed,
Far as the death we died,
Dim as the faded battle-smoke,
We wander at your side;
Cold as a cause outlived, or lost,
Vague as the legends told
At twilight, of a mystic band
Circling an Age of Gold.

Unseen, unheard, unfelt—and yet,
Beneath the army blue
Our heart-beats sounded real enough
When we were boys like you.
We turned us from your fabled lore,
With ancient passion rife;
No myth, our solemn laying down
Of love, and hope, and life.

No myth, the clasped and severed hands,
No dream, the last replies.
Upon the desolated home
To-day, the sunlight lies.
Take, sons of peace, your heritage—
Our loss, your legacy;
Our action be your fables fair,
Our facts, your poetry.

O ye who fall on calmer times!
The perils of the calm
Are yours—the swell, the sloth, the sleep,
The carelessness of harm,
The keel that rides the gale, to strike
Where the warm waves are still;

Ours were the surf, the stir, the shock,
The tempest and the thrill.

Comrades, be yours that vigor old,
Be yours the elected power
That fits a man, like rock to tide,
To his appointed hour;
Yours to become all that we were,
And all we might have been;
Yours the fine eye that separates
The unseen from the seen.

Written for the Centennial Celebration at Andover Phillips Academy.

THE UNSEEN COMRADES.

Last night I saw an armèd band, whose feet
Did take the martial step, although they trod
Soundless as waves of light upon the air.
(Silent from silent lips the bugle fell.)
The wind was wild; but the great flag they bore,
Hung motionless, and glittered like a god
Above their awful faces while they marched.
And when I saw, I understood and said—
“If these are they whom we did love, and give,
What seek they?” But one sternly answered me,—
“We seek our comrades whom we left to thee:

The weak, who were thy strength; the poor, who had
Thy pride; the faint and few who gave to thee
One supreme hour from out the day of life,
One deed majestic to their century.
These were thy trust: how fare they at thy hands?
Thy saviors then—are they thy heroes now?
Our comrades still; we keep the step with them,
Behold! As thou unto the least of them
Shalt do, so dost thou unto us. Amen.”

Written for the benefit of the Soldiers' Home at Chelsea, Massachusetts.

STRONGER THAN DEATH

Who shall tell the story
As it was?
Write it with the heart's blood?
(Pale ink, alas!)
Speak it with the soul's lips,
Or be dumb?
Tell me, singers fled, and
Song to come!

No answer; like a shell the silence curls,
And far within it leans a whisper out,
Breathless and inarticulate, and whirls
And dies as dies an ailing dread or doubt.

And I—since there is found none else than I,
No stronger, sweeter voice than mine, to tell

This tale of love that cannot stoop to die—
Were fain to be the whisper in the shell;

Were fain to lose and spend myself within
The sacred silence of one mighty heart,
And leaning from it, hidden there, to win
Some finer ear that, listening, bends apart.

“Fly for your lives!” The entrails of the earth
Trembled, resounding to the cry,
That, like a chasing ghost, around the mine
Crept ghastly: “The pit 's on fire! Fly!”

The shaft, a poisoned throat whose breath was death,
Like hell itself grown sick of sin,
Hurled up the men; haggard and terrible;
Leaping upon us through the din

That all our voices made; and back we shrank
From them as from the starting dead;

Recoiling, shrieked, but knew not why we shrieked;
And cried, but knew not what we said.

And still that awful mouth did toss them up:
“The last is safe! The last is sound!”
We sobbed to see them where they sunk and crawled,
Like beaten hounds, upon the ground.

Some sat with lolling, idiot head, and laughed;
One reached to clutch the air away
His gasping lips refused; some cursed; and one
Knelt down—but he was old—to pray.

We huddled there together all that night,
Women and men from the wild Town;
I heard a shrill voice cry, “We all are up,
But some—ye have forgot—are down!”

“Who is forgot?” We stared from face to face;
But answering through the dark, she said

(It was a woman): “Eh, ye need not fret;
None is forgot except the dead.

“The buried dead asleep there in the works—
Eh, Lord! It must be hot below!
Ye'll keep 'em waking all the livelong night,
To set the mine a-burning so!”

And all the night the mine did burn and burst,
As if the earth were but a shell
Through which a child had thrust a finger-touch,
And, peal on dreadful peal, the bell,

The miner's 'larum, wrenched the quaking air;
And through the flaring light we saw
The solid forehead of the eternal hill
Take on a human look of awe;

As if it were a living thing, that spoke
And flung some protest to the sky,

As if it were a dying thing that saw,
But could not tell, a mystery.

The bells ran ringing by us all that night.
The bells ceased jangling with the morn.
About the blackened works,—sunk, tossed, and rent,—
We gathered in the foreign dawn;

Women and men, with eyes askance and strange,
Fearing, we knew not what, to see.
Against the hollowed jaws of the torn hill,
Why creep the miners silently?

From man to man, a whisper chills: “See, see,
The sunken shaft of Thirty-one!
The earth, a traitor to her trust, has fled
And turned the dead unto the sun.

“And here—O God of life and death! Thy work,
Thine only, this!” With foreheads bare,

We knelt, and drew him, young and beautiful,
Thirty years dead, into the air.

Thus had he perished; buried from the day;
By the swift poison caught and slain;
By the kind poison unmarred, rendered fair
Back to the upper earth again—

The warm and breathing earth that knew him not;
And men and women wept to see—
For kindred had he none among us all—
How lonely even the dead may be.

We wept, I say; we wept who knew him not;
But sharp, a tearless woman sprang
From out the crowd (that quavering voice I knew),
And terrible her cry outrang:

“I pass, I pass ye all! Make way! Stand back!
Mine is the place ye yield,” she said.

“He was my lover once—my own, my own;
Oh, he was mine, and he is dead!”

Women and men, we gave her royal way;
Proud as young joy the smile she had.
We knew her for a neighbor in the Town,
Unmated, solitary, sad.

Youth, hope, and love, we gave her silent way,
Calm as a sigh she swept us all;
Then swiftly, as a word leans to a thought,
We saw her lean to him, and fall

Upon the happy body of the dead—
An aged woman, poor and gray.
Bright as the day, immortal as young Love,
And glorious as life, he lay.

Her shrunken hands caressed his rounded cheek,
Her white locks on his golden hair

Fell sadly. “O love!” she cried with shriveled lips,
“O love, my love, my own, my fair!

“See, I am old, and all my heart is gray.
They say the dead are aye forgot—
There, there, my sweet! I whisper, leaning low,
That all these women hear it not.

“Deep in the darkness there, didst think on me?
High in the heavens, have ye been true?
Since I was young, and since you called me fair,
I never loved a man but you.

And here, my boy, you lie, so safe, so still”—
But there she hushed; and in the dim,
Cool morning, timid as a bride, but calm
As a glad mother, gathered him

Unto her heart. And all the people then,
Women and men, and children too,

Crept back, and back, and back, and on,
Still as the morning shadows do.

And left them in the lifting dawn—they two,
On her sad breast, his shining head
Stirred softly, as were he the living one,
And she had been the moveless dead.

And yet we crept on, back, and back, and on.
The distance widened like the sky,
Between our little restlessness,
And Love so godlike that it could not die.

University of Virginia Library

I. SONGS OF THE SILENT WORLD.

AFTERWARD.