 | Joaquin Miller's Poems |  |
TO REST AT LAST
Of after days. ... I push'd the boughs apart,
I stood, look'd forth, and then look'd back, all loath
To leave my shadow'd wood. I gather'd heart
From very fearfulness; with sudden start
I plunged in the arena; stood a wild
Uncertain thing, all artless, in all art. ...
The brave approved, the fair lean'd fair and smiled,—
True lions touch with velvet-touch a timid child.
Of tinsel'd life. The court, the castle gate
That open'd wide along the pleasant way,
The gracious converse of the kingly great
Had made another glad and well elate
With all. A world of thanks; but I am grown
Aweary. ... I am not of this estate;
The poor, the plain brave border-men alone
Were my first love, and these I will not now disown.
The utmost limit of the westmost land.
In savage, gnarl'd, and antique majesty
The great trees belt about the place, and stand
In guard, with mailéd limb and lifted hand,
Against the cold approaching civic pride.
The foamy brooklets seaward leap; the bland
Still air is fresh with touch of wood and tide,
And peace, eternal peace, possesses, wild and wide.
Some flocks and herds shall feed along the stream;
Some corn and climbing vines shall make us blest
With bread and luscious fruit. ... The sunny dream
Of wampum men in moccasins that seem
To come and go in silence, girt in shell,
Before a sun-clad cabin-door, I deem
The harbinger of peace. Hope weaves her spell
Again about the wearied heart, and all is well.
Beneath my vine and somber verdant tree.
Some tawny maids in other tongues than mine
Shall minister. Some memories shall be
Before me. I shall sit and I shall see,
That last vast day that dawn shall reinspire,
The sun fall down upon the farther sea,
Fall wearied down to rest, and so retire,
A splendid sinking isle of far-off fading fire.
[OMITTED]
These final verses are peculiarly descriptive of the home I have built here on the Hights for my declining years; although written and published in London—Songs of the Sunlands—in 1873. True, my strong love of a home of my own, woods, and “a careless ordered garden” led me to settle down in other lands more than once and in places widely different from this which I had fancied and pictured long, long ago, but I was never well or at all content in any place till now. Even the people about me, unworldly, dreamful, silent and of other lands and tongues are, like my home, the same I had pictured more than a quarter of a century ago, and I joy in this, that I have been thus true to myself. The only departure from my dear first plan is in finding my ideal home by the glorious gate of San Francisco instead of the somber fir-set sea bank far to the north, “Where Rolls the Oregon.”
| Joaquin Miller's Poems | |