Why shouldst thou cease thy plaintive song
When I draw near?
Has mankind done thee any wrong,
That thou shouldst fear?
To see thee scampering to thy den,
So wild and shy,
’T would seem thou know’st the ways of men
As well as I.
’T is true the palmy days are o’er
When all thy kind—
Poor...
I stood within the cypress gloom
Where old Ferrara’s dead are laid,
And mused on many a sculptured tomb,
Moss-grown and mouldering in the shade.
And there was one the eye might pass,
And careless foot might tread upon
A crumbling tablet in the grass,
With weeds and wild vines overrun.
In the dim light I stooped to...
At table yonder sits the man we seek,
Beside the ingle, where the crimson flare
Reveals him through the eddying tavern reek,
Reclining easeful in his leathern chair;
In russet doublet, bearded and benign,
He looks a worthy burgher at his wine.
Even so; but when thy veins ran fire tonight,
Thy hand crept knotted to thy sword-hilt...
Our many years are made of clay and cloud,
And quick desire is but as morning dew;
And love and life, that linger and are proud,
Dissolve and are again the arching blue.
For who shall answer what the ages ask?
Or who undo a one-day-earlier bud?
We are but atoms in the larger task
Of law that seeks not to be understood.
O dappled throat of white! Shy, hidden bird!
Perched in green dimness of the dewy wood,
And murmuring, in that lonely, lover mood,
Thy heart-ache, softly heard,
Sweetened by distance, over land and lake.
Why, like a kinsman, do I feel thy voice
Awaken voices in me free and sweet?
Was there some far ancestral birdhood fleet...
Where all the winds were tranquil,
And all the odors sweet,
And rings of tumbling upland
Sloped down to kiss your feet:
There, in a nest of verdure,
You grew from bud to bough;
You heard the song at mid-day,—
At eve the plighted vow.
But fate that gives a guerdon
Takes back a double fee:
She hewed you...
Swept by the hot wind, stark, untrackable,
The stony desert stretches to the sky.
Deep-printed shadows at the tent-door lie,
And camels slumber by the burning well.
One weeps within, wrinkled and dusk of face,
White-haired and lordly, o’er the new-brought dead:
Mohammed over Seid, who loved and read
Truth in the master when a fierce...
He was in love with Truth and knew her near—
Her comrade, not her suppliant on the knee:
She gave him wild melodious words to be
Made music that should haunt the atmosphere.
She drew him to her bosom, day-long dear,
And pointed to the stars and to the sea,
And taught him miracles and mystery,
And made him master of the rounded year....
Hope, is this thy hand
Lies warm as life in mine?
Is this thy sign
Of peace none understand?
What! art thou not steadfast?
From off the blue air’s beach
Wilt lean and reach
The price of pity past?
I know not if I may
Believe thee, Hope, or doubt:
With pretty pout
Wilt flee, or...
As i sit on a log here in the woods among the clean-faced beeches,
The trunks of the trees seem to me like the pipes of a mighty organ,
Thrilling my soul with wave on wave of the harmonies of the universal anthem—
The grand, divine, eonic “I am” chorus.
The red squirrel scolding in yonder hickory tree,
The flock of blackbirds chattering in council...
