Through some strange sense of sight or touch
I find what all have found before,
The presence I have feared so much,
The unknown’s immaterial door.
I seek not and it comes to me;
The do not know the thing I find:
The fillet of fatality
Drops from my brows that made me blind.
Point forward now or backward, light!
The way...
An heritage of hopes and fears
And dreams and memory,
And vices of ten thousand years
God gives to thee.
A house of clay, the home of Fate,
Haunted of Love and Sin,
Where Death stands knocking at the gate
To let him in.
Calling, the heron flies athwart the blue
That sleeps above it; reach on rocky reach
Of water sings by sycamore and beech,
In whose warm shade bloom lilies not a few.
It is a page whereon the sun and dew
Scrawl sparkling words in dawn’s delicious speech;
A laboratory where the wood-winds teach,
Dissect each scent and analyze each hue....
We have sent him seeds of the melon’s core,
And nailed a warning upon his door;
By the Ku Klux laws we can do no more.
Down in the hollow, mid crib and stack,
The roof of his low-porched house looks black,
Not a line of light at the doorsill’s crack.
Yet arm and mount! and mask and ride!
The hounds can sense though the fox may hide!...
The wind IN THE PINES
WHEN winds go organing through the pines
On hill and headland, darkly gleaming,
Meseems I hear sonorous lines
Of Iliads that the woods are dreaming.
OPPORTUNITY
BEHOLD a hag whom Life denies a kiss
As he rides questward in knight-errant-wise;
Only when he hath passed her is it his
To know, too late,...
With eyes hand-arched he looks into
The morning’s face, then turns away
With schoolboy feet, all wet with dew,
Out for a holiday.
The hill brook sings, incessant stars,
Foam-fashioned, on its restless breast;
And where he wades its water-bars
Its song is happiest.
A comrade of the chinquapin,
He looks into its knotted...
The song-birds? are they flown away?
The song-birds of the summer-time,
That sang their souls into the day,
And set the laughing days to rhyme?—
No catbird scatters through the hush
The sparkling crystals of its song;
Within the woods no hermit-thrush
Trails an enchanted flute along,
A sweet assertion of the hush.
What shall her silence keep
Under the sun?
Here, where the willows weep
And waters run;
Here, where she lies asleep,
And all is done.
Lights, when the tree-top swings;
Scents that are sown;
Sounds of the wood-bird’s wings;
And the bee’s drone:
These be her comfortings
Under the stone.
What shall...
The sky-lark’s SONG
HEY, laddie, hark, to the merry, merry lark;
How high he singeth clear:
Oh, a morn in spring is the sweetest thing
That cometh in all the year!
Oh, a morn in spring is the sweetest thing
That cometh in all the year!
Ring, ting! it is the merry spring-time;
How full of heart a body feels!...
If there be graveyards in the heart
From which no roses spring,
A place of wrecks and old gray tombs
From which no birds take wing,
Where linger buried hopes and dreams
Like ghosts among the graves,
Why, buried hopes are dismal things,
And lonely ghosts are knaves!
If there come dreary winter days,
When summer...
