I Saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,
Until the music called, and called me thence,
And tears stirred in my heart as tears may come
To lonely children straying far from home,
Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.
If I might follow far and far away
Unto the country where these songs abide,
I think my soul would...
O Far-off rose of long ago,
An hour of sweet, an hour of red,
To live, to breathe, and then to go
Into the dark ere June was dead!
Why say they: Roses shall return
With every year as years go on?
New springtime and strange bloom, my rose,
And alien June; but thou art gone.
LO! above the mournful chanting,
Rise the fuller-sounded wailings
Of the soul’s most solemn anthem.
Hark! the strains of deep Kol Nidra—
Saddest music ever mortal
Taught his lips to hymn or sound!
Not the heart of one lone mortal
Told his anguish in that strain;
All the sorrow, pain, and struggles
Of a people in...
You ax about dat music made
On banjos long ago,
An’ wants to know why it ain’t played
By niggers any mo’.
Dem banjos b’longed to by-gone days
When times an’ chunes was rare,
When we was gay as children—’case
We did n’t have a care.
But when we got our freedom, we
Found projeckin’ was done;
Our livin’...
My chile? Lord, no, she ’s none o’ mine;
She ’s des one I have tried
To put in place of Anna Jane—
My little one what died.
Dat ’s long ago; no one but me
Knows even where she lies:
But in her place I ’ve always kept
A borrowed chile, her size.
As soon as it outgrows my chile,
I lets it go, right straight—...
All night long through the starlit air and the stillness,
Through the cool wanness of dawn and the burning of noontide,
Onward we strain with a mighty resounding of hoof-beats.
Heaven and earth are ashake with the terrible trampling;
Wild, straying feet of a vast and hastening army;
Wistful eyes that helplessly seek one another.
Hushed is the...
Thou foolish blossom, all untimely blown!
Poor jest of summer, come when woods are chill!
Thy sister buds, in June’s warm redness grown,
That lit with laughter all the upland hill,
Have traceless passed; save on each thornëd stem
Red drops tell how their hearts, in dying, bled.
Theirs was the noon’s rich languor, and for them
...
The Wakening bugles cut the night:
“To horse! To horse! Away!”
And thine the lips that bid me go,
The eyes that bid me stay.
God make me blind for this one hour!
God make me only hear
That hurrying drum,—that cry, “They come!”
And thy “Good-by!” so near.
O eyes that hold me with your tears!
Think not your...
What charlatans in this later day
Beat at the gates of Art!
Each with his trick of speech or brush,—
Forgetting, that apart
From all the brawling of an age,
Its feverish fantasy,
She waits, who only unto Time
The soul of Art sets free!
God’s handmaid Beauty,—whose touch rounds
A dewdrop or a world,—
...
List to that bird! His song—what poet pens it?
Brigand of birds, he ’s stolen every note!
Prince though of thieves—hark! how the rascal spends it!
Pours the whole forest from one tiny throat!
