Poet who sleepest by this wandering wave!
When thou wast born, what birth-gift hadst thou then?
To thee what wealth was that the Immortals gave,
The wealth thou gavest in thy turn to men?
Not Milton’s keen, translunar music thine;
Not Shakespeare’s cloudless, boundless human view;
Not Shelley’s flush of rose on peaks divine;
Nor...
Back to the flower-town, side by side,
The bright months bring,
New-born, the bridegroom and the bride,
Freedom and spring.
The sweet land laughs from sea to sea,
Filled full of sun;
All things come back to her, being free;
All things but one.
In many a tender wheaten plot
Flowers that were dead...
Above the pines the moon was slowly drifting,
The river sang below;
The dim Sierras, far beyond, uplifting
Their minarets of snow.
The roaring camp-fire, with rude humor, painted
The ruddy tints of health
On haggard face and form that drooped and fainted
In the fierce race for wealth;
Till one arose, and from...
CHIEF in thy generation born of men
Whom English praise acclaimed as English born,
With eyes that matched the world-wide eyes of morn
For gleam of tears or laughter, tenderest then
When thoughts of children warmed their light, or when
Reverence of age with love and labor worn,
Or godlike pity fired with godlike scorn,
Shot through them...
O Gentler Censor of our age!
Prime master of our ampler tongue!
Whose word of wit and generous page
Were never wroth except with Wrong.
Fielding—without the manner’s dross,
Scott—with a spirit’s larger room,
What Prelate deems thy grave his loss?
What Halifax erects thy tomb?
But, may be, He—who could so draw
The...
(6th October, 1892)
LOW, like another’s, lies the laurelled head:
The life that seemed a perfect song is o’er:
Carry the last great bard to his last bed.
Land that he loved, thy noblest voice is mute.
Land that he loved, that loved him! nevermore
Meadow of thine, smooth lawn or wild seashore,
Gardens of odorous bloom and tremulous fruit,...
[Read at the Unveiling of His Statue in Central Park, May, 1877]
AMONG their graven shapes to whom
Thy civic wreaths belong,
O city of his love! make room
For one whose gift was song.
Not his the soldier’s sword to wield,
Nor his the helm of state,
Nor glory of the stricken field,
Nor triumph of debate.
In...
Two souls diverse out of our human sight
Pass, followed one with love and each with wonder:
The stormy sophist with his mouth of thunder,
Clothed with loud words and mantled in the might
Of darkness and magnificence of night;
And one whose eye could smite the night in sunder,
Searching if light or no light were thereunder,
And found in...
To Confront His Own Portrait for “The Wound Dresser” in “Leaves of Grass”
OUT from behind this bending, rough-cut mask,
These lights and shades, this drama of the whole,
This common curtain of the face, contained in me for me, in you for you, in each for each.
(Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears—O heaven!
The passionate teeming plays this curtain hid!)...
From “The Song of Myself”
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loaf and invite my soul,
I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born...
