Identity

..."Una selva oscura." - Dante.


Awake or sleeping (for I know not which)
I was or was not mazed within a wood
Where every mother-bird brought up her brood
Safe in some leafy niche
Of oak or ash, of cypress or of beech,

Of silvery aspen trembling delicately,
Of plane or warmer-tinted sycamore,
Of elm that dies in secret from the core,
Of ivy weak and free,
Of pines, of all green lofty things that be.

Such birds they seemed as challenged each desire;
Like spots of azure heaven upon the wing,
Like downy emeralds that alight and sing,
Like actual coals on fire,
Like anything they seemed, and everything.

Such mirth they made, such warblings and such chat
With tongue of music in a well-tuned beak,
They seemed to speak more wis...

You are a lovely autumn sky, rose-clear!
But sadness is flowing in me like the sea,
And leaves on my sullen lip, as it disappears,
of its bitter slime the painful memory.


Your hand glides over my numb breast in vain:
what it seeks, dear friend, is a place made raw
by woman’s ferocious fang and claw, refrain:
seek this heart, the wild beasts tear, no more.


My heart is a palace defiled by the rabble,
they drink, and murder, and clutch each other’s hair!
About your naked throat a perfume hovers!...


O Beauty, harsh scourge of souls, this is your care!
With your eyes of fire, dazzling as at our feasts,
Burn these scraps to ashes, spared by the beasts!

Nymph of the downward smile and sidelong glance!
In what diviner moments of the day
Art thou most lovely? when gone far astray
Into the labyrinths of sweet utterance,
Or when serenely wandering in a trance
Of sober thought? Or when starting away,
With careless robe to meet the morning ray,
Thou sparest the flowers in thy mazy dance?
Haply 'tis when thy ruby lips part sweetly,
And so remain, because thou listenest:
But thou to please wert nurtured so completely
That I can never tell what mood is best;
I shall as soon pronounce which Grace more neatly
Trips it before Apollo than the rest.

O Lord, I cannot but believe
The birds do sing thy praises then, when they sing to one another,
And they are lying seed-sown land when the winter makes them grieve,
Their little bosoms breeding songs for the summer to unsmother!

If thou hadst finished me, O Lord,
Nor left out of me part of that great gift that goes to singing,
I sure had known the meaning high of the songster's praising word,
Had known upon what thoughts of thee his pearly talk he was stringing!

I should have read the wisdom hid
In the storm-inspired melody of thy thrush's bosom solemn:
I should not then have understood what thy free spirit did
To make the lark-soprano mount like to a geyser-column!

I think I almost understand
Thy owl, his muffled swiftness, moon-round eyes, and intoned hoo...

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way -- the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy --
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood s...

Lulled by the sound of pastoral bells,
Rude Nature's Pilgrims did we go,
From the dread summit of the Queen
Of mountains, through a deep ravine,
Where, in her holy chapel, dwells
"Our Lady of the Snow."

The sky was blue, the air was mild;
Free were the streams and green the bowers;
As if, to rough assaults unknown,
The genial spot had 'ever' shown
A countenance that as sweetly smiled--
The face of summer-hours.

And we were gay, our hearts at ease;
With pleasure dancing through the frame
We journeyed; all we knew of care--
Our path that straggled here and there;
Of trouble--but the fluttering breeze;
Of Winter--but a name.

If foresight could have rent the veil
Of three short days--but hush--no more!
Calm is the grave, and c...

There in the past I see her as of old,
Blue-eyed and hazel-haired, within a room
Dim with a twilight of tenebrious gold;
Her white face sensuous as a delicate bloom
Night opens in the tropics. Fold on fold
Pale laces drape her; and a frail perfume,
As of a moonlit primrose brimmed with rain,
Breathes from her presence, drowsing heart and brain.

Her head is bent; some red carnations glow
Deep in her heavy hair; her large eyes gleam;--
Bright sister stars of those twin worlds of snow,
Her breasts, through which the veined violets stream;--
I hold her hand; her smile comes sweetly slow
As thoughts of love that haunt a poet's dream;
And at her feet once more I sit and hear
Wild words of passion--dead this many a year.

I remember, when a child,
How within the April wild
Once I walked with Mystery
In the groves of Arcady....
Through the boughs, before, behind,
Swept the mantle of the wind,
Thunderous and unconfined.

Overhead the curving moon
Pierced the twilight: a cocoon,
Golden, big with unborn wings -
Beauty, shaping spiritual things,
Vague, impatient of the night,
Eager for its heavenward flight
Out of darkness into light.

Here and there the oaks assumed
Satyr aspects; shadows gloomed,
Hiding, of a dryad look;
And the naiad-frantic brook,
Crying, fled the solitude,
Filled with terror of the wood,
Or some faun-thing that pursued.

In the dead leaves on the ground
Crept a movement; rose a sound:
Everywhere the silence tick...

O differing human heart,
Why is it that I tremble when thine eyes,
Thy human eyes and beautiful human speech,
Draw me, and stir within my soul
That subtle ineradicable longing
For tender comradeship?
It is because I cannot all at once,
Through the half-lights and phantom-haunted mists
That separate and enshroud us life from life,
Discern the nearness or the strangeness of thy paths
Nor plumb thy depths.
I am like one that comes alone at night
To a strange stream, and by an unknown ford
Stands, and for a moment yearns and shrinks,
Being ignorant of the water, though so quiet it is,
So softly murmurous,
So silvered by the familiar moon.

On receiving a sprig of heather in blossom.



No more these simple flowers belong
To Scottish maid and lover;
Sown in the common soil of song,
They bloom the wide world over.

In smiles and tears, in sun and showers,
The minstrel and the heather,
The deathless singer and the flowers
He sang of live together.

Wild heather-bells and Robert Burns
The moorland flower and peasant!
How, at their mention, memory turns
Her pages old and pleasant!

The gray sky wears again its gold
And purple of adorning,
And manhood's noonday shadows hold
The dews of boyhood's morning.

The dews that washed the dust and soil
From off the wings of pleasure,
The sky, that flecked the, ground of toil
With golden threads of l...

    My mind was a mirror:
    It saw what it saw, it knew what it knew.
    In youth my mind was just a mirror In a rapidly flying car,
    Which catches and loses bits of the landscape.
    Then in time
    Great scratches were made on the mirror,
    Letting the outside world come in,
    And letting my inner self look out.
    For this is the birth of the soul in sorrow,
    A birth with gains and losses.
    The mind sees the world as a thing apart,
    And the soul makes the world at one with itself.
    A mirror scratched reflects no image -
    And this is the silence of wisdom.

(VERSES WRITTEN UNDER A PICTURE.)
INSCRIBED TO J. A. WHISTLER.


I.
White rose in red rose-garden
Is not so white;
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright
Because the hard East blows
Over their maiden rows
Grow not as this face grows from pale to bright.

Behind the veil, forbidden,
Shut up from sight,
Love, is there sorrow hidden,
Is there delight?
Is joy thy dower or grief,
White rose of weary leaf,
Late rose whose life is brief, whose loves are light?

Soft snows that hard winds harden
Till each flake bite
Fill all the flowerless garden
Whose flowers took flight
Long since when summer ceased,
And men rose up from feast,
And warm west wind grew east, and warm day night.

II.<...

I.

Give me the patches on my pants, the freckles on my face--
The happy heart where cankering care had never found a place--
And let my bare feet walk again that dirt road down the hill
That led me to the river's brink, beyond the old Mock Mill!


II.

Give me the youthful friends I knew, now scattered far and wide--
The loved ones who have passed beyond the bounds of time and tide--
And let me see the rose's hue that mantled every cheek
When we were run-aways from school, a-fishing in the creek.


III.

Give me the stone-bruise on my heel, the hat without a crown--
The unkempt suit of yellow hair the sun had burnt to brown--
And let me go and soak myself, just where we used to walk,
In that old swimmin' pool we had, up on the Hanging...

    Her soul is like a wolf that stands
    Where sunlight falls between the trees
    Of a sparse forest's leafless edge,
    When Spring's first magic moveth these.

    Her soul is like a little brook,
    Thin edged with ice against the leaves,
    Where the wolf drinks and is alone,
    And where the woodbine interweaves.

    A bank late covered by the snow,
    But lighted by the frozen North;
    Her soul is like a little plot
    That one white blossom bringeth forth.

    Her soul is slim, like silver slips,
    And straight, like flags beside a stream.
    Her soul is like a shape that moves
    And changes in a wonder dream.

    Who would pursue her clasps a cloud,
    And taketh sorrow for his zeal.
    Memory shall ...

Lake Winnipesaukee


I. NOON.

White clouds, whose shadows haunt the deep,
Light mists, whose soft embraces keep
The sunshine on the hills asleep!

O isles of calm! O dark, still wood!
And stiller skies that overbrood
Your rest with deeper quietude!

O shapes and hues, dim beckoning, through
Yon mountain gaps, my longing view
Beyond the purple and the blue,

To stiller sea and greener land,
And softer lights and airs more bland,
And skies, the hollow of God’s hand!

Transfused through you, O mountain friends!
With mine your solemn spirit blends,
And life no more hath separate ends.

I read each misty mountain sign,
I know the voice of wave and pine,
And I am yours, and ye are mine.

Oh happy time! - Art's early days!
When o'er each deed, with sweet self-praise,
Narcissus-like I hung!
When great Rembrandt but little seemed,
And such Old Masters all were deemed
As nothing to the young!

Some scratchy strokes - abrupt and few,
So easily and swift I drew,
Sufficed for my design;
My sketchy, superficial hand
Drew solids at a dash - and spanned
A surface with a line.

Not long my eye was thus content,
But grew more critical - my bent
Essayed a higher walk;
I copied leaden eyes in lead -
Rheumatic hands in white and red,
And gouty feet - in chalk.

Anon my studious art for days
Kept making faces - happy phrase,
For faces such as mine!
Accomplished in the details then,
I left the minor parts of men,

What can I do in poetry
Now the good spirit's gone from me?
Why, nothing now but lonely sit
And over-read what I have writ.

Spake full well, in language quaint and olden,
    One who dwelleth by the castled Rhine,
When he called the flowers, so blue and golden,
    Stars, that in earth's firmament do shine; -

Stars they are, wherein we read our history,
    As astrologers and seers of eld;
Yet not wrapped about with awful mystery,
    Like the burning stars, which they beheld.

Wondrous truths, and manifold as wondrous,
    God hath written in those stars above;
But not less in the bright flowerets under us
    Stands the revelation of his love.

Bright and glorious is that revelation,
    Written all over this great world of ours;
Making evident our own creation,
    In these stars of earth, - these golden flowers.

And the Poet, faithful and far-seeing,
...