The Ghosts Of Revellers.

At purple eyes beside the grain,
Our loves on altars we had burned,
And mixed our tribute with the dew,
Our tears, when rosy dawn returned.

Our voices we had joined with song
Of bird ecstatic, light, and free;
Our laughter rollicked with the brook
Running through darkness merrily.

At purple eyes beside the rim
Of frozen lakes our loves we burned,
And slid away when stillness reigned:
Deep the vast woods our bodies urned.

In starlit night along the shade
Of our dusk tombs our spirits glide;
We hear the echoing of the wind,
We breathe the sighs we living sighed.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was an American Roman Catholic nun and social worker. Born on May 20, 1851, in Lenox, Massachusetts, she was the daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the famous novelist. After a failed marriage, Lathrop turned towards religious life and dedicated herself to caring for those with incurable cancer. She founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, and the community grew to operate several homes for cancer patients. She passed away on July 9, 1926.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

A Wooing Song.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Simple Poetry

To G. P. L.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Simple Poetry

A Song Before Grief.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Simple Poetry

The Unperfected.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Old Ghosts

Clove-spicy pinks and phlox that fill the sense
With drowsy indolence;
And in the evening skies
Interior splendor, pregnant with surprise,
As if in some new wise
The full moon soon would rise.

Hung with the crimson aigrets of its seeds
The purple monkshood bleeds;
The dewy crickets chirr,
And everywhere are lights of lavender;
And scents of musk and myrrh
To guide the foot of her.

She passes like a misty glimmer on
To where the rose blooms wan,
A twilight moth in flight,
As in the west its streak of chrysolite
The dusk erases quite,
And ushers in the night.

And now another shadow passes slow,
With firefly light a-glow:
The scent of a cigar,
And two who kiss beneath the evening-star,
Where, in a moonbeam bar,

Madison Julius Cawein

Incantation

When the leaves, by thousands thinned,
A thousand times have whirled in the wind,
And the moon, with hollow cheek,
Staring from her hollow height,
Consolation seems to seek
From the dim, reechoing night;
And the fog-streaks dead and white
Lie like ghosts of lost delight
O'er highest earth and lowest sky;
Then, Autumn, work thy witchery!

Strew the ground with poppy-seeds,
And let my bed be hung with weeds,
Growing gaunt and rank and tall,
Drooping o'er me like a pall.
Send thy stealthy, white-eyed mist
Across my brow to turn and twist
Fold on fold, and leave me blind
To all save visions in the mind.
Then, in the depth of rain-fed streams
I shall slumber, and in dreams
Slide through some long glen that burns
With a crust of blood-r...

George Parsons Lathrop

At Moonrise

Pale faces looked up at me, up from the earth, like flowers;
Pale hands reached down to me, out of the air, like stars,
As over the hills, robed on with the twilight, the Hours,
The Day's last Hours, departed, and Dusk put up her bars.

Pale fingers beckoned me on; pale fingers, like starlit mist;
Dim voices called to me, dim as the wind's dim rune,
As up from the night, like a nymph from the amethyst
Of her waters, as silver as foam, rose the round, white breast of the moon.

And I followed the pearly waving and beckon of hands,
The luring glitter and dancing glimmer of feet,
And the sibilant whisper of silence, that summoned to lands
Remoter than legend or faery, where Myth and Tradition meet.

And I came to a place where the shadow of ancient Night
Brooded ...

Madison Julius Cawein

The First Frost Of Autumn.

At evening it rose in the hollow glade,
Where wild-flowers blushed 'mid silence and shade;
Where, hid from the gaze of the garish noon,
They were slily wooed by the trembling moon.
It rose for the guardian zephyrs had flown,
And left the valley that night alone.
No sigh was borne from the leafy hill,
No murmur came from the lapsing rill;
The boughs of the willow in silence wept,
And the aspen leaves in that sabbath slept.
The valley dreamed, and the fairy lute
Of the whispering reed by the brook was mute.
The slender rush o'er the glassy rill,
As a marble shaft, was erect and still,
And no airy sylph on the mirror wave,
A dimpling trace of its footstep gave.
The moon shone down, but the shadows deep
Of the pensile flowers, were hushed in sleep.
The p...

Samuel Griswold Goodrich

A Ballad Of The Mist.

"I love the Lady of Merle," he said.
"She is not for thee!" her suitor cried.
And in the valley the lovers fought
By the salt river's tide.

The braver fell on the dewy sward:
The unloved lover returned once more;
In yellow satin the lady came
And met him at the door.

"Hast thou heard, dark Edith," laughed he grim,
"Poor Hugh hath craved thee many a day?
Soon would it have been too late for him
His low-born will to say.

"I struck a blade where lay his heart's love,
And voice for thee have I left him none,
To brag he still seeks thee over the hills
When thou and I are one!"

Fearless across the wide country
Rode the dark Lady Edith of Merle;
She looked at the headlands soft with haze,
And the moor's mists of pearl.

Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

A November Wood-Walk.

Dead leaves are deep in all our forest walks;
    Their brightest tints not all extinguished yet,
    Shine redly glimmering through the dewy wet;
    And whereso'er thy musing foot is set,
The fragrant cool-wort lifts its emerald stalks.

How kindly nature wraps secure and warm,
    In the fallen mantle of her summer pride,
    These lovely tender things that peep and hide,
    Whom unawares thy curious eye hath spied,
For the long night of winter's frost and storm.

Still keeps the deer-berry its vivid green,
    Set in its glowing calyx like a gem;
    While hung above, a marvellous diadem
    Of tawny gold, the bittersweet's gray stem,
Strung with its globes of murky flame is seen.

The foot sinks ankle-deep in velvet moss,
    The shroud of...

Kate Seymour Maclean