Down comes the winter rain -
Spoils my hat and bow -
Runs into the poll of me;
But mother won't know.

We've been out and caught a cold,
Knee-deep in snow;
Such a lucky thing it is
That mother won't know!

Rosy lost herself last night -
Couldn't tell where to go.
Yes - it rather frightened her,
But mother didn't know.

Somebody made Willy drunk
At the Christmas show:
O 'twas fun! It's well for him
That mother won't know!

Howsoever wild we are,
Late at school or slow,
Mother won't be cross with us,
Mother won't know.

How we cried the day she died!
Neighbours whispering low . . .
But we now do what we will -
Mother won't know.

Now in the dark of February rains,
    Poor lovers of the sunshine, spring is born,
    The earthy fields are full of hidden corn,
And March's violets bud along the lanes;

Therefore with joy believe in what remains.
    And thou who dost not feel them, do not scorn
    Our early songs for winter overworn,
And faith in God's handwriting on the plains.

"Hope" writes he, "Love" in the first violet,
    "Joy," even from Heaven, in songs and winds and trees;
    And having caught the happy words in these
While Nature labours with the letters yet,
    Spring cannot cheat us, though her hopes be broken,
    Nor leave us, for we know what God hath spoken.

With loitering step and quiet eye,
Beneath the low November sky,
I wandered in the woods, and found
A clearing, where the broken ground
Was scattered with black stumps and briers,
And the old wreck of forest fires.
It was a bleak and sandy spot,
And, all about, the vacant plot
Was peopled and inhabited
By scores of mulleins long since dead.
A silent and forsaken brood
In that mute opening of the wood,
So shrivelled and so thin they were,
So gray, so haggard, and austere,
Not plants at all they seemed to me,
But rather some spare company
Of hermit folk, who long ago,
Wandering in bodies to and fro,
Had chanced upon this lonely way,
And rested thus, till death one day
Surprised them at their compline prayer,
And left them standing lifele...

She looked like a bird from a cloud
On the clammy lawn,
Moving alone, bare-browed
In the dim of dawn.
The candles alight in the room
For my parting meal
Made all things withoutdoors loom
Strange, ghostly, unreal.

The hour itself was a ghost,
And it seemed to me then
As of chances the chance furthermost
I should see her again.
I beheld not where all was so fleet
That a Plan of the past
Which had ruled us from birthtime to meet
Was in working at last:

No prelude did I there perceive
To a drama at all,
Or foreshadow what fortune might weave
From beginnings so small;
But I rose as if quicked by a spur
I was bound to obey,
And stepped through the casement to her
Still alone in the gray.

"I am leaving you . ....

The Old Year's gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he'd a neighbour's face,
In this he's known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they're here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall--
A guest to every heart's desire,
And now he's nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
Are things identified;
But time once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year's Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

    Slip back, Time!
Yet again I am nearing
Castle and keep, uprearing
    Gray, as in my prime.

    At the inn
Smiling close, why is it
Not as on my visit
    When hope and I were twin?

    Groom and jade
Whom I found here, moulder;
Strange the tavern-holder,
    Strange the tap-maid.

    Here I hired
Horse and man for bearing
Me on my wayfaring
    To the door desired.

    Evening gloomed
As I journeyed forward
To the faces shoreward,
    Till their dwelling loomed.

    If again
Towards the Atlantic sea there
I should speed, they'd be there
    Surely now as then? . . .

    Why waste thought,
When I know them vanished
Under earth; yea, banished
    Ever into nought.

Rhyme, the rack of finest wits,
That expresseth but by fits
True conceit,
Spoiling senses of their treasure,
Cozening judgment with a measure,
But false weight;
Wresting words from their true calling,
Propping verse for fear of falling
To the ground;
Jointing syllabes, drowning letters,
Fast'ning vowels as with fetters
They were bound!
Soon as lazy thou wert known,
All good poetry hence was flown,
And art banish'd.
For a thousand years together
All Parnassus' green did wither,
And wit vanish'd.
Pegasus did fly away,
At the wells no Muse did stay,
But bewail'd
So to see the fountain dry,
And Apollo's music die,
All light failed!
Starveling rhymes did fill the stage;
Not a poet in an age
Worth crowning;
Not ...

    The cornfields rise above mankind,
    Lifting white torches to the blue,
    Each season not ashamed to be
    Magnificently decked for you.

    What right have you to call them yours,
    And in brute lust of riches burn
    Without some radiant penance wrought,
    Some beautiful, devout return?

Sweet type of innocence, snow-clothed blossom,
Seemly, though vainly, bowing down to shun
The storm hard-beating on thy wan white bosom,
Left in the swail, and little cheer'd by sun;
Resembling that frail jewel, just begun
To ope on vice's eye its witcheries blooming,
Midst all its storms, with little room to shun--
Ah, thou art winter's snowdrop, lovely Woman!
In this world dropt, where every evil's glooming
With killing tempests o'er its tender prey,
Watching the opening of thy beauties coming,
Its every infant charm to snatch away:
Then come the sorrows thou'rt too weak to brave,
And then thy beauty-cheek digs ruin's early grave.

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art:
I warm’d both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Among the fields the camomile
Seems blown mist in the lightning's glare:
Cool, rainy odors drench the air;
Night speaks above; the angry smile
Of storm within her stare.

The way that I shall take to-night
Is through the wood whose branches fill
The road with double darkness, till,
Between the boughs, a window's light
Shines out upon the hill.

The fence; and then the path that goes
Around a trailer-tangled rock,
Through puckered pink and hollyhock,
Unto a latch-gate's unkempt rose,
And door whereat I knock.

Bright on the oldtime flower place
The lamp streams through the foggy pane;
The door is opened to the rain:
And in the door - her happy face
And outstretched arms again.

I

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed in the slushy sand.

II

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!

Rank Poverty! dost thou my joys assail,
And with thy threat'nings fright me from my rest?
I once had thoughts, that with a Bloomfield's tale,
And leisure hours, I surely should be blest;
But now I find the sadly-alter'd scene,
From these few days I fondly thought my own,
Hoping to spend them private and alone,
But, lo! thy troop of spectres intervene:
Want shows his face, with Idleness between,
Next Shame's approaching step, that hates the throng,
Comes sneaking on, with Sloth that fetters strong.
Are these the joys my leisure hours must glean?
Then I decline:--but know where'er we meet,
Ye ne'er shall drive me from the Muses' seat.

"And I saw the figure and visage of Madness seeking for a home."

There are three folk driving in a quaint old chaise,
And the cliff-side track looks green and fair;
I view them talking in quiet glee
As they drop down towards the puffins' lair
By the roughest of ways;
But another with the three rides on, I see,
Whom I like not to be there!

No: it's not anybody you think of. Next
A dwelling appears by a slow sweet stream
Where two sit happy and half in the dark:
They read, helped out by a frail-wick'd gleam,
Some rhythmic text;
But one sits with them whom they don't mark,
One I'm wishing could not be there.

No: not whom you knew and name. And now
I discern gay diners in a mansion-place,
And the guests dropping wit - pert, prim, or choice,<...

When the spring comes round, and a certain day
Looks out from the brume by the eastern copsetrees
    And says, Remember,
    I begin again, as if it were new,
    A day of like date I once lived through,
    Whiling it hour by hour away;
    So shall I do till my December,
    When spring comes round.

I take my holiday then and my rest
Away from the dun life here about me,
    Old hours re-greeting
    With the quiet sense that bring they must
    Such throbs as at first, till I house with dust,
    And in the numbness my heartsome zest
    For things that were, be past repeating
    When spring comes round.

    When Nature her great master-piece designed,
    And fram'd her last, best work, the human mind,
    Her eye intent on all the mazy plan,
    She form'd of various parts the various man.

    Then first she calls the useful many forth;
    Plain plodding industry, and sober worth:
    Thence peasants, farmers, native sons of earth,
    And merchandise' whole genus take their birth:
    Each prudent cit a warm existence finds,
    And all mechanics' many-apron'd kinds.
    Some other rarer sorts are wanted yet,
    The lead and buoy are needful to the net;
    The caput mortuum of gross desires
    Makes a material for mere knights and squires;
    The martial phosphorus is taught to flow,
    She kneads the lumpish philosophic dough,
    Then m...

    At four o'clock in late October
    I sat alone in the country school-house
    Back from the road, mid stricken fields,
    And an eddy of wind blew leaves on the pane,
    And crooned in the flue of the cannon-stove,
    With its open door blurring the shadows
    With the spectral glow of a dying fire.
    In an idle mood I was running the planchette -
    All at once my wrist grew limp,
    And my hand moved rapidly over the board,
    'Till the name of "Charles Guiteau" was spelled,
    Who threatened to materialize before me.
    I rose and fled from the room bare-headed
    Into the dusk, afraid of my gift.
    And after that the spirits swarmed -
    Chaucer, Caesar, Poe and Marlowe,
    Cleopatra and Mrs. Surratt -
    Wherever I went, with m...

    Regret not me;
    Beneath the sunny tree
I lie uncaring, slumbering peacefully.

    Swift as the light
    I flew my faery flight;
Ecstatically I moved, and feared no night.

    I did not know
    That heydays fade and go,
But deemed that what was would be always so.

    I skipped at morn
    Between the yellowing corn,
Thinking it good and glorious to be born.

    I ran at eves
    Among the piled-up sheaves,
Dreaming, "I grieve not, therefore nothing grieves."

    Now soon will come
    The apple, pear, and plum
And hinds will sing, and autumn insects hum.

    Again you will fare
    To cider-makings rare,
And junketings; but I shall not be there.

    Yet gaily sing
    Until the pe...