Poems

BEFORE THE GATE

 
They gave the whole long day to idle laughter,
To fitful song and jest,
To moods of soberness as idle, after,
And silences, as idle too as the rest.
 
 
But when at last upon their way returning,
Taciturn, late, and loath,
Through the broad meadow in the sunset burning,
They reached the gate, one fine spell hindered them both.
 
 
Her heart was troubled with a subtile anguish
Such as but women know
That wait, and lest love speak or speak not languish,
And what they would, would rather they would not so;
 
 
Till he said,–man-like nothing comprehending
Of all the wondrous guile
That women won win themselves with, and bending
Eyes of relentless asking on her the while,–
 
 
“Ah, if beyond this gate the path united
Our steps as far as death,
And I might open it!–” His voice, affrighted
At its own daring, faltered under his breath.
 
 
Then she–whom both his faith and fear enchanted
Far beyond words to tell,
Feeling her woman’s finest wit had wanted
The art he had that knew to blunder so well–
 
 
Shyly drew near, a little step, and mocking,
“Shall we not be too late
For tea?” she said. “I’m quite worn out with walking:
Yes, thanks, your arm. And will you–open the gate?”
 

CLEMENT

I

 
That time of year, you know, when the summer, beginning to sadden,
Full-mooned and silver-misted, glides from the heart of September,
Mourned by disconsolate crickets, and iterant grasshoppers, crying
All the still nights long, from the ripened abundance of gardens;
Then, ere the boughs of the maples are mantled with earliest autumn,
But the wind of autumn breathes from the orchards at nightfall,
Full of winy perfume and mystical yearning and languor;
And in the noonday woods you hear the foraging squirrels,
And the long, crashing fall of the half-eaten nut from the tree-top;
When the robins are mute, and the yellow-birds, haunting the thistles,
Cheep, and twitter, and flit through the dusty lanes and the loppings,
When the pheasant booms from your stealthy foot in the cornfield,
And the wild-pigeons feed, few and shy, in the scoke-berry bushes;
When the weary land lies hushed, like a seer in a vision,
And your life seems but the dream of a dream which you cannot remember,–
Broken, bewildering, vague, an echo that answers to nothing!
That time of year, you know. They stood by the gate in the meadow,
Fronting the sinking sun, and the level stream of its splendor
Crimsoned the meadow-slope and woodland with tenderest sunset,
Made her beautiful face like the luminous face of an angel,
Smote through the painéd gloom of his heart like a hurt to the sense, there.
Languidly clung about by the half-fallen shawl, and with folded
Hands, that held a few sad asters: “I sigh for this idyl
Lived at last to an end; and, looking on to my prose-life,”
With a smile, she said, and a subtle derision of manner,
“Better and better I seem, when I recollect all that has happened
Since I came here in June: the walks we have taken together
Through these darling meadows, and dear, old, desolate woodlands;
All our afternoon readings, and all our strolls through the moonlit
Village,–so sweetly asleep, one scarcely could credit the scandal,
Heartache, and trouble, and spite, that were hushed for the night, in its silence.
Yes, I am better. I think I could even be civil to him for his kindness,
Letting me come here without him… But open the gate, Cousin Clement;
Seems to me it grows chill, and I think it is healthier in-doors.
– No, then I you need not speak, for I know well enough what is coming:
Bitter taunts for the past, and discouraging views of the future?
Tragedy, Cousin Clement, or comedy,–just as you like it;–
Only not here alone, but somewhere that people can see you.
Then I’ll take part in the play, and appear the remorseful young person
Full of divine regrets at not having smothered a genius
Under the feathers and silks of a foolish, extravagant woman.
O you selfish boy! what was it, just now, about anguish?
Bills would be your talk, Cousin Clement, if you were my husband.”
Then, with her summer-night glory of eyes low-bending upon him,
Dark’ning his thoughts as the pondered stars bewilder and darken,
Tenderly, wistfully drooping toward him, she faltered in whisper,–
All her mocking face transfigured,–with mournful effusion:
“Clement, do not think it is you alone that remember,–
Do not think it is you alone that have suffered. Ambition,
Fame, and your art,–you have all these things to console you.
I–what have I in this world? Since my child is dead–a bereavement.”
Sad hung her eyes on his, and he felt all the anger within him
Broken, and melting in tears. But he shrank from her touch while he answered
(Awkwardly, being a man, and awkwardly, being a lover),
“Yes, you know how it is done. You have cleverly fooled me beforetime,
With a dainty scorn, and then an imploring forgiveness!
Yes, you might play it, I think,–that rôle of remorseful young person,
That, or the old man’s darling, or anything else you attempted.
Even your earnest is so much like acting I fear a betrayal,
Trusting your speech. You say that you have not forgotten. I grant you–
Not, indeed, for your word–that is light–but I wish to believe you.
Well, I say, since you have not forgotten, forget now, forever!
I–I have lived and loved, and you have lived and have married.
Only receive this bud to remember me when we have parted,–
Thorns and splendor, no sweetness, rose of the love that I cherished!”
There he tore from its stalk the imperial flower of the thistle,
Tore, and gave to her, who took it with mocking obeisance,
Twined it in her hair, and said, with her subtle derision:
“You are a wiser man than I thought you could ever be, Clement,–
Sensible, almost. So! I’ll try to forget and remember.”
Lightly she took his arm, but on through the lane to the farm-house,
Mutely together they moved through the lonesome, odorous twilight.
 

II

 
High on the farm-house hearth, the first autumn fire was kindled;
Scintillant hickory bark and dryest limbs of the beech-tree
Burned, where all summer long the boughs of asparagus flourished.
Wild were the children with mirth, and grouping and clinging together,
Danced with the dancing flame, and lithely swayed with its humor;
Ran to the window-panes, and peering forth into the darkness,
Saw there another room, flame-lit, and with frolicking children.
(Ah! by such phantom hearths, I think that we sit with our first-loves!)
Sometimes they tossed on the floor, and sometimes they hid in the corners,
Shouting and laughing aloud, and never resting a moment,
In the rude delight, the boisterous gladness of childhood,–
Cruel as summer sun and singing-birds to the heartsick.
Clement sat in his chair unmoved in the midst of the hubbub,
Rapt, with unseeing eyes; and unafraid in their gambols,
By his tawny beard the children caught him, and clambered
Over his knees, and waged a mimic warfare across them,
Made him their battle-ground, and won and lost kingdoms upon him.
Airily to and fro, and out of one room to another
Passed his cousin, and busied herself with things of the household,
Nonchalant, debonair, blithe, with bewitching housewifely importance,
Laying the cloth for the supper, and bringing the meal from the kitchen;
Fairer than ever she seemed, and more than ever she mocked him,
Coming behind his chair, and clasping her fingers together
Over his eyes in a girlish caprice, and crying, “Who is it?”
Vexed his despair with a vision of wife and of home and of children,
Calling his sister’s children around her, and stilling their clamor,
Making believe they were hers. And Clement sat moody and silent,
Blank to the wistful gaze of his mother bent on his visage
With the tender pain, the pitiful, helpless devotion
Of the mother that looks on the face of her son in his trouble,
Grown beyond her consoling, and knows that she cannot befriend him.
Then his cousin laughed, and in idleness talked with the children;
Sometimes she turned to him, and then when the thistle was falling,
Caught it and twined it again in her hair, and called it her keepsake,
Smiled, and made him ashamed of his petulant gift there, before them.
But, when the night was grown old and the two by the hearthstone together
Sat alone in the flickering red of the flame, and the cricket
Carked to the stillness, and ever, with sullen throbs of the pendule
Sighed the time-worn clock for the death of the days that were perished,–
It was her whim to be sad, and she brought him the book they were reading.
“Read it to-night,” she said, “that I may not seem to be going.”
Said, and mutely reproached him with all the pain she had wrought him.
From her hand he took the volume and read, and she listened,–
All his voice molten in secret tears, and ebbing and flowing,
Now with a faltering breath, and now with impassioned abandon,–
Read from the book of a poet the rhyme of the fatally sundered,
Fatally met too late, and their love was their guilt and their anguish,
But in the night they rose, and fled away into the darkness,
Glad of all dangers and shames, and even of death, for their love’s sake.
Then, when his voice brake hollowly, falling and fading to silence,
Thrilled in the silence they sat, and durst not behold one another,
Feeling that wild temptation, that tender, ineffable yearning,
Drawing them heart to heart. One blind, mad moment of passion
With their fate they strove; but out of the pang of the conflict,
Through such costly triumph as wins a waste and a famine,
Victors they came, and Love retrieved the error of loving.
So, foreknowing the years, and sharply discerning the future,
Guessing the riddle of life, and accepting the cruel solution,–
Side by side they sat, as far as the stars are asunder.
Carked the cricket no more, but while the audible silence
Shrilled in their ears, she, suddenly rising and dragging the thistle
Out of her clinging hair, laughed mockingly, casting it from her:
“Perish the thorns and splendor,–the bloom and the sweetness are perished.
Dreary, respectable calm, polite despair, and one’s Duty,–
These and the world, for dead Love!–The end of these modern romances!
Better than yonder rhyme?.. Pleasant dreams and good night, Cousin Clement.”
 

BY THE SEA

 
I walked with her I love by the sea,
The deep came up with its chanting waves,
Making a music so great and free
That the will and the faith, which were dead in me,
Awoke and rose from their graves.
 
 
Chanting, and with a regal sweep
Of their ’broidered garments up and down
The strand, came the mighty waves of the deep,
Dragging the wave-worn drift from its sleep
Along the sea-sands bare and brown.
 
 
“O my soul, make the song of the sea!” I cried.
“How it comes, with its stately tread,
And its dreadful voice, and the splendid pride
Of its regal garments flowing wide
Over the land!” to my soul I said.
 
 
My soul was still; the deep went down.
“What hast thou, my soul,” I cried,
“In thy song?” “The sea-sands bare and brown,
With broken shells and sea-weed strown,
And stranded drift,” my soul replied.
 

SAINT CHRISTOPHER

 
In the narrow Venetian street,
On the wall above the garden gate
(Within, the breath of the rose is sweet,
And the nightingale sings there, soon and late),
 
 
Stands Saint Christopher, carven in stone,
With the little child in his huge caress,
And the arms of the baby Jesus thrown
About his gigantic tenderness;
 
 
And over the wall a wandering growth
Of darkest and greenest ivy clings,
And climbs around them, and holds them both
In its netted clasp of knots and rings,
 
 
Clothing the saint from foot to beard
In glittering leaves that whisper and dance
To the child, on his mighty arm upreared,
With a lusty summer exuberance.
 
 
To the child on his arm the faithful saint
Looks up with a broad and tranquil joy;
His brows and his heavy beard aslant
Under the dimpled chin of the boy,
 
 
Who plays with the world upon his palm,
And bends his smiling looks divine
On the face of the giant mild and calm,
And the glittering frolic of the vine.
 
 
He smiles on either with equal grace,–
On the simple ivy’s unconscious life,
And the soul in the giant’s lifted face,
Strong from the peril of the strife:
 
 
For both are his own,–the innocence
That climbs from the heart of earth to heaven,
And the virtue that gently rises thence
Through trial sent and victory given.
 
 
Grow, ivy, up to his countenance,
But it cannot smile on my life as on thine;
Look, Saint, with thy trustful, fearless glance,
Where I dare not lift these eyes of mine.
 

Venice, 1863.

ELEGY ON JOHN BUTLER HOWELLS

Who died, “with the first song of the birds,” Wednesday morning, April 27, 1864.

 

I

 
In the early morning when I wake
At the hour that is sacred for his sake,
 
 
And hear the happy birds of spring
In the garden under my window sing,
 
 
And through my window the daybreak blows
The sweetness of the lily and rose,
 
 
A dormant anguish wakes with day,
And my heart is smitten with strange dismay:
 
 
Distance wider than thine, O sea,
Darkens between my brother and me!
 

II

 
A scrap of print, a few brief lines,
The fatal word that swims and shines
 
 
On my tears, with a meaning new and dread,
Make faltering reason know him dead,
 
 
And I would that my heart might feel it too,
And unto its own regret be true;
 
 
For this is the hardest of all to bear,
That his life was so generous and fair,
 
 
So full of love, so full of hope,
Broadening out with ample scope,
 
 
And so far from death, that his dying seems
The idle agony of dreams
 
 
To my heart, that feels him living yet,–
And I forget, and I forget.
 

III

 
He was almost grown a man when he passed
Away, but when I kissed him last
 
 
He was still a child, and I had crept
Up to the little room where he slept,
 
 
And thought to kiss him good-by in his sleep;
But he was awake to make me weep
 
 
With terrible homesickness, before
My wayward feet had passed the door.
 
 
Round about me clung his embrace,
And he pressed against my face his face,
 
 
As if some prescience whispered him then
That it never, never should be again.
 

IV

 
Out of far-off days of boyhood dim,
When he was a babe and I played with him,
 
 
I remember his looks and all his ways;
And how he grew through childhood’s grace,
 
 
To the hopes, and strifes, and sports, and joys,
And innocent vanity of boys;
 
 
I hear his whistle at the door,
His careless step upon the floor,
 
 
His song, his jest, his laughter yet,–
And I forget, and I forget.
 

V

 
Somewhere in the graveyard that I know,
Where the strawberries under the chestnuts grow,
 
 
They have laid him; and his sisters set
On his grave the flowers their tears have wet;
 
 
And above his grave, while I write, the song
Of the matin robin leaps sweet and strong
 
 
From the leafy dark of the chestnut-tree;
And many a murmuring honey-bee
 
 
On the strawberry blossoms in the grass
Stoops by his grave and will not pass;
 
 
And in the little hollow beneath
The slope of the silent field of death,
 
 
The cow-bells tinkle soft and sweet,
And the cattle go by with homeward feet,
 
 
And the squirrel barks from the sheltering limb,
At the harmless noises not meant for him;
 
 
And Nature, unto her loving heart
Has taken our darling’s mortal part,
 
 
Tenderly, that he may be,
Like the song of the robin in the tree,
 
 
The blossoms, the grass, the reeds by the shore,
A part of Summer evermore.
 

VI

 
I write, and the words with my tears are wet,–
But I forget, O, I forget!
 
 
Teach me, Thou that sendest this pain,
To know and feel my loss and gain!
 
 
Let me not falter in belief
On his death, for that is sorest grief:
 
 
O, lift me above this wearing strife,
Till I discern his deathless life,
 
 
Shining beyond this misty shore,
A part of Heaven evermore.
 

Venice, Wednesday Morning, at Dawn,

May 16, 1864.

THANKSGIVING

I

 
Lord, for the erring thought
Not into evil wrought:
Lord, for the wicked will
Betrayed and baffled still:
For the heart from itself kept,
Our thanksgiving accept.
 

II

 
For ignorant hopes that were
Broken to our blind prayer:
For pain, death, sorrow, sent
Unto our chastisement:
For all loss of seeming good,
Quicken our gratitude.
 

A SPRINGTIME

 
One knows the spring is coming:
There are birds; the fields are green;
There is balm in the sunlight and moonlight,
And dew in the twilights between.
 
 
But over there is a silence,
A rapture great and dumb,
That day when the doubt is ended,
And at last the spring is come.
 
 
Behold the wonder, O silence!
Strange as if wrought in a night,–
The waited and lingering glory,
The world-old, fresh delight!
 
 
O blossoms that hang like winter,
Drifted upon the trees,
O birds that sing in the blossoms,
O blossom-haunting bees,–
 
 
O green, green leaves on the branches,
O shadowy dark below,
O cool of the aisles of orchards,
Woods that the wild flowers know,–
 
 
O air of gold and perfume,
Wind, breathing sweet and sun,
O sky of perfect azure–
Day, Heaven and Earth in one!–
 
 
Let me draw near thy secret,
And in thy deep heart see
How fared, in doubt and dreaming,
The spring that is come in me.
 
 
For my soul is held in silence,
A rapture, great and dumb,–
For the mystery that lingered,
The glory that is come!
 

1861.

IN EARLIEST SPRING

 
Tossing his mane of snows in wildest eddies and tangles,
Lion-like, March cometh in, hoarse, with tempestuous breath,
Through all the moaning chimneys, and thwart all the hollows and angles
Round the shuddering house, threating of winter and death.
 
 
But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the meadow
Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift
Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow,
Deep in the oak’s chill core, under the gathering drift.
 
 
Nay, to earth’s life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire
(How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes,–
Rapture of life ineffable, perfect,–as if in the brier,
Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense of the rose.
 

THE BOBOLINKS ARE SINGING

 
Out of its fragrant heart of bloom,–
The bobolinks are singing!
Out of its fragrant heart of bloom
The apple-tree whispers to the room,
“Why art thou but a nest of gloom,
While the bobolinks are singing?”
 
 
The two wan ghosts of the chamber there,–
The bobolinks are singing!
The two wan ghosts of the chamber there
Cease in the breath of the honeyed air,
Sweep from the room and leave it bare,
While the bobolinks are singing.
 
 
Then with a breath so chill and slow,–
The bobolinks are singing!
Then with a breath so chill and slow,
It freezes the blossoms into snow,
The haunted room makes answer low,
While the bobolinks are singing.
 
 
“I know that in the meadow-land,–
The bobolinks are singing!
I know that in the meadow-land
The sorrowful, slender elm-trees stand,
And the brook goes by on the other hand,
While the bobolinks are singing.
 
 
“But ever I see, in the brawling stream,–
The bobolinks are singing!
But ever I see in the brawling stream
A maiden drowned and floating dim,
Under the water, like a dream,
While the bobolinks are singing.
 
 
“Buried, she lies in the meadow-land!–
The bobolinks are singing!
Buried, she lies in the meadow-land,
Under the sorrowful elms where they stand.
Wind, blow over her soft and bland,
While the bobolinks are singing.
 
 
“O blow, but stir not the ghastly thing,–
The bobolinks are singing!
O blow, but stir not the ghastly thing
The farmer saw so heavily swing
From the elm, one merry morn of spring,
While the bobolinks were singing.
 
 
“O blow, and blow away the bloom,–
The bobolinks are singing!
O blow, and blow away the bloom
That sickens me in my heart of gloom,
That sweetly sickens the haunted room,
While the bobolinks are singing!”
 

PRELUDE.
(TO AN EARLY BOOK OF VERSE.)

 
In March the earliest bluebird came
And caroled from the orchard-tree
His little tremulous songs to me,
And called upon the summer’s name,
 
 
And made old summers in my heart
All sweet with flower and sun again;
So that I said, “O, not in vain
Shall be thy lay of little art,
 
 
“Though never summer sun may glow,
Nor summer flower for thee may bloom;
Though winter turn in sudden gloom,
And drowse the stirring spring with snow”;
 
 
And learned to trust, if I should call
Upon the sacred name of Song,
Though chill through March I languish long,
And never feel the May at all,
 
 
Yet may I touch, in some who hear,
The hearts, wherein old songs asleep
Wait but the feeblest touch to leap
In music sweet as summer air!
 
 
I sing in March brief bluebird lays,
And hope a May, and do not know:
May be, the heaven is full of snow,–
May be, there open summer days.