LXXVI
I had been hungry all the years;
My noon had come, to dine;
I, trembling, drew the table near,
And touched the curious wine.
’T was this on tables I had seen,
When turning, hungry, lone,
I looked in windows, for the wealth
I could not hope to own.
I did not know the ample bread,
’T was so unlike the crumb
The birds and I had often shared
In Nature’s dining-room.
The plenty hurt me, ’t was so new,—
Myself felt ill and odd,
As berry of a mountain bush
Transplanted to the road.
Nor was I hungry; so I found
That hunger was a way
Of persons outside windows,
The entering takes away.
LXXVII
I gained it so,
By climbing slow,
By catching at the twigs that grow
Between the bliss and me.
It hung so high,
As well the sky
Attempt by strategy.
I said I gained it,—
This was all.
Look, how I clutch it,
Lest it fall,
AndIapauper go;
Unfitted by an instant’s grace
For the contented beggar’s face
I wore an hour ago.
LXXVIII
TO learn the transport by the pain,
As blind men learn the sun;
To die of thirst, suspecting
That brooks in meadows run;
To stay the homesick, homesick feet
Upon a foreign shore
Haunted by native lands, the while,
And blue, beloved air—
This is the sovereign anguish,
This, the signal woe!
These are the patient laureates
49
Whose voices, trained below,
Ascend in ceaseless carol,
Inaudible, indeed,
To us, the duller scholars
Of the mysterious bard!
LXXIX
I years had been from home,
And now, before the door,
I dared not open, lest a face
I never saw before
Stare vacant into mine
And ask my business there.
My business,—just a life I left,
Was such still dwelling there?
I fumbled at my nerve,
I scanned the windows near;
The silence like an ocean rolled,
And broke against my ear.
I laughed a wooden laugh
That I could fear a door,
Who danger and the dead had faced,
But never quaked before.
I fitted to the latch
My hand, with trembling care,
Lest back the awful door should spring,
And leave me standing there.
I moved my fingers off
As cautiously as glass,
And held my ears, and like a thief
Fled gasping from the house.
LXXX
PRAYER is the little implement
Through which men reach
Where presence is denied them.
They fling their speech
By means of it in God’s ear;
If then He hear,
This sums the apparatus
Comprised in prayer.
LXXXI
I know that he exists
Somewhere, in silence.
He has hid his rare life
From our gross eyes.
’T is an instant’s play,
’T is a fond ambush,
Just to make bliss
Earn her own surprise!
But should the play
Prove piercing earnest,
Should the glee glaze
In death’s stiff stare,
Would not the fun
Look too expensive?
Would not the jest
Have crawled too far?
LXXXII
MUSICIANS wrestle everywhere:
All day, among the crowded air,
I hear the silver strife;
And—waking long before the dawn—
Such transport breaks upon the town
I think it that “new life!”
It is not bird, it has no nest;
Nor band, in brass and scarlet dressed,
Nor tambourine, nor man;
It is not hymn from pulpit read,—
The morning stars the treble led
On time’s first afternoon!
Some say it is the spheres at play!
Some say that bright majority
Of vanished dames and men!
Some think it service in the place
Where we, with late, celestial face,
Please God, shall ascertain!
LXXXIII
JUST lost when I was saved!
Just felt the world go by!
Just girt
50
me for the onset with eternity,
When breath blew back,
And on the other side
I heard recede the disappointed tide!
Therefore, as one returned, I feel,
Odd secrets of the line to tell!
Some sailor, skirting foreign shores,
Some pale reporter from the awful doors
Before the seal!
Next time, to stay!
Next time, the things to see
By ear unheard,
Unscrutinized by eye.
Next time, to tarry,
While the ages steal,—
Slow tramp the centuries,
And the cycles wheel.
LXXXIV
’T is little I could care for pearls
Who own the ample sea;
Or brooches, when the Emperor
With rubies pelteth me;
Or gold, who am the Prince of Mines;
Or diamonds, when I see
A diadem
51
to fit a dome
Continual crowning me.
LXXXV
SUPERIORITY to fate
Is difficult to learn.
’T is not conferred by any,
But possible to earn
A pittance at a time,
Until, to her surprise,
The soul with strict economy
Subsists till Paradise.
LXXXVI
HOPE is a subtle glutton;
He feeds upon the fair;
And yet, inspected closely,
What abstinence is there!
His is the halcyon table
That never seats but one,
And whatsoever is consumed
The same amounts remain.
LXXXVII
FORBIDDEN fruit a flavor has
That lawful orchards mocks;
How luscious lies the pea within
The pod that Duty locks!
LXXXVIII
HEAVEN is what I cannot reach!
The apple on the tree,
Provided it do hopeless hang,
That “heaven” is, to me.
The color on the cruising cloud,
The interdicted
52
ground
Behind the hill, the house behind,
There Paradise is found!
LXXXIX
A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.
XC
TO venerate the simple days
Which lead the seasons by,
Needs but to remember
That from you or me
They may take the trifle
Termed mortality!
To invest existence with a stately air,
Needs but to remember
That the acorn there
Is the egg of forests
For the upper air!
XCI
IT‘S such a little thing to weep,
So short a thing to sigh;
And yet by trades the size of these
We men and women die!
XCII
DROWNING is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.
Three times, ’t is said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode
Where hope and he part company,—
For he is grasped of God.
The Maker’s cordial visage,
However good to see,
Is shunned, we must admit it,
Like an adversity.
XCIII
How still the bells in steeples stand,
Till, swollen with the sky,
They leap upon their silver feet
In frantic melody!
XCIV
IF the foolish call them “flowers,”
Need the wiser tell?
If the savants “classify” them,
It is just as well!
Those who read the
Revelations
Must not criticise
Those who read the same edition
With beclouded eyes!
Could we stand with that old Moses
Canaan denied,—
Scan, like him, the stately landscape
On the other side,—
Doubtless we should deem superfluous
Many sciences
Not pursued by learned angels
In scholastic skies!
Low amid that glad
Belles lettres
53
Grant that we may stand,
Stars, amid profound Galaxies,
At that grand “Right hand”!
XCV
COULD mortal lip divine
The undeveloped freight
Of a delivered syllable,
’T would crumble with the weight.
XCVI
MY life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
XCVII
WE never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies.
The heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the cubits
54
warp
For fear to be a king.
XCVIII
WHILE I was fearing it, it came,
But came with less of fear,
Because that fearing it so long
Had almost made it dear.
There is a fitting a dismay,
A fitting a despair.
’T is harder knowing it is due,
Than knowing it is here.
The trying on the utmost,
The morning it is new,
Is terribler than wearing it
A whole existence through.
XCIX
THERE is no frigate
55
like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers
56
like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
C
WHO has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God’s residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.
CI
A face devoid of love or grace,
A hateful, hard, successful face,
A face with which a stone
Would feel as thoroughly at ease
As were they old acquaintances,—
First time together thrown.
CII
I had a guinea
57
golden;
I lost it in the sand,
And though the sum was simple,
And pounds were in the land,
Still had it such a value
Unto my frugal eye,
That when I could not find it
I sat me down to sigh.
I had a crimson robin
Who sang full many a day,
But when the woods were painted
He, too, did fly away.
Time brought me other robins,—
Their ballads were the same,—
Still for my missing troubadour
58
I kept the “house at hame.”
59
I had a star in heaven;
One Pleiad
60
was its name,
And when I was not heeding
It wandered from the same.
And though the skies are crowded,
And all the night ashine,
I do not care about it,
Since none of them are mine.
My story has a moral:
I have a missing friend,—
Pleiad its name, and robin,
And guinea in the sand,—
And when this mournful ditty,
Accompanied with tear,
Shall meet the eye of traitor
In country far from here,
Grant that repentance solemn
May seize upon his mind,
And he no consolation
Beneath the sun may find.
CIII
FROM all the jails the boys and girls
Ecstatically leap,—
Beloved, only afternoon
That prison doesn’t keep.
They storm the earth and stun the air,
A mob of solid bliss.
Alas! that frowns could lie in wait
For such a foe as this!
CIV
FEW get enough,—enough is one;
To that ethereal throng
Have not each one of us the right
To stealthily belong?
CV
UPON the gallows hung a wretch,
Too sullied for the hell
To which the law entitled him.
As nature’s curtain fell
The one who bore him tottered in,
For this was woman’s son.
“ ’T was all I had,” she stricken gasped;
Oh, what a livid boon!
CVI
I felt a cleavage in my mind
As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
But could not make them fit.
The thought behind I strove to join
Unto the thought before,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
Like balls upon a floor.
CVII
THE reticent volcano keeps
His never slumbering plan;
Confided are his projects pink
To no precarious man.
If nature will not tell the tale
Jehovah told to her,
Can human nature not survive
Without a listener?
Admonished by her buckled lips
Let every babbler be.
The only secret people keep
Is Immortality.
CVIII
IF recollecting were forgetting,
Then I remember not;
And if forgetting, recollecting,
How near I had forgot!
And if to miss were merry,
And if to mourn were gay,
How very blithe the fingers
That gathered these to-day!
CIX
THE farthest thunder that I heard
Was nearer than the sky,
And rumbles still, though torrid noons
Have lain their missiles by.
The lightning that preceded it
Struck no one but myself,
But I would not exchange the bolt
For all the rest of life.
Indebtedness to oxygen
The chemist may repay,
But not the obligation
To electricity.
It founds the homes and decks the days,
And every clamor bright
Is but the gleam concomitant
61
Of that waylaying light.
The thought is quiet as a flake,—
A crash without a sound;
How life’s reverberation
Its explanation found!
CX
ON the bleakness of my lot
Bloom I strove to raise.
Late, my acre of a rock
Yielded grape and maize.
Soil of flint if steadfast tilled
Will reward the hand;
Seed of palm by Lybian sun
Fructified in sand.
CXI
A door just opened on a street—
I, lost, was passing by—
An instant’s width of warmth disclosed,
And wealth, and company.
The door as sudden shut, and I,
I, lost, was passing by,—
Lost doubly, but by contrast most,
Enlightening misery.
CXII