April twilights, and other poems

Chapter 20: AFTERMATH

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About This Book

The collection brings together early and later lyrics that move between Midwestern prairie scenes and classical European landscapes, pairing domestic memory with mythic evocations. Poems revisit childhood and rural labor, meditate on love and loneliness, and register seasonal shifts from spring thaw to winter stillness. Formal range includes tender ballads, elegies, and narrative fragments that deploy vivid natural imagery—prairie dawns, hawthorns, poppies—and classical allusions to Delphi, Antinous, and martyrs. Throughout, an elegiac, reflective voice balances quiet domestic detail with high, mythic gestures, producing a persistent strain of nostalgia and yearning for vanished time and place.

A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;
A pungent odor from the dusty sage;
A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;
A breaking of the distant table-lands
Through purple mists ascending, and the flare
Of water-ditches silver in the light;
A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
A sudden sickness for the hills of home.

Still about the fire they tell
How it long ago befell
That a shepherd maid and lad
Met and trembled and were glad;
When the swift spring waters ran,
And the wind to boy or man
Brought the aching of his sires—
Song and love and all desires.
Ere the starry dogwoods fell
They were lovers, so they tell.

Woe is me to tell it thee,
Winter winds in Arcady!
Broken pipes and vows forgot,
Scattered flocks returning not,
Frozen brook and drifted hill,
Ashen sun and song-birds still;
Songs of summer and desire
Crooned about the winter fire;
Shepherd lads with silver hair,
Shepherd maids no longer fair.

PROVENÇAL LEGEND

On his little grave and wild,
Faustinus, the martyr child,
Candytuft and mustards grow.
Ah, how many a June has smiled
On the turf he lies below.

Ages gone they laid him there,
Quit of sun and wholesome air,
Broken flesh and tortured limb;
Leaving all his faith the heir
Of his gentle hope and him.

Yonder, under pagan skies,
Bleached by rains, the circus lies,
Where they brought him from his play.
Comeliest his of sacrifice,
Youth and tender April day.

“Art thou not the shepherd’s son?—
There the hills thy lambkins run?—
These the fields thy brethren keep?”
“On a higher hill than yon
Doth my Father lead His sheep.”

“Bring thy ransom, then,” they say,
“Gold enough to pave the way
From the temple to the Rhone.”
When he came, upon his day,
Slender, tremulous, alone,

Mustard flowers like these he pressed,
Golden, flame-like, to his breast,
Blooms the early weanlings eat.
When his Triumph brought him rest,
Yellow bloom lay at his feet.

Golden play-days came: the air
Called him, weanlings bleated there,
Roman boys ran fleet with spring;
Shorn of youth and usage fair,
Hope nor hill-top days they bring.

But the shepherd children still
Come at Easter, warm or chill,
Come with violets gathered wild
From his sloping pasture hill,
Play-fellows who would fulfill
Play-time to that martyr child.

THE ENCORE

No garlands in the winter-time,
No trumpets in the night!
The song ye praise was done lang syne,
And was its own delight.
O’ God’s name take the wreath away,
Since now the music’s sped;
Ye never cry, “Long live the king!”
Until the king is dead.

When I came piping through the land,
One morning in the spring,
With cockle-burrs upon my coat,
’Twas then I was a king:
A mullein sceptre in my hand,
My order daisies three,
With song’s first freshness on my lips—
And then ye pitied me!

SONG

Troubadour, when you were gay,
You wooed with rose and roundelay,
Singing harp-strings, sweet as May.
From beneath the crown of bay
Fell the wild, abundant hair.
Scent of cherry bloom and pear
With you from the south did fare,
Buds of myrtle for your wear.
Soft as summer stars thine eyes,
Planets pale in violet skies;
Summer wind that sings and dies
Was the music of thy sighs.

Troubadour, one winter’s night,
When the pasture-lands were white
And the cruel stars were bright,
Fortune held thee in despite.
Then beneath my tower you bore
Rose nor rondel as of yore,
But a heavy grief and sore
Laid in silence at my door.
April yearneth, April goes;
Not for me her violet blows,
I have done for long with those.
At my breast thy sorrow grows,
Nearer to my heart, God knows,
Than ever roundelay or rose!

L’ENVOI

Where are the loves that we have loved before
When once we are alone, and shut the door?
No matter whose the arms that held me fast,
The arms of Darkness hold me at the last.
No matter down what primrose path I tend,
I kiss the lips of Silence in the end.
No matter on what heart I found delight,
I come again unto the breast of Night.
No matter when or how love did befall,
’Tis Loneliness that loves me best of all,
And in the end she claims me, and I know
That she will stay, though all the rest may go.
No matter whose the eyes that I would keep
Near in the dark, ’tis in the eyes of Sleep
That I must look and look forever more,
When once I am alone, and shut the door.

PART II

THE PALATINE
(IN THE “DARK AGES”)

“Have you been with the King to Rome,
Brother, big brother?”
“I’ve been there and I’ve come home.
Back to your play, little brother.”

“Oh, how high is Caesar’s house,
Brother, big brother?”
“Goats about the doorways browse:
Night hawks nest in the burnt roof-tree,
Home of the wild bird and home of the bee.
A thousand chambers of marble lie
Wide to the sun and the wind and the sky.
Poppies we find amongst our wheat
Grow on Caesar’s banquet seat.
Cattle crop and neatherds drowse
On the floors of Caesar’s house.”

“But what has become of Caesar’s gold,
Brother, big brother?”
“The times are bad and the world is old—
Who knows the where of the Caesars’ gold?
Night comes black on the Caesars’ hill;
The wells are deep and the tales are ill.
Fire-flies gleam in the damp and mould,—
All that is left of the Caesars’ gold.
Back to your play, little brother.”

“What has become of the Caesars’ men,
Brother, big brother?”
“Dogs in the kennel and wolf in the den
Howl for the fate of the Caesars’ men.
Slain in Asia, slain in Gaul,
By Dacian border and Persian wall;
Rhineland orchard and Danube fen
Fatten their roots on Caesar’s men.”

“Why is the world so sad and wide,
Brother, big brother?”
“Saxon boys by their fields that bide
Need not know if the world is wide.
Climb no mountain but Shire-end Hill,
Cross no water but goes to mill;
Ox in the stable and cow in the byre,
Smell of the wood smoke and sleep by the fire;
Sun-up in seed-time—a likely lad
Hurts not his head that the world is sad.
Back to your play, little brother.”

THE GAUL IN THE CAPITOL

The murmur of old, old water,
The yellow of old, old stone,
The fountain that sings through the silence,
The river-god, dreaming alone;
The Antonine booted and mounted
In his sun-lit, hill-top place,
The Julians, gigantic in armour,
The low-browed Claudian race.

The wolf and the twin boys she suckled,
And the powerful breed they bred;
Caesars of duplicate empires,
All under one roof-stead.
Fronting these fronts triumphant,
Conquest on conquest pressed
By these marching, arrogant masters,
Who could have hoped for the West?

At the feet of his multiple victors,
Beaten and dazed and dumb,
One, from the wild new races,
Clay of the kings to come.
Hail, in the halls of the Caesars!
Hail, from the thrones oversea!
Sheath of the sword-like vigour,
Sap of the kings to be!

A LIKENESS
(PORTRAIT BUST OF AN UNKNOWN, CAPITOL, ROME)

In every line a supple beauty—
The restless head a little bent—
Disgust of pleasure, scorn of duty,
The unseeing eyes of discontent.
I often come to sit beside him,
This youth who passed and left no trace
Of good or ill that did betide him,
Save the disdain upon his face.

The hope of all his House, the brother
Adored, the golden-hearted son,
Whom Fortune pampered like a mother;
And then—a shadow on the sun.
Whether he followed Caesar’s trumpet,
Or chanced the riskier game at home
To find how favour played the strumpet
In fickle politics at Rome;

Whether he dreamed a dream in Asia
He never could forget by day,
Or gave his youth to some Aspasia,
Or gamed his heritage away—
Once lost, across the Empire’s border
This man would seek his peace in vain;
His look arraigns a social order
Somehow entrammelled with his pain.

“The dice of gods are always loaded”;
One gambler, arrogant as they,
Fierce, and by fierce injustice goaded,
Left both his hazard and the play.
Incapable of compromises,
Unable to forgive or spare,
The strange awarding of the prizes
He had no fortitude to bear.

Tricked by the forms of things material,—
The solid-seeming arch and stone,
The noise of war, the pomp Imperial,
The heights and depths about a throne—
He missed, among the shapes diurnal,
The old, deep-travelled road from pain,
The thoughts of men, which are eternal,
In which, eternal, men remain.

Ritratto D’ignoto; defying
Things unsubstantial as a dream—
An empire, long in ashes lying—
His face still set against the stream—
Yes, so he looked, that gifted brother
I loved, who passed and left no trace,
Not even—luckier than this other—
His sorrow in a marble face.

THE SWEDISH MOTHER
(NEBRASKA)

“You shall hear the tale again—
Hush, my red-haired daughter.”
Brightly burned the sunset gold
On the black pond water.

Red the pasture ridges gleamed
Where the sun was sinking.
Slow the windmill rasped and wheezed
Where the herd was drinking.

On the kitchen doorstep low
Sat a Swedish mother;
In her arms one baby slept,
By her sat another.

“All time, ’way back in old countree,
Your grandpa, he been good to me.
Your grandpa, he been young man, too,
And I been yust li’l’ girl, like you.
All time in spring, when evening come,
We go bring sheep an’ li’l’ lambs home.
We go big field, ’way up on hill,
Ten times high like our windmill.
One time your grandpa leave me wait
While he call sheep down. By de gate
I sit still till night come dark;
Rabbits run an’ strange dogs bark,
Old owl hoot, an’ your modder cry,
She been so ’fraid big bear come by.
Last, ’way off, she hear de sheep,
Li’l’ bells ring and li’l’ lambs bleat.
Then all sheep come over de hills,
Big white dust, an’ old dog Nils.
Then come grandpa, in his arm
Li’l’ sick lamb dat somet’ing harm.
He so young then, big and strong,
Pick li’l’ girl up, take her ’long,—
Poor li’l’ tired girl, yust like you,—
Lift her up an’ take her too.
Hold her tight an’ carry her far,—
’Ain’t no light but yust one star.
Sheep go ‘bah-h,’ an’ road so steep;
Li’l’ girl she go fast asleep.”

Every night the red-haired child
Begs to hear the story,
When the pasture ridges burn
With the sunset glory.

She can never understand,
Since the tale ends gladly,
Why her mother, telling it,
Always smiles so sadly.

Wonderingly she looks away
Where her mother’s gazing;
Only sees the drifting herd,
In the sunset grazing.

SPANISH JOHNNY

The old West, the old time,
The old wind singing through
The red, red grass a thousand miles,
And, Spanish Johnny, you!
He’d sit beside the water-ditch
When all his herd was in,
And never mind a child, but sing
To his mandolin.

The big stars, the blue night,
The moon-enchanted plain:
The olive man who never spoke,
But sang the songs of Spain.
His speech with men was wicked talk—
To hear it was a sin;
But those were golden things he said
To his mandolin.

The gold songs, the gold stars,
The world so golden then:
And the hand so tender to a child
Had killed so many men.
He died a hard death long ago
Before the Road came in;
The night before he swung, he sang
To his mandolin.

AUTUMN MELODY

In the autumn days, the days of parting,
Days that in a golden silence fall,
When the air is quick with bird-wings starting,
And the asters darken by the wall;

Strong and sweet the wine of heaven is flowing,
Bees and sun and sleep and golden dyes;
Long forgot is budding-time and blowing,
Sunk in honeyed sleep the garden lies.

Spring and storm and summer midnight madness
Dream within the grape but never wake;
Bees and sun and sweetness,—oh, and sadness!
Sun and sweet that reach the heart—and break.

Ah, the pain at heart forever starting,
Ah, the cup untasted that we spilled
In the autumn days, the days of parting!
Would our shades could drink it, and be stilled.

PRAIRIE SPRING

Evening and the flat land,
Rich and somber and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long, empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire;
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.

MACON PRAIRIE
(NEBRASKA)

She held me for a night against her bosom,
The aunt who died when I was yet a baby,
The girl who scarcely lived to be a woman.
Stricken, she left familiar earth behind her,
Mortally ill, she braved the boisterous ocean,
Dying, she crossed irrevocable rivers,
Hailed the blue Lakes, and saw them fade forever,
Hungry for distances;—her heart exulting
That God had made so many seas and countries
To break upon the eye and sweep behind her.
From one whose love was tempered by discretion,
From all the net of caution and convenience
She snatched her high heart for the great adventure,
Broke her bright bubble under far horizons,—
Among the skirmishers that teased the future,
Precursors of the grave slow-moving millions
Already destined to the Westward-faring.

They came, at last, to where the railway ended,
The strange troop captained by a dying woman;
The father, the old man of perfect silence,
The mother, unresisting, broken-hearted,
The gentle brother and his wife, both timid,
Not knowing why they left their native hamlet;
Going as in a dream, but ever going.

In all the glory of an Indian summer,
The lambent transmutations of October,
They started with the great ox-teams from Hastings
And trekked in a southwesterly direction,
Boring directly toward the fiery sunset.
Over the red grass prairies, shaggy-coated,
Without a goal the caravan proceeded;
Across the tablelands and rugged ridges,
Through the coarse grasses which the oxen breasted,
Blue-stem and bunch-grass, red as sea-marsh samphire.
Always the similar, soft undulations
Of the free-breathing earth in golden sunshine,
The hardy wind, and dun hawks flying over
Against the unstained firmament of heaven.

In the front wagon, under the white cover,
Stretched on her feather-bed and propped with pillows,
Never dismayed by the rude oxen’s scrambling,
The jolt of the tied wheel or brake or hold-back,
She lay, the leader of the expedition;
And with her burning eyes she took possession
Of the red waste,—for hers, and theirs, forever.

A wagon-top, rocking in seas of grasses,
A camp-fire on a prairie chartless, trackless,
A red spark under the dark tent of heaven.
Surely, they said, by day she saw a vision,
Though her exhausted strength could not impart it,—
Her breathing hoarser than the tired cattle.

When cold, bright stars the sunburnt days succeeded,
She took me in her bed to sleep beside her,—
A sturdy bunch of life, born on the ocean.
Always she had the wagon cover lifted
Before her face. The sleepless hours till daybreak
She read the stars.

“Plenty of time for sleep,” she said, “hereafter.”

She pointed out the spot on Macon prairie,
Telling my father that she wished to lie there.
“And plant, one day, an apple orchard round me,
In memory of woman’s first temptation,
And man’s first cowardice.”
That night, within her bosom,
I slept.
Before the morning
I cried because the breast was cold behind me.

Now, when the sky blazes like blue enamel,
Brilliant and hard over the blond cornfields,
And through the autumn days our wind is blowing
Like the creative breath of God Almighty—
Then I rejoice that offended love demanded
Such wide retreat, and such self-restitution;
Forged an explorer’s will in a frail woman,
Asked of her perfect faith and renunciation,
Hardships and perils, prophecy and vision,
The leadership of kin, and happy ending
On the red rolling land of Macon prairie.

STREET IN PACKINGTOWN
(CHICAGO)

In the gray dust before a frail gray shed,
By a board fence obscenely chalked in red,
A gray creek willow, left from country days,
Flickers pallid in the haze.

Beside the gutter of the unpaved street,
Tin cans and broken glass about his feet,
And a brown whisky bottle, singled out
For play from prosier crockery strewn about,
Twisting a shoestring noose, a Polack’s brat
Joylessly torments a cat.

His dress, some sister’s cast-off wear,
Is rolled to leave his stomach bare.
His arms and legs with scratches bleed;
He twists the cat and pays no heed.
He mauls her neither less nor more
Because her claws have raked him sore.
His eyes, faint-blue and moody, stare
From under a pale shock of hair.
Neither resentment nor surprise
Lights the desert of those eyes—
To hurt and to be hurt; he knows
All he will know on earth, or need to know.

But there, beneath his willow tree,
His tribal, tutelary tree,
The tortured cat across his knee,
With hate, perhaps, a threat, maybe,
Lithuania looks at me.

A SILVER CUP

In Venice,
Under the Rialto bridge, one summer morning,
In a mean shop I bought a silver goblet.
It was a place of poor and sordid barter,
A damp hole filled with rags and rusty kettles,
Fire-tongs and broken grates and mended bellows,
And common crockery, coarse in use and fashion.
Everything spoke the desperate needs of body,
The breaking up and sale of wretched shelters,
The frail continuance even of hunger.
Misery under all—and that so fleeting!
The fight to fill the pots and pans soon over,
And then this wretched litter left from living.

The goblet
Stood in a dusty window full of charcoal,
The only bright, the only gracious object.
Because my heart was full to overflowing,
Because my day to weep had not come near me,
Because the world was full of love, I bought it.
From all the wreckage there I took no warning;—
Those ugly things outlasting hearts and houses,
And all the life that men build into houses.
Out of the jaws of hunger toothed with iron,
Into the sun exultantly I bore it.
Then, in the brightness of the summer sunshine,
I saw the loops and flourishes of letters,
The scattered trace of some outworn inscription,—
Six lines or more, rubbed flat into the silver,
Dashes and strokes, like rain-marks in a snowdrift.
Was it a prize, perhaps, or gift of friendship?
Was its inscription hope, or recognition?
Not heeding still, I bade my oarsman quicken,
And once ashore, across the Square I hastened,
Precipitate through the idlers and the pigeons,
Behind the Clock Tower, to a cunning craftsman,
There to exhort and urge the deft engraver,
And crowd upon my cup another story;
A name and promise in my memory singing.

In Venice,
Under the Rialto bridge, I bought you.
Now you come back to me, such long years after,
Your promise never kept, your hope defeated,
Your legend now a thing for tears and laughter;—
Though both your names are names of living people,
Cut by the steady hand of that engraver
While I stood over him and urged his deftness.
He played the part; nor stopped to smile and tell me
That for such words his art was too enduring.
His living was to cut such stuff in silver!
And now I have you, what to do, I wonder?
The names, another smith can soon efface them,—
But leave, so beautifully cut, the legend.
Not from a poet’s book, but from the living
Sad mouth of a young peasant boy, I took it;
Four words, which mean that life is sweet together.

In some dark junk-shop window I shall leave you,
Some place of poor effects from broken houses,
Where desperate women go to sell a saucepan
And frightened men to buy a baby’s cradle.
Here, in New York, a city full of exiles,
Short marriages and early deaths and heart-breaks:
In some such window, with the blue glass vases,
The busts of Presidents in plaster, gilded,
Pawned watches, and the rings and chains and bracelets
Given for love and sold for utter anguish,
There I shall leave you, a sole gracious object.

And hope some blind, bright eye will one day spy you—
Some boy with too much love and empty pockets
May read with quickening pulse your brief inscription,
Cut in his mother-language, half forgotten,
Four words which mean that life is sweet together;
Rush in and count his coins upon the table,
(A cup his own as if his heart had made it!)
And bear you off to one who hopes as he does.
So, one day, may the wish, for you, be granted.
They will not know, these two, the names you cover;
Mine and another, razed by violence from you,
Nor his, worn down by time, the first possessor’s—
Who had his story, which you never told me.

RECOGNITION

The old volcanic mountains
That slope up from the sea—
They dream and dream a thousand years
And watch what-is-to-be.

What gladness shines upon them
When, white as white sea-foam,
To the old, old ports of Beauty
A new sail comes home!

GOING HOME
(BURLINGTON ROUTE)

How smoothly the trains run beyond the Missouri;
Even in my sleep I know when I have crossed the river.
The wheels turn as if they were glad to go;
The sharp curves and windings left behind,
The roadway wide open,
(The crooked straight
And the rough places plain.)

They run smoothly, they run softly, too.
There is not noise enough to trouble the lightest sleeper.
Nor jolting to wake the weary-hearted.
I open my window and let the air blow in,
The air of morning,
That smells of grass and earth—
Earth, the grain-giver.

How smoothly the trains run beyond the Missouri;
Even in my sleep I know when I have crossed the river.
The wheels turn as if they were glad to go;
They run like running water,
Like Youth, running away ...
They spin bright along the bright rails,
Singing and humming,
Singing and humming.
They run remembering,
They run rejoicing,
As if they, too, were going home.