New Hampshire, A Poem; with Notes and Grace Notes

I stay;

But it isn’t as if

There wasn’t always Hudson’s Bay

And the fur trade,

A small skiff

And a paddle blade.

I can just see my tent pegged,

And me on the floor,

Crosslegged,

And a trapper looking in at the door

With furs to sell.

His name’s Joe,

Alias John,

And between what he doesn’t know

And won’t tell

About where Henry Hudson’s gone,

I can’t say he’s much help;

But we get on.

The seal yelp

On an ice cake.

It’s not men by some mistake?

No,

There’s not a soul

For a wind-break

Between me and the North Pole—

Except always John-Joe,

My French Indian Esquimaux,

And he’s off setting traps,

In one himself perhaps.

Give a head shake

Over so much bay

Thrown away

In snow and mist

That doesn’t exist,

I was going to say,

For God, man or beast’s sake,

Yet does perhaps for all three.

Don’t ask Joe

What it is to him.

It’s sometimes dim

What it is to me,

Unless it be

It’s the old captain’s dark fate

Who failed to find or force a strait

In its two-thousand-mile coast;

And his crew left him where he failed,

And nothing came of all he sailed.

It’s to say, “You and I”

To such a ghost,

“You and I

Off here

With the dead race of the Great Auk!”

And, “Better defeat almost,

If seen clear,

Than life’s victories of doubt

That need endless talk talk

To make them out.”

Old Davis owned a solid mica mountain

In Dalton that would some day make his fortune.

There’d been some Boston people out to see it:

And experts said that deep down in the mountain

The mica sheets were big as plate glass windows.

He’d like to take me there and show it to me.

“I’ll tell you what you show me. You remember

You said you knew the place where once, on Kinsman,

The early Mormons made a settlement

And built a stone baptismal font outdoors—

But Smith, or some one, called them off the mountain

To go West to a worse fight with the desert.

You said you’d seen the stone baptismal font.

Well, take me there.”

“Some day I will.”

“Today.”

“Huh, that old bath-tub, what is that to see?

Let’s talk about it.”

“Let’s go see the place.”

“To shut you up I’ll tell you what I’ll do:

I’ll find that fountain if it takes all summer,

And both of our united strengths, to do it.”

“You’ve lost it, then?”

“Not so but I can find it.

No doubt it’s grown up some to woods around it.

The mountain may have shifted since I saw it

In eighty-five.”

“As long ago as that?”

“If I remember rightly, it had sprung

A leak and emptied then. And forty years

Can do a good deal to bad masonry.

You won’t see any Mormon swimming in it.

But you have said it, and we’re off to find it.

Old as I am, I’m going to let myself

Be dragged by you all over everywhere—”

“I thought you were a guide.”

“I am a guide,

And that’s why I can’t decently refuse you.”

We made a day of it out of the world,

Ascending to descend to reascend.

The old man seriously took his bearings,

And spoke his doubts in every open place.

We came out on a look-off where we faced

A cliff, and on the cliff a bottle painted,

Or stained by vegetation from above,

A likeness to surprise the thrilly tourist.

“Well, if I haven’t brought you to the fountain,

At least I’ve brought you to the famous Bottle.”

“I won’t accept the substitute. It’s empty.”

“So’s everything.”

“I want my fountain.”

“I guess you’d find the fountain just as empty.

And anyway this tells me where I am.”

“Hadn’t you long suspected where you were?”

“You mean miles from that Mormon settlement?

Look here, you treat your guide with due respect

If you don’t want to spend the night outdoors.

I vow we must be near the place from where

The two converging slides, the avalanches,

On Marshall, look like donkey’s ears.

We may as well see that and save the day.”

“Don’t donkey’s ears suggest we shake our own?”

“For God’s sake, aren’t you fond of viewing nature?

You don’t like nature. All you like is books.

What signify a donkey’s ears and bottle,

However natural? Give you your books!

Well then, right here is where I show you books.

Come straight down off this mountain just as fast

As we can fall and keep a-bouncing on our feet.

It’s hell for knees unless done hell-for-leather.”

“Be ready,” I thought, “for almost anything.”

We struck a road I didn’t recognize,

But welcomed for the chance to lave my shoes

In dust once more. We followed this a mile,

Perhaps, to where it ended at a house

I didn’t know was there. It was the kind

To bring me to for broad-board panelling.

I never saw so good a house deserted.

“Excuse me if I ask you in a window

That happens to be broken,” Davis said.

“The outside doors as yet have held against us.

I want to introduce you to the people

Who used to live here. They were Robinsons.

You must have heard of Clara Robinson,

The poetess who wrote the book of verses

And had it published. It was all about

The posies on her inner window sill,

And the birds on her outer window sill,

And how she tended both, or had them tended:

She never tended anything herself.

She was ‘shut in’ for life. She lived her whole

Life long in bed, and wrote her things in bed.

I’ll show you how she had her sills extended

To entertain the birds and hold the flowers.

Our business first’s up attic with her books.”

We trod uncomfortably on crunching glass

Through a house stripped of everything

Except, it seemed, the poetess’s poems.

Books, I should say!—if books are what is needed.

A whole edition in a packing-case,

That, overflowing like a horn of plenty,

Or like the poetess’s heart of love,

Had spilled them near the window toward the light,

Where driven rain had wet and swollen them.

Enough to stock a village library—

Unfortunately all of one kind, though.

They had been brought home from some publisher

And taken thus into the family.

Boys and bad hunters had known what to do

With stone and lead to unprotected glass:

Shatter it inward on the unswept floors.

How had the tender verse escaped their outrage?

By being invisible for what it was,

Or else by some remoteness that defied them

To find out what to do to hurt a poem.

Yet oh! the tempting flatness of a book,

To send it sailing out the attic window

Till it caught the wind, and, opening out its covers,

Tried to improve on sailing like a tile

By flying like a bird (silent in flight,

But all the burden of its body song),

Only to tumble like a stricken bird,

And lie in stones and bushes unretrieved.

Books were not thrown irreverently about.

They simply lay where some one now and then,

Having tried one, had dropped it at his feet

And left it lying where it fell rejected.

Here were all those the poetess’s life

Had been too short to sell or give away.

“Take one,” Old Davis bade me graciously.

“Why not take two or three?”

“Take all you want.

Good-looking books like that.” He picked one fresh

In virgin wrapper from deep in the box,

And stroked it with a horny-handed kindness.

He read in one and I read in another,

Both either looking for or finding something.

The attic wasps went missing by like bullets.

I was soon satisfied for the time being.

All the way home I kept remembering

The small book in my pocket. It was there.

The poetess had sighed, I knew, in heaven

At having eased her heart of one more copy—

Legitimately. My demand upon her,

Though slight, was a demand. She felt the tug.

In time she would be rid of all her books.

It was long I lay

Awake that night

Wishing the tower

Would name the hour

And tell me whether

To call it day

(Though not yet light)

And give up sleep.

The snow fell deep

With the hiss of spray;

Two winds would meet,

One down one street,

One down another,

And fight in a smother

Of dust and feather.

I could not say,

But feared the cold

Had checked the pace

Of the tower clock

By tying together

Its hands of gold

Before its face.

Then came one knock!

A note unruffled

Of earthly weather,

Though strange and muffled.

The tower said, “One!”

And then a steeple.

They spoke to themselves

And such few people

As winds might rouse

From sleeping warm

(But not unhouse).

They left the storm

That struck en masse

My window glass

Like a beaded fur.

In that grave One

They spoke of the sun

And moon and stars,

Saturn and Mars

And Jupiter.

Still more unfettered,

They left the named

And spoke of the lettered,

The sigmas and taus

Of constellations.

They filled their throats

With the furthest bodies

To which man sends his

Speculation,

Beyond which God is;

The cosmic motes

Of yawning lenses.

Their solemn peals

Were not their own:

They spoke for the clock

With whose vast wheels

Theirs interlock.

In that grave word

Uttered alone

The utmost star

Trembled and stirred,

Though set so far

Its whirling frenzies

Appear like standing

In one self station.

It has not ranged,

And save for the wonder

Of once expanding

To be a nova,

It has not changed

To the eye of man

On planets over

Around and under

It in creation

Since man began

To drag down man

And nation nation.

Why make so much of fragmentary blue

In here and there a bird, or butterfly,

Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,

When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—

Though some savants make earth include the sky;

And blue so far above us comes so high,

It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

The living come with grassy tread

To read the gravestones on the hill;

The graveyard draws the living still,

But never any more the dead.

The verses in it say and say:

“The ones who living come today

To read the stones and go away

Tomorrow dead will come to stay.”

So sure of death the marbles rhyme,

Yet can’t help marking all the time

How no one dead will seem to come.

What is it men are shrinking from?

It would be easy to be clever

And tell the stones: Men hate to die

And have stopped dying now forever.

I think they would believe the lie.

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

I slumbered with your poems on my breast

Spread open as I dropped them half-read through

Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb

To see, if in a dream they brought of you,

I might not have the chance I missed in life

Through some delay, and call you to your face

First soldier, and then poet, and then both,

Who died a soldier-poet of your race.

I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain

Unsaid between us, brother, and this remained—

And one thing more that was not then to say:

The Victory for what it lost and gained.

You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire

On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day

The war seemed over more for you than me,

But now for me than you—the other way.

How over, though, for even me who knew

The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine,

If I was not to speak of it to you

And see you pleased once more with words of mine?

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,

We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, “Whose colt?”

A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,

The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head

And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.

We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,

And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey,

Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.

“I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow.

He isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play

With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.

I doubt if even his mother could tell him, ‘Sakes,

It’s only weather.’ He’d think she didn’t know!

Where is his mother? He can’t be out alone.”

And now he comes again with clatter of stone,

And mounts the wall again with whited eyes

And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight.

He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.

“Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,

When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,

Ought to be told to come and take him in.”

Before man came to blow it right

The wind once blew itself untaught,

And did its loudest day and night

In any rough place where it caught.

Man came to tell it what was wrong:

It hadn’t found the place to blow;

It blew too hard—the aim was song.

And listen—how it ought to go!

He took a little in his mouth,

And held it long enough for north

To be converted into south,

And then by measure blew it forth.

By measure. It was word and note,

The wind the wind had meant to be—

A little through the lips and throat.

The aim was song—the wind could see.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing

Deeper down in the well than where the water

Gives me back in a shining surface picture

Me myself in the summer heaven godlike

Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,

I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,

Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.

Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,

And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry

There is more unmixed color on the wing

Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry.

But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:

And now from having ridden out desire

They lie closed over in the wind and cling

Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.

Always the same, when on a fated night

At last the gathered snow lets down as white

As may be in dark woods, and with a song

It shall not make again all winter long

Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,

I almost stumble looking up and round,

As one who overtaken by the end

Gives up his errand, and lets death descend

Upon him where he is, with nothing done

To evil, no important triumph won,

More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:

I know that winter death has never tried

The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap

In long storms an undrifted four feet deep

As measured against maple, birch and oak,

It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak;

And I shall see the snow all go down hill

In water of a slender April rill

That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake

And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.

Nothing will be left white but here a birch,

And there a clump of houses with a church.

Love at the lips was touch

As sweet as I could bear;

And once that seemed too much;

I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,

The flow of—was it musk

From hidden grapevine springs

Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache

From sprays of honeysuckle

That when they’re gathered shake

Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those

Seemed strong when I was young;

The petal of the rose

It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt

That is not dashed with pain

And weariness and fault;

I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark

Of almost too much love,

The sweet of bitter bark

And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred

I take away my hand

From leaning on it hard

In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:

I long for weight and strength

To feel the earth as rough

To all my length.

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark

And cold to an orchard so young in the bark

Reminds me of all that can happen to harm

An orchard away at the end of the farm

All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,

I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse

By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.

(If certain it wouldn’t be idle to call

I’d summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall

And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)

I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.

(We made it secure against being, I hope,

By setting it out on a northerly slope.)

No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;

But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.

“How often already you’ve had to be told,

Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.

Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”

I have to be gone for a season or so.

My business awhile is with different trees,

Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,

And such as is done to their wood with an axe—

Maples and birches and tamaracks.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night

And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight

When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)

Its heart sinks lower under the sod.

But something has to be left to God.

Love and forgetting might have carried them

A little further up the mountain side

With night so near, but not much further up.

They must have halted soon in any case

With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was

With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;

When they were halted by a tumbled wall

With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,

Spending what onward impulse they still had

In one last look the way they must not go,

On up the failing path, where, if a stone

Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;

No footstep moved it. “This is all,” they sighed,

“Good-night to woods.” But not so; there was more.

A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them

Across the wall, as near the wall as they.

She saw them in their field, they her in hers.

The difficulty of seeing what stood still,

Like some up-ended boulder split in two,

Was in her clouded eyes: they saw no fear there.

She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.

Then, as if they were something that, though strange,

She could not trouble her mind with too long,

She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.

“This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?”

But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.

A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them

Across the wall as near the wall as they.

This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,

Not the same doe come back into her place.

He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,

As if to ask, “Why don’t you make some motion?

Or give some sign of life? Because you can’t.

I doubt if you’re as living as you look.”

Thus till he had them almost feeling dared

To stretch a proffering hand—and a spell-breaking.

Then he too passed unscared along the wall.

Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.

“This must be all.” It was all. Still they stood,

A great wave from it going over them,

As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor

Had made them certain earth returned their love.

They sent him back to her. The letter came

Saying . . . And she could have him. And before

She could be sure there was no hidden ill

Under the formal writing, he was in her sight,

Living. They gave him back to her alive—

How else? They are not known to send the dead—

And not disfigured visibly. His face?

His hands? She had to look, to ask,

“What is it, dear?” And she had given all

And still she had all—they had—they the lucky!

Wasn’t she glad now? Everything seemed won,

And all the rest for them permissible ease.

She had to ask, “What was it, dear?”

“Enough,

Yet not enough. A bullet through and through,

High in the breast. Nothing but what good care

And medicine and rest, and you a week,

Can cure me of to go again.” The same

Grim giving to do over for them both.

She dared no more than ask him with her eyes

How was it with him for a second trial.

And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.

They had given him back to her, but not to keep.

The farm house lingers, though averse to square

With the new city street it has to wear

A number in. But what about the brook

That held the house as in an elbow-crook?

I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength

And impulse, having dipped a finger length

And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed

A flower to try its currents where they crossed.

The meadow grass could be cemented down

From growing under pavements of a town;

The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.

Is water wood to serve a brook the same?

How else dispose of an immortal force

No longer needed? Staunch it at its source

With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown

Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone

In fetid darkness still to live and run—

And all for nothing it had ever done

Except forget to go in fear perhaps.

No one would know except for ancient maps

That such a brook ran water. But I wonder

If from its being kept forever under

The thoughts may not have risen that so keep

This new-built city from both work and sleep.

Builder, in building the little house,

In every way you may please yourself;

But please please me in the kitchen chimney:

Don’t build me a chimney upon a shelf.

However far you must go for bricks,

Whatever they cost a-piece or a pound,

Buy me enough for a full-length chimney,

And build the chimney clear from the ground.

It’s not that I’m greatly afraid of fire,

But I never heard of a house that throve

(And I know of one that didn’t thrive)

Where the chimney started above the stove.

And I dread the ominous stain of tar

That there always is on the papered walls,

And the smell of fire drowned in rain

That there always is when the chimney’s false.

A shelf’s for a clock or vase or picture,

But I don’t see why it should have to bear

A chimney that only would serve to remind me

Of castles I used to build in air.

The west was getting out of gold,

The breath of air had died of cold,

When shoeing home across the white,

I thought I saw a bird alight.

In summer when I passed the place

I had to stop and lift my face;

A bird with an angelic gift

Was singing in it sweet and swift.

No bird was singing in it now.

A single leaf was on a bough,

And that was all there was to see

In going twice around the tree.

From my advantage on a hill

I judged that such a crystal chill

Was only adding frost to snow

As gilt to gold that wouldn’t show.

A brush had left a crooked stroke

Of what was either cloud or smoke

From north to south across the blue;

A piercing little star was through.

He halted in the wind, and—what was that

Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?

He stood there bringing March against his thought,

And yet too ready to believe the most.

“Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,” I said;

And truly it was fair enough for flowers

Had we but in us to assume in March

Such white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so in a strange world,

Myself as one his own pretense deceives;

And then I said the truth (and we moved on):

A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.

From where I lingered in a lull in March

Outside the sugar-house one night for choice,

I called the fireman with a careful voice

And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:

“O fireman, give the fire another stoke,

And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.”

I thought a few might tangle, as they did,

Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare

Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,

And so be added to the moon up there.

The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show

On every tree a bucket with a lid,

And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.

The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.

They were content to figure in the trees

As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.

And that was what the boughs were full of soon.

Spades take up leaves

No better than spoons,

And bags full of leaves

Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise

Of rustling all day

Like rabbit and deer

Running away.

But the mountains I raise

Elude my embrace,

Flowing over my arms

And into my face.

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight;

And since they grew duller

From contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop,

And who’s to say where

The harvest shall stop?

The sound of the closing outside door was all.

You made no sound in the grass with your footfall,

As far as you went from the door, which was not far;

But you had awakened under the morning star

The first song-bird that awakened all the rest.

He could have slept but a moment more at best.

Already determined dawn began to lay

In place across a cloud the slender ray

For prying beneath and forcing the lids of sight,

And loosing the pent-up music of over-night.

But dawn was not to begin their “pearly-pearly”

(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early,

Before it changes to diamonds in the sun),

Neither was song that day to be self-begun.

You had begun it, and if there needed proof—

I was asleep still under the dripping roof,

My window curtain hung over the sill to wet;

But I should awake to confirm your story yet;

I should be willing to say and help you say

That once you had opened the valley’s singing day.

All crying “We will go with you, O Wind!”

The foliage follow him, leaf and stem;

But a sleep oppresses them as they go,

And they end by bidding him stay with them.

Since ever they flung abroad in spring

The leaves had promised themselves this flight,

Who now would fain seek sheltering wall,

Or thicket, or hollow place for the night.

And now they answer his summoning blast

With an ever vaguer and vaguer stir,

Or at utmost a little reluctant whirl

That drops them no further than where they were.

I only hope that when I am free

As they are free to go in quest

Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life

It may not seem better to me to rest.

To think to know the country and not know

The hillside on the day the sun lets go

Ten million silver lizards out of snow!

As often as I’ve seen it done before

I can’t pretend to tell the way it’s done.

It looks as if some magic of the sun

Lifted the rug that bred them on the floor

And the light breaking on them made them run.

But if I thought to stop the wet stampede,

And caught one silver lizard by the tail,

And put my foot on one without avail,

And threw myself wet-elbowed and wet-kneed

In front of twenty others’ wriggling speed,—

In the confusion of them all aglitter,

And birds that joined in the excited fun

By doubling and redoubling song and twitter,

I have no doubt I’d end by holding none.

It takes the moon for this. The sun’s a wizard

By all I tell; but so’s the moon a witch.

From the high west she makes a gentle cast

And suddenly, without a jerk or twitch,

She has her spell on every single lizard.

I fancied when I looked at six o’clock

The swarm still ran and scuttled just as fast.

The moon was waiting for her chill effect.

I looked at nine: the swarm was turned to rock

In every lifelike posture of the swarm,

Transfixed on mountain slopes almost erect.

Across each other and side by side they lay.

The spell that so could hold them as they were

Was wrought through trees without a breath of storm

To make a leaf, if there had been one, stir.

It was the moon’s: she held them until day,

One lizard at the end of every ray.

The thought of my attempting such a stay!

A plow, they say, to plow the snow.

They cannot mean to plant it, though—

Unless in bitterness to mock

At having cultivated rock.