THE TURN OF THE YEAR
The pines shake and the winds wake,
And the dark waves crowd the sky-line!
The birds wheel out on a troubled sky;
The widening road runs white and long,
And the page is turned,
And the world is tired!
So I want no more of twilight sloth,
And I want no more of resting,
And of all the earth I ask no more
Than the green sea, the great sea,
The long road, the white road,
And a change of life to-day!
IF I LOVE YOU
If I love you, woman of rose
And warmth and wondering eyes,
If it so fall out
That you are the woman I choose,
Oh, what is there left to say,
And what should it matter to me,
Or what can it mean to you?
For under the two white breasts
And the womb that makes you woman
The call of the ages whispers
And the countless ghosts awaken,
And stronger than sighs and weeping
The urge that makes us one,
And older than hate or loving or shame
This want that builds the world!
WHAT SHALL I CARE?
What shall I care for the ways
Of these idle and thin-flanked women in silk
And the lisping men-shadows that trail at their heels?
What are they worth in my world
Or the world that I want,
These flabby-armed, indolent, delicate women
And these half-women daring to call themselves men
Yet afraid to get down to the earth
And afraid of the wind,
Afraid of the truth,
And so sadly afraid of themselves?
How can they help me in trouble and death?
How can they keep me from hating my kind?
Oh, I want to get out of their coffining rooms,
I want to walk free with a man,
A man who has lived and dared
And swung through the cycle of life!
God give me a man for a friend
To the End,
Give me a man with his heel on the neck of Hate,
With his fist in the face of Death,
A man not fretted with womanish things,
Unafraid of the light,
Of the worm in the lip of a corpse,
Unafraid of the call from the cell of his heart,—
God give me a man for friend!
HUNTER AND HUNTED
I
When the sun is high,
And the hills are happy with light,
Then virile and strong I am!
Then ruddy with life I fare,
The fighter who feels no dread,
The roamer who knows no bounds,
The hunter who makes the world his prey,
And shouting and swept with pride,
Still mounts to the lonelier height!
II
In the cool of the day,
When the huddling shadows swarm,
And the ominous eyes look out
And night slinks over the swales
And the silence is chill with death,
Then I am the croucher beside the coals,
The lurker within the shadowy cave,
Who listens and mutters a charm
And trembles and waits,
A hunted thing grown
Afraid of the hunt,
A silence enisled in silence,
A wonder enwrapped in awe!
APPLE BLOSSOMS
I saw a woman stand
Under the seas of bloom,
Under the waves of colour and light,
The showery snow and rose of the odorous trees
That made a glory of earth.
She stood where the petals fell,
And her hands were on her breast,
And her lips were touched with wonder,
And her eyes were full of pain—
For pure she was, and young,
And it was Spring!
THE HOUSE OF LIFE
Quietly I closed the door.
Then I said to my soul:
"I shall never come back,
Back to this haunted room
Where Sorrow and I have slept."
I turned from that hated door
And passed through the House of Life,
Through its ghostly rooms and glad
And its corridors dim with age.
Then lightly I crossed a threshold
Where the casements showed the sun
And I entered an unknown room,—
And my heart went cold,
For about me stood that Chamber of Pain
I had thought to see no more!
ULTIMATA
I am desolate,
Desolate because of a woman.
When at midnight walking alone
I look up at the slow-wheeling stars,
I see only the eyes of this woman.
In bird-haunted valleys and by-ways secluded,
Where once I sought peace,
I find now only unrest
And this one unaltering want.
When the dawn-wind stirs in the pine-tops
I hear only her voice's whisper.
When by day I gaze into the azure above me
I see only the face of this woman.
In the sunlight I cannot find comfort,
Nor can I find peace in the shadows.
Neither can I take joy in the hill-wind,
Nor find solace on kindlier breasts;
For deep in the eyes of all women I watch
I see only her eyes stare back.
Nor can I shut the thought of her out of my heart
And the ache for her out of my hours.
Ruthlessly now she invades even my dreams
And wounds me in sleep;
And my body cries out for her,
Early and late and forever cries out for her,
And her alone,—
And I want this woman!
I am sick at heart because of this woman;
I am lost to shame because of my want;
And mine own people have come to mean naught to me;
And with many about me still am I utterly alone,
And quite solitary now I take my way
Where men are intent on puny things
And phantasmal legions pace!
And a wearisome thing is life,
And forever the shadow of this one woman
Is falling across my path.
The turn in the road is a promise of her.
The twilight is thronged with her ghosts;
The grasses speak only of her,
The leaves whisper her name forever;
The odorous fields are full of her.
Her lips, I keep telling myself,
Are a cup from which I must drink;
Her breast is the one last pillow
Whereon I may ever find peace!
Yet she has not come to me,
And being denied her, everything stands denied,
And all men who have waited in vain for love
Cry out through my desolate heart;
And the want of the hungering world
Runs like fire through my veins
And bursts from my throat in the cry
That I want this woman!
I am possessed of a great sickness
And likewise possessed of a great strength,
And the ultimate hour has come.
I will arise and go unto this woman,
And with bent head and my arms about her knees
I shall say unto her: "Beloved beyond all words,
Others have sought your side,
And many have craved your kiss,
But none, O body of flesh and bone,
Has known a hunger like mine!
And though evil befall, or good,
This hunger is given to me,
And is now made known to you,—
For I must die,
Or you must die,
Or Desire must die
This night!"
THE LIFE ON THE TABLE
In the white-walled room
Where the white bed waits
Stand banks of meaningless flowers;
In the rain-swept street
Are a ghost-like row of cabs;
And along the corridor-dusk
Phantasmal feet repass.
Through the warm, still air
The odour of ether hangs;
And on this slenderest thread
Of one thin pulse
Hangs and swings
The hope of life—
The life of her
I love!
YOU BID ME TO SLEEP
You bid me to sleep,—
But why, O Daughter of Beauty,
Was beauty thus born in the world?
Since out of these shadowy eyes
The wonder shall pass!
And out of this surging and passionate breast
The dream shall depart!
And out of these delicate rivers of warmth
The fire shall wither and fail!
And youth like a bird from your body shall fly!
And Time like a fang on your flesh shall feed!
And this perilous bosom that pulses with love
Shall go down to the dust from which it arose,—
Yet Daughter of Beauty, close,
Close to its sumptuous warmth
You hold my sorrowing head,
And smile with shadowy eyes,
And bid me to sleep again!
THE LAST OF SUMMER
The opal afternoon
Is cool, and very still.
A wash of tawny air,
Sea-green that melts to gold,
Bathes all the skyline, hill by hill.
Out of the black-topped pinelands
A black crow calls,
And the year seems old!
A woman from a doorway sings,
And from the valley-slope a sheep-dog barks,
And through the umber woods the echo falls.
Then silence on the still world lies,
And faint and far the birds fly south,
And behind the dark pines drops the sun,
And a small wind wakes and sighs,
And Summer, see, is done!
AT CHARING-CROSS
Alone amid the Rockies I have stood;
Alone across the prairie's midnight calm
Full often I have fared
And faced the hushed infinity of night;
Alone I have hung poised
Between a quietly heaving sea
And quieter sky,
Aching with isolation absolute;
And in Death's Valley I have walked alone
And sought in vain for some appeasing sign
Of life or movement,
While over-desolate my heart called out
For some befriending face
Or some assuaging voice!
But never on my soul has weighed
Such loneliness as this,
As here amid the seething London tides
I look upon these ghosts that come and go,
These swarming restless souls innumerable,
Who through their million-footed dirge of unconcern
Must know and nurse the thought of kindred ghosts
As lonely as themselves,
Or else go mad with it!
PRESCIENCE
I
"The sting of it all," you said, as you stooped low over your roses,
"The worst of it is, when I think of Death,
That Spring by Spring the Earth shall still be beautiful,
And Summer by Summer be lovely again,
—And I shall be gone!"
II
"I would not care, perhaps," you said, watching your roses,
"If only 'twere dust and ruin and emptiness left behind!
But the thought that Earth and April
Year by casual year
Shall waken around the old ways, soft and beautiful,
Year by year when I am away,
—This, this breaks my heart!"
THE STEEL WORKERS
I watched the workers in steel,
The Pit-like glow of the furnace,
The rivers of molten metal,
The tremulous rumble of cranes,
The throb of the Thor-like hammers
On sullen and resonant anvils!
I saw the half-clad workers
Twisting earth's iron to their use,
Shaping the steel to their thoughts;
And, in some way, out of the fury
And the fires of mortal passion,
It seemed to me,
In some way, out of the torture
And tumult of inchoate Time,
The hammer of sin is shaping
The soul of man!
THE CHILDREN
The city is old in sin,
And children are not for cities,
And, wan-eyed woman, you want them not,
You say with a broken laugh.
Yet out of each wayward softness of voice,
And each fulness of breast,
And each flute-throated echo of song,
Each flutter of lace and quest of beautiful things,
Each coil of entangling hair built into its crown,
Each whisper and touch in the silence of night,
Each red unreasoning mouth that is lifted to mouth,
Each whiteness of brow that is furrowed no more with thought,
Each careless soft curve of lips that can never explain,
Arises the old and the inappeasable cry!
Every girl who leans from a tenement sill
And flutters a hand to a youth,
Every woman who waits for a man in the dusk,
Every harlotous arm flung up to a drunken heel
That would trample truth down in the dust,
Reaches unknowingly out for its own,
And blind to its heritage waits
For its child!
THE NOCTURNE
Remote, in some dim room,
On this dark April morning soft with rain,
I hear her pensive touch
Fall aimless on the keys,
And stop, and play again.
And as the music wakens
And the shadowy house is still,
How all my troubled soul cries out
For things I know not of!
Ah, keen the quick chords fall,
And weighted with regret,
Fade through the quiet rooms;
And warm as April rain
The strange tears fall,
And life in some way seems
Too deep to bear!
THE WILD GEESE
Over my home-sick head,
High in the paling light
And touched with the sunset's glow,
Soaring and strong and free,
The unswerving phalanx sweeps,
The honking wild geese go,—
Go with a flurry of wings
Home to their norland lakes
And the sedge-fringed tarns of peace
And the pinelands soft with Spring!
I cannot go as the geese go,
But into the steadfast North,
The North that is dark and tender,
My home-sick spirit wings,—
Wings with a flurry of longing thoughts
And nests in the tarns of youth.
THE DAY
I
Dewy, dewy lawn-slopes,
Is this the day she comes?
O wild-flower face of Morning,
Must you never wake?
Silvery, silvery sea-line,
Does she come to-day?
O murmurous, murmurous birch-leaves,
Beneath your whispering shadow
She will surely pass;
And thrush beneath the black-thorn
And white-throat in the pine-top,
Sing as you have never sung,
For she will surely come!
II
The lone green of the lawn-slope,
The grey light on the sky-line,
The mournful stir of birch-leaves,
The thin note of the brown thrush,
And the call of troubled white-throats
Across the afternoon!—
Ah, Summer now is over,
And for us the season closed,
For she who came an hour ago
Has gone again—
Has gone!
THE REVOLT
God knows that I've tinkled and jingled and strummed,
That I've piped it and jigged it until I'm fair sick of the game,
That I've given them slag and wasted the silver of song,
That I've thrown them the tailings and they've taken them up content!
But now I want to slough off the bitterness born of it all,
I want to throw off the shackles and chains of time,
I want to sit down with my soul and talk straight out,
I want to make peace with myself,
And say what I have to say,
While still there is time!
Yea, I will arise and go forth, I have said,
To the uplands of truth, to be free as the wind,
Rough and unruly and open and turbulent-throated!
Yea, I will go forth and fling from my soul
The shackles and chains of song!
But, lo, on my wrists are the scars,
And here on my ankles the chain-galls,
And the cell-pallor, see, on my face!
And my throat seems thick with the cell-dust,
And for guidance I grope to the walls,
And after my moment of light
I want to go back to the Dark,
Since the Open still makes me afraid,
And silence seems best in the sun,
And song in the dusk!
ATAVISM
I feel all primal and savage to-day.
I could eat and drink deep and love strong
I could fight and exult and boast and be glad!
I could tear out the life of a wild thing and laugh at it!
I could crush into panting submission the breast of a woman
A-stray from her tribe and her smoke-stained tent-door!
I could glory in folly and fire and ruin,
And race naked-limbed with the wind,
And slink on the heels of my foes
And dabble their blood on my brows—
For to-day I am sick of it all,
This silent and orderly empty life,
And I feel all savage again!
MARCH TWILIGHT
Black with a batter of mud
Stippled with silvery pools
Stands the pavement at the street-end;
And the gutter snow is gone
From cobble and runnelling curb;
And no longer the ramping wind
Is rattling the rusty signs;
And moted and soft and misty
Hangs the sunlight over the cross-streets,
And the home-bound crowds of the city
Walk in a flood of gold.
And suddenly out of the dusk
There comes the ancient question:
Can it be that I have lived
In earlier worlds unknown?
Or is it that somewhere deep
In this husk that men call Me
Are kennelled a motley kin
I never shall know or name,—
Are housed still querulous ghosts
That sigh and awaken and move,
And sleep once more?
THE ECHO
I
I am only a note in the chorus,
A leaf in the fluttering June,
A wave on the deep.
These things that I struggle to utter
Have all been uttered before.
In many another heart
The selfsame song was born,
The ancient ache endured,
The timeless wonder faced,
The unanswered question nursed,
The resurgent hunger felt,
And the eternal failure known!
II
But glad is the lip of its whisper;
The wave, of its life;
The leaf, of its lisp;
And glad for its hour is my soul
For its echo of godlier music,
Its fragment of song!
AUTUMN
The thin gold of the sun lies slanting on the hill;
In the sorrowful greys and muffled violets of the old orchard
A group of girls are quietly gathering apples.
Through the mingled gloom and green they scarcely speak at all,
And their broken voices rise and fall unutterably sad.
There are no birds,
And the goldenrod is gone.
And a child calls out, far away, across the autumn twilight;
And the sad grey of the dusk grows slowly deeper,
And all the world seems old!
FACES
I tire of these empty masks,
These faces of city women
That seem so vapid and well-controlled.
I get tired of their guarded ways
And their eyes that are always empty
Of either passion or hate
Or promise or love,
And that seem to be old
And are never young!
I think of the homelier faces
That I have seen,
The vital and open faces
In the by-ways of the world:
A Polish girl who met
Her lover one wintry morning
Outside the gaol at Ossining;
A lean young Slav violinist
And the steerage women about him,
Held by the sound of his music;
A young and deep-bosomed Teuton
Suckling her shawl-wrapped child
On a grey stone bridge in Detmold;
A group of girls from Ireland,
Crowding the steps of a colonist-car
And singing half-sadly together
As their train rocked on and on
Over the sun-bathed prairie;
A mournful Calabrian mother
Standing and staring out
Past the mists of Ischia
After a fading steamer;
A Nautch girl held by a sailor
Who'd taken a knife from her fingers
But not the fire from her eyes;
And a silent Sicilian mother
Standing alone in the Marina
Awaiting her boy who had been
Long years away!—
These I remember!
And of these
I never tire!
THERE IS STRENGTH IN THE SOIL
There is strength in the soil;
In the earth there is laughter and youth.
There is solace and hope in the upturned loam.
And lo, I shall plant my soul in it here like a seed!
And forth it shall come to me as a flower of song;
For I know it is good to get back to the earth
That is orderly, placid, all-patient!
It is good to know how quiet
And noncommittal it breathes,
This ample and opulent bosom
That must some day nurse us all!
LIFE-DRUNK
On opal Aprilian mornings like this
I seem dizzy and drunk with life.
I waken and wander and laugh in the sun;
With some mystical knowledge enormous
I lift up my face to the light.
Drunk with a gladness stupendous I seem;
With some wine of Immensity god-like I reel;
And my arm could fling Time from His throne;
I could pelt the awed taciturn arch
Of Morning with music and mirth;
And I feel, should I find but a voice for my thought,
That the infinite orbits of all God's loneliest stars
That are weaving vast traceries out on the fringes of Night
Could never stand more than a hem on the robe of my Song!
MY HEART STOOD EMPTY
My heart stood empty and bare,
So I hung it with thoughts of a woman.
The remembered ways of this woman
Hung sweet in my heart.
So I followed where thought should lead,
And it led to her feet.
But the mouth of this woman was pain,
And the love of this woman, regret;
And now only the thought
Of all those remembered thoughts
Of remembered ways,
Is shut in my heart!
ONE NIGHT IN THE NORTHWEST
When they flagged our train because of a broken rail,
I stepped down out of the crowded car,
With its clamour and dust and heat and babel of broken talk.
I stepped out into the cool, the velvet cool, of the night,
And felt the balm of the prairie-wind on my face,
And somewhere I heard the running of water,
I felt the breathing of grass,
And I knew, as I saw the great white stars,
That the world was made for good!
DREAMERS
There's a poet tombed in you,
Man of blood and iron!
There's a dreamer dead and buried
Deep beneath your cynic frown,
Deep beneath your toil!
And deep beneath my music,
There's a strong man stirs in me;
There's a ghost of blood and granite
Coffined in this madness
Carpentered of Song!
You live your day and drain it;
I weave my dream and lose it;
But the red blood lost in me awakens still at times,
At all your city's sky-line,
At all your roaring market-place,
At all its hum of power—
And the poet dead within you stirs
Still at the plaintive note or two
Of a dreamer's plaintive song!
THE QUESTION
I
Glad with the wine of life,
Reeling I go my way,
Drunk with the ache of living
And mouthing my drunken song!
Then comes the lucid moment
And the shadow across the lintel;
And I hear the ghostly whisper,
And I glimpse with startled eyes
The Door beyond the doorway,
And I see the small dark house
Where I must sleep.
II
Then song turns sour on my lips,
And the warmth goes out of my blood,
And I turn me back to the beaker,
And re-draining my cup of dream,
I drown the whispering voices,
I banish the ghostly question
As to which in the end is true:
The wine and the open road?
Or the waiting Door?
THE GIFT OF HATE
Empty it seems, at times, their cry about Love,
Their claim that love is the only thing that survives.
For I who am born of my centuries strewn with hate,
Who was spewed into life from a timeless tangle of sin,
I can hate as strong and as long as I love!
There are hours and issues I hate;
There are creeds and deeds and doubts I hate;
There are men I hate to the uttermost;
And although in their graves they listen and weep,
Earth's mothers and wistful women who cried for peace,
I hate this King of Evil who has crowned my heart with Hate!
THE DREAM
I lay by your side last night.
By you, in my dreams,
I felt the damp of the grave.
I was dead with you—
And my bones still ache with Death.
For my hand went out and I touched your lips,
And I found them fallen away,
Wasted and lost!
Those lips once warm with life
Were eaten and gone!
And my soul screamed out in the dark
At the intimate blackness of Death.
And then I arose from the dead
And returned to the day;
And my bones and my heart still ache with it all,
And I hunger to hear the relieving babble of life,
The crowd in the hurrying street,
The tumult and laughter and talk,
To make me forget!
ONE ROOM IN MY HEART
One room in my heart shall be closed, I said;
One chamber at least in my soul shall be secret and locked!
I shall hold it my holy of holies, and no one shall know it!
But you, calm woman predestined, with casual hands,
You came with this trivial key,
And ward by obdurate ward the surrendering lock fell back,
And disdainfully now you wander and brood and wait
In this room that I thought was my own!
THE MEANING
It isn't the Sea that I love,
But the ships
That must dare and endure and defy and survive it!
It isn't the flesh that I love,
But the spirit
That guides and derides and controls and outlives it!
It isn't this earth that I love,
But the mortals
Who give to it meaning and colour and passion and life!
For what is the Sea without ships?
And what is the flesh without soul?
And what is a world without love?
THE VEIL
You have said that I sold
My life for a song;
Laid bare my heart
That men might listen
And go their ways—
My inchoate heart
That I dare not plumb,
That goes unbridled
To the depths of Hell,
That sings in the sun
To the brink of Heaven!
I have tossed you the spindrift
Born of its fretting
On its shallowest coast,
But over the depths of it
Bastioned in wonder
And silent with fear
God sits with me!
THE MAN OF DREAMS
All my lean life
I garnered nothing but a dream or two,
These others gathered harvests
And grew fat with grain.
But no man lives by bread,
And bread alone.
So, forgetful of their scorn,
When starved, they cried for life,
I gave them my last dreams,
I bared for them my heart,
That they might eat!
APRIL ON THE RIALTO
A canyon of granite and steel,
A river of grim unrest,
And over the fever and street-dust
Arches the azure of dream.
And fretting along the tumult,
Threading the iron curbs,
Tawdry in tinsel and feather
Drift the daughters of pleasure,
The sad-eyed traders in song,
The makers of joy,
The Columbines of the city
Seeking their ends!
But under the beaded eye-lash,
Under the lip with its rouge,
Under the mask of white
Splashed with geranium-red,
As God's own arch of azure
Leans softly over the street,
Surely, this day, runs warmer
The blood through a wasted breast!
THE SURRENDER
Must I round my life to a song,
As the waves wear smooth the shore-stone?
Shall the mortal beat and throb
Of this heart of mine
Be only to crumble a dream,
And fashion the pebbles of fancy,
That the tides of time may cover,
Or a child may find?
Little in truth it matters;
But this at the most I know:
Infinite is the ocean
That thunders upon man's soul,
And the sooner the soul falls broken,
The smoother will be its song!
THE PASSING
Ere the thread is loosed,
And the sands run low,
And the last hope fails,
Wherever we fare,
O Fond and True,
May it fall that we come in the end,
Come back to the crimson valleys,
Back to the Indian Summer,
Back to the northern pine-lands,
And the grey lakes draped with silence,
And the sunlight thin and poignant,
And the leaf that flutters earthward,
And the skyline green and lonely,
And the ramparts of the dead world
Ruddy with wintry rose!
May we fare, O Fond and True,
Through our soft-houred Indian Summer,
Through the paling twilight weather,
And facing the lone green uplands,
And greeting the sun-warmed hills,
Step into the pineland shadows
And enter the sunset valley
And go as the glory goes
Out of the dreaming autumn,
Out of the drifting leaf
And the dying light!
PROTESTATIONS
If I tire of you, beautiful woman,
I know that the fault is mine;
Yet not all mine the failure
And not all mine the loss!
In loveliness still you walk;
But I have walked with sorrow!
I have threaded narrows,
And I have passed through perils
That you know nothing of!
And I in my grief have gazed
In eyes that were not yours;
And my emptier hours have known
The sigh of kindlier bosoms,
The kiss of kindlier mouths!
Yet the end of all is written,
And nothing, O rose-leaf woman,
You ever may dream or do
Henceforth can bring me anguish
Or crown my days with joy!
Three tears, O stately woman,
You said could float your soul,
So little a thing it seemed!
Yet all that's left of life
I'd give to know your love,
I'd give to show my love,
And feel your kiss again!