Poems

As the kindling glances,
Queen-like and clear,
Which the bright moon lances
From her tranquil sphere
At the sleepless waters
Of a lonely mere,
On the wild whirling waves, mournfully, mournfully,
Shiver and die;
As the tears of sorrow
Mothers have shed—
Prayers that to-morrow
Shall in vain be sped
When the flower they flow for
Lies frozen and dead—
Fall on the throbbing brow, fall on the burning breast,
Bringing no rest;

Like bright waves that fall
With a lifelike motion
On the lifeless margin of the sparkling ocean;
A wild rose climbing up a mouldering wall;
A gush of sunbeams through a ruined hall;
Strains of glad music at a funeral,—
So sad, and with so wild a start
To this deep-sobered heart,
So anxiously and painfully,
So drearily and doubtfully,
And, oh! with such intolerable change
Of thought, such contrast strange,
O unforgotten voice, thy accents come,
Like wanderers from the world’s extremity,
Unto their ancient home!

In vain, all, all in vain,
They beat upon mine ear again,—
Those melancholy tones so sweet and still;
Those lute-like tones which in the bygone year
Did steal into mine ear;
Blew such a thrilling summons to my will,
Yet could not shake it;
Made my tost heart its very life-blood spill,
Yet could not break it.

YOUTH’S AGITATIONS.

When I shall be divorced, some ten years hence,
From this poor present self which I am now;
When youth has done its tedious vain expense
Of passions that forever ebb and flow:

Shall I not joy youth’s heats are left behind,
And breathe more happy in an even clime?
Ah, no! for then I shall begin to find
A thousand virtues in this hated time!

Then I shall wish its agitations back,
And all its thwarting currents of desire;
Then I shall praise the heat which then I lack,
And call this hurrying fever, generous fire;

And sigh that one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common,—discontent.

THE WORLD’S TRIUMPHS.

So far as I conceive the world’s rebuke
To him addressed who would recast her new,
Not from herself her fame of strength she took,
But from their weakness who would work her rue.

“Behold,” she cries, “so many rages lulled,
So many fiery spirits quite cooled down;
Look how so many valors, long undulled,
After short commerce with me, fear my frown!

Thou too, when thou against my crimes wouldst cry,
Let thy foreboded homage check thy tongue!”—
The world speaks well; yet might her foe reply,
“Are wills so weak? then let not mine wait long!

Hast thou so rare a poison? let me be
Keener to slay thee, lest thou poison me!”

STAGIRIUS.[3]

Thou, who dost dwell alone;
Thou, who dost know thine own;
Thou, to whom all are known
From the cradle to the grave,—
Save, oh! save.
From the world’s temptations,
From tribulations,
From that fierce anguish
Wherein we languish,
From that torpor deep
Wherein we lie asleep,
Heavy as death, cold as the grave,
Save, oh! save.

When the soul, growing clearer,
Sees God no nearer;
When the soul, mounting higher,
To God comes no nigher;
But the arch-fiend Pride
Mounts at her side,
Foiling her high emprise,
Sealing her eagle eyes,
And, when she fain would soar,
Makes idols to adore,
Changing the pure emotion
Of her high devotion,
To a skin-deep sense
Of her own eloquence;
Strong to deceive, strong to enslave,—
Save, oh! save.

From the ingrained fashion
Of this earthly nature
That mars thy creature;
From grief that is but passion,
From mirth that is but feigning,
From tears that bring no healing,
From wild and weak complaining,
Thine old strength revealing,
Save, oh! save.
From doubt, where all is double;
Where wise men are not strong,
Where comfort turns to trouble,
Where just men suffer wrong;
Where sorrow treads on joy,
Where sweet things soonest cloy,
Where faiths are built on dust,
Where love is half mistrust,
Hungry, and barren, and sharp as the sea,—
Oh! set us free.
Oh, let the false dream fly,
Where our sick souls do lie
Tossing continually!
Oh, where thy voice doth come,
Let all doubts be dumb,
Let all words be mild,
All strifes be reconciled,
All pains beguiled!
Light bring no blindness,
Love no unkindness,
Knowledge no ruin,
Fear no undoing!
From the cradle to the grave,
Save, oh! save.

HUMAN LIFE.

What mortal, when he saw,
Life’s voyage done, his heavenly Friend,
Could ever yet dare tell him fearlessly,—
“I have kept uninfringed my nature’s law;
The inly-written chart thou gavest me,
To guide me, I have steered by to the end”?

Ah! let us make no claim,
On life’s incognizable sea,
To too exact a steering of our way;
Let us not fret and fear to miss our aim,
If some fair coast has lured us to make stay,
Or some friend hailed us to keep company.

Ay! we would each fain drive
At random, and not steer by rule.
Weakness! and worse, weakness bestowed in vain!
Winds from our side the unsuiting consort rive;
We rush by coasts where we had lief remain:
Man cannot, though he would, live chance’s fool.

No! as the foaming swath
Of torn-up water, on the main,
Falls heavily away with long-drawn roar
On either side the black deep-furrowed path
Cut by an onward-laboring vessel’s prore,
And never touches the ship-side again;

Even so we leave behind,
As, chartered by some unknown Powers,
We stem across the sea of life by night,
The joys which were not for our use designed,—
The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours.

TO A GYPSY CHILD BY THE SEASHORE;

DOUGLAS, ISLE OF MAN.

Who taught this pleading to unpractised eyes?
Who hid such import in an infant’s gloom?
Who lent thee, child, this meditative guise?
Who massed, round that slight brow, these clouds of doom?

Lo! sails that gleam a moment, and are gone;
The swinging waters, and the clustered pier.
Not idly earth and ocean labor on,
Nor idly do these sea-birds hover near.

But thou, whom superfluity of joy
Wafts not from thine own thoughts, nor longings vain,
Nor weariness, the full-fed soul’s annoy,
Remaining in thy hunger and in thy pain;
Thou, drugging pain by patience; half averse
From thine own mother’s breast, that knows not thee;
With eyes which sought thine eyes thou didst converse,
And that soul-searching vision fell on me.

Glooms that go deep as thine, I have not known;
Moods of fantastic sadness, nothing worth.
Thy sorrow and thy calmness are thine own;
Glooms that enhance and glorify this earth.

What mood wears like complexion to thy woe?
His, who in mountain glens, at noon of day,
Sits rapt, and hears the battle break below?
—Ah! thine was not the shelter, but the fray.

Some exile’s, mindful how the past was glad?
Some angel’s, in an alien planet born?
—No exile’s dream was ever half so sad,
Nor any angel’s sorrow so forlorn.

Is the calm thine of stoic souls, who weigh
Life well, and find it wanting, nor deplore;
But in disdainful silence turn away,
Stand mute, self-centred, stern, and dream no more?

Or do I wait, to hear some gray-haired king
Unravel all his many-colored lore;
Whose mind hath known all arts of governing,
Mused much, loved life a little, loathed it more?

Down the pale cheek, long lines of shadow slope,
Which years, and curious thought, and suffering give.
—Thou hast foreknown the vanity of hope,
Foreseen thy harvest, yet proceed’st to live.

O meek anticipant of that sure pain
Whose sureness gray-haired scholars hardly learn!
What wonder shall time breed, to swell thy strain?
What heavens, what earth, what suns, shalt thou discern?

Ere the long night, whose stillness brooks no star,
Match that funereal aspect with her pall,
I think thou wilt have fathomed life too far,
Have known too much—or else forgotten all.

The Guide of our dark steps, a triple veil
Betwixt our senses and our sorrow keeps;
Hath sown with cloudless passages the tale
Of grief, and eased us with a thousand sleeps.

Ah! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Not daily labor’s dull, Lethæan spring,
Oblivion in lost angels can infuse
Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing;

And though thou glean, what strenuous gleaners may,
In the thronged fields where winning comes by strife;
And though the just sun gild, as mortals pray,
Some reaches of thy storm-vexed stream of life;

Though that blank sunshine blind thee; though the cloud
That severed the world’s march and thine, be gone;
Though ease dulls grace, and wisdom be too proud
To halve a lodging that was all her own,—

Once, ere thy day go down, thou shalt discern,
Oh, once, ere night, in thy success, thy chain!
Ere the long evening close, thou shalt return,
And wear this majesty of grief again.

A QUESTION.

TO FAUSTA.

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows
Like the wave;
Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men.
Love lends life a little grace,
A few sad smiles; and then
Both are laid in one cold place,—
In the grave.

Dreams dawn and fly, friends smile and die
Like spring flowers;
Our vaunted life is one long funeral.
Men dig graves with bitter tears
For their dead hopes; and all,
Mazed with doubts and sick with fears,
Count the hours.

We count the hours! These dreams of ours,
False and hollow,
Do we go hence, and find they are not dead?
Joys we dimly apprehend
Faces that smiled and fled,
Hopes born here, and born to end,
Shall we follow?

IN UTRUMQUE PARATUS.

If, in the silent mind of One all-pure,
At first imagined lay
The sacred world; and by procession sure
From those still deeps, in form and color drest,
Seasons alternating, and night and day,
The long-mused thought to north, south, east, and west,
Took then its all-seen way;

Oh, waking on a world which thus-wise springs!
Whether it needs thee count
Betwixt thy waking and the birth of things
Ages or hours—oh, waking on life’s stream!
By lonely pureness to the all-pure fount
(Only by this thou canst) the colored dream
Of life remount!

Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
And faint the city gleams;
Rare the lone pastoral huts—marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,—
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams.

But, if the wild unfathered mass no birth
In divine seats hath known;
In the blank, echoing solitude, if Earth,
Rocking her obscure body to and fro,
Ceases not from all time to heave and groan,
Unfruitful oft, and at her happiest throe
Forms, what she forms, alone;

Oh, seeming sole to awake, thy sun-bathed head
Piercing the solemn cloud
Round thy still dreaming brother-world outspread!
O man, whom Earth, thy long-vexed mother, bare
Not without joy,—so radiant, so endowed
(Such happy issue crowned her painful care),—
Be not too proud!

Oh, when most self-exalted most alone,
Chief dreamer, own thy dream!
Thy brother-world stirs at thy feet unknown;
Who hath a monarch’s hath no brother’s part—
Yet doth thine inmost soul with yearning teem.
Oh, what a spasm shakes the dreamer’s heart!
“I, too, but seem.”

THE WORLD AND THE QUIETIST.

TO CRITIAS.

“Why, when the world’s great mind
Hath finally inclined,
Why,” you say, Critias, “be debating still?
Why, with these mournful rhymes
Learned in more languid climes,
Blame our activity
Who, with such passionate will,
Are what we mean to be?”

Critias, long since, I know
(For Fate decreed it so),
Long since the world hath set its heart to live;
Long since, with credulous zeal
It turns life’s mighty wheel,
Still doth for laborers send
Who still their labor give,
And still expects an end.

Yet, as the wheel flies round,
With no ungrateful sound
Do adverse voices fall on the world’s ear.
Deafened by his own stir,
The rugged laborer
Caught not till then a sense
So glowing and so near
Of his omnipotence.

So, when the feast grew loud
In Susa’s palace proud,
A white-robed slave stole to the great king’s side.
He spake—the great king heard;
Felt the slow-rolling word
Swell his attentive soul;
Breathed deeply as it died,
And drained his mighty bowl.

THE SECOND BEST.

Moderate tasks and moderate leisure,
Quiet living, strict-kept measure
Both in suffering and in pleasure,—
’Tis for this thy nature yearns.

But so many books thou readest,
But so many schemes thou breedest,
But so many wishes feedest,
That thy poor head almost turns.

And (the world’s so madly jangled,
Human things so fast entangled)
Nature’s wish must now be strangled
For that best which she discerns.

So it must be! yet, while leading
A strained life, while over-feeding,
Like the rest, his wit with reading,
No small profit that man earns,—

Who through all he meets can steer him,
Can reject what cannot clear him,
Cling to what can truly cheer him;
Who each day more surely learns

That an impulse, from the distance
Of his deepest, best existence,
To the words, “Hope, Light, Persistence,”
Strongly sets and truly burns.

CONSOLATION.

Mist clogs the sunshine.
Smoky dwarf houses
Hem me round everywhere;
A vague dejection
Weighs down my soul.

Yet, while I languish,
Everywhere countless
Prospects unroll themselves,
And countless beings
Pass countless moods.

Far hence, in Asia,
On the smooth convent-roofs,
On the gold terraces,
Of holy Lassa,
Bright shines the sun.

Gray time-worn marbles
Hold the pure Muses;
In their cool gallery,
By yellow Tiber,
They still look fair.

Strange unloved uproar [A]
Shrills round their portal;
Yet not on Helicon
Kept they more cloudless
Their noble calm.

Through sun-proof alleys
In a lone, sand-hemmed
City of Africa,
A blind, led beggar,
Age-bowed, asks alms.

No bolder robber
Erst abode ambushed
Deep in the sandy waste;
No clearer eyesight
Spied prey afar.

Saharan sand-winds
Seared his keen eyeballs;
Spent is the spoil he won.
For him the present
Holds only pain.

Two young, fair lovers,
Where the warm June-wind,
Fresh from the summer fields
Plays fondly round them,
Stand, tranced in joy.

With sweet, joined voices,
And with eyes brimming,
“Ah!” they cry, “Destiny,
Prolong the present!
Time, stand still here!”

The prompt stern goddess
Shakes her head, frowning:
Time gives his hour-glass
Its due reversal;
Their hour is gone.

With weak indulgence
Did the just goddess
Lengthen their happiness,
She lengthened also
Distress elsewhere.

The hour whose happy
Unalloyed moments
I would eternalize,
Ten thousand mourners
Well pleased see end.

The bleak, stern hour,
Whose severe moments
I would annihilate,
Is passed by others
In warmth, light, joy.

Time, so complained of,
Who to no one man
Shows partiality,
Brings round to all men
Some undimmed hours.

[A] Written during the siege of Rome by the French, 1849.

RESIGNATION.

TO FAUSTA.

To die be given us, or attain!
Fierce work it were, to do again.

So pilgrims, bound for Mecca, prayed
At burning noon; so warriors said,
Scarfed with the cross, who watched the miles
Of dust which wreathed their struggling files
Down Lydian mountains; so, when snows
Round Alpine summits, eddying, rose,
The Goth, bound Rome-wards; so the Hun,
Crouched on his saddle, while the sun
Went lurid down o’er flooded plains
Through which the groaning Danube strains
To the drear Euxine: so pray all,
Whom labors, self-ordained, inthrall;
Because they to themselves propose
On this side the all-common close
A goal which, gained, may give repose.
So pray they; and to stand again
Where they stood once, to them were pain;
Pain to thread back and to renew
Past straits, and currents long steered through.

But milder natures, and more free,—
Whom an unblamed serenity
Hath freed from passions, and the state
Of struggle these necessitate;
Whom schooling of the stubborn mind
Hath made, or birth hath found, resigned,—
These mourn not, that their goings pay
Obedience to the passing day.
These claim not every laughing hour
For handmaid to their striding power;
Each in her turn, with torch upreared,
To await their march; and when appeared,
Through the cold gloom, with measured race,
To usher for a destined space
(Her own sweet errands all foregone)
The too imperious traveller on.
These, Fausta, ask not this; nor thou,
Time’s chafing prisoner, ask it now!

We left just ten years since, you say,
That wayside inn we left to-day.[4]
Our jovial host, as forth we fare,
Shouts greeting from his easy-chair.
High on a bank our leader stands,
Reviews and ranks his motley bands,
Makes clear our goal to every eye,—
The valley’s western boundary.
A gate swings to! our tide hath flowed
Already from the silent road.
The valley-pastures, one by one,
Are threaded, quiet in the sun;
And now, beyond the rude stone bridge,
Slopes gracious up the western ridge.
Its woody border, and the last
Of its dark upland farms, is past;
Cool farms, with open-lying stores,
Under their burnished sycamores,—
All past! and through the trees we glide
Emerging on the green hillside.
There climbing hangs, a far-seen sign,
Our wavering, many-colored line;
There winds, up-streaming slowly still
Over the summit of the hill.
And now, in front, behold outspread
Those upper regions we must tread,—
Mild hollows, and clear heathy swells,
The cheerful silence of the fells.

Some two hours’ march, with serious air,
Through the deep noontide heats we fare;
The red-grouse, springing at our sound,
Skims, now and then, the shining ground;
No life, save his and ours, intrudes
Upon these breathless solitudes.
Oh, joy! again the farms appear.
Cool shade is there, and rustic cheer;
There springs the brook will guide us down,
Bright comrade, to the noisy town.
Lingering, we follow down; we gain
The town, the highway, and the plain.
And many a mile of dusty way,
Parched and road-worn, we made that day;
But, Fausta, I remember well,
That as the balmy darkness fell,
We bathed our hands with speechless glee,
That night, in the wide-glimmering sea.

Once more we tread this self-same road,
Fausta, which ten years since we trod;
Alone we tread it, you and I,
Ghosts of that boisterous company.
Here, where the brook shines, near its head,
In its clear, shallow, turf-fringed bed;
Here, whence the eye first sees, far down,
Capped with faint smoke, the noisy town,—
Here sit we, and again unroll,
Though slowly, the familiar whole.
The solemn wastes of heathy hill
Sleep in the July sunshine still;
The self-same shadows now, as then,
Play through this grassy upland glen;
The loose dark stones on the green way
Lie strewn, it seems, where then they lay;
On this mild bank above the stream,
(You crush them!) the blue gentians gleam.
Still this wild brook, the rushes cool,
The sailing foam, the shining pool!
These are not changed; and we, you say,
Are scarce more changed, in truth, than they.

The gypsies, whom we met below,
They too have long roamed to and fro;
They ramble, leaving, where they pass,
Their fragments on the cumbered grass.
And often to some kindly place
Chance guides the migratory race,
Where, though long wanderings intervene,
They recognize a former scene.
The dingy tents are pitched; the fires
Give to the wind their wavering spires;
In dark knots crouch round the wild flame
Their children, as when first they came;
They see their shackled beasts again
Move, browsing, up the gray-walled lane.
Signs are not wanting, which might raise
The ghost in them of former days,—
Signs are not wanting, if they would;
Suggestions to disquietude.
For them, for all, time’s busy touch,
While it mends little, troubles much.
Their joints grow stiffer—but the year
Runs his old round of dubious cheer;
Chilly they grow—yet winds in March,
Still, sharp as ever, freeze and parch;
They must live still—and yet, God knows,
Crowded and keen the country grows;
It seems as if, in their decay,
The law grew stronger every day.
So might they reason, so compare,
Fausta, times past with times that are;
But no! they rubbed through yesterday
In their hereditary way,
And they will rub through, if they can,
To-morrow on the self-same plan,
Till death arrive to supersede,
For them, vicissitude and need.

The poet, to whose mighty heart
Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,
Subdues that energy to scan
Not his own course, but that of man.
Though he move mountains, though his day
Be passed on the proud heights of sway,
Though he hath loosed a thousand chains,
Though he hath borne immortal pains,
Action and suffering though he know,—
He hath not lived, if he lives so.
He sees, in some great-historied land,
A ruler of the people stand,
Sees his strong thought in fiery flood
Roll through the heaving multitude,
Exults—yet for no moment’s space
Envies the all-regarded place.
Beautiful eyes meet his, and he
Bears to admire uncravingly;
They pass: he, mingled with the crowd,
Is in their far-off triumphs proud.

From some high station he looks down,
At sunset, on a populous town;
Surveys each happy group which fleets,
Toil ended, through the shining streets,—
Each with some errand of its own,—
And does not say, I am alone.
He sees the gentle stir of birth
When morning purifies the earth;
He leans upon a gate, and sees
The pastures, and the quiet trees.
Low, woody hill, with gracious bound,
Folds the still valley almost round;
The cuckoo, loud on some high lawn,
Is answered from the depth of dawn;
In the hedge straggling to the stream,
Pale, dew-drenched, half-shut roses gleam.
But, where the farther side slopes down,
He sees the drowsy new-waked clown
In his white quaint-embroidered frock
Make, whistling, toward his mist-wreathed flock,
Slowly, behind his heavy tread,
The wet, flowered grass heaves up its head.
Leaned on his gate, he gazes: tears
Are in his eyes, and in his ears
The murmur of a thousand years.
Before him he sees life unroll,
A placid and continuous whole,—
That general life, which does not cease,
Whose secret is not joy, but peace;
That life, whose dumb wish is not missed
If birth proceeds, if things subsist;
The life of plants, and stones, and rain,
The life he craves—if not in vain
Fate gave, what chance shall not control,
His sad lucidity of soul.

You listen; but that wandering smile,
Fausta, betrays you cold the while!
Your eyes pursue the bells of foam
Washed, eddying, from this bank, their home.
Those gypsies—so your thoughts I scan—
Are less, the poet more, than man.
They feel not, though they move and see.
Deeper the poet feels; but he
Breathes, when he will, immortal air,
Where Orpheus and where Homer are.
In the day’s life, whose iron round
Hems us all in, he is not bound;
He leaves his kind, o’erleaps their pen,
And flees the common life of men.
He escapes thence, but we abide.
Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

The world in which we live and move
Outlasts aversion, outlasts love,
Outlasts each effort, interest, hope,
Remorse, grief, joy; and, were the scope
Of these affections wider made,
Man still would see, and see dismayed,
Beyond his passion’s widest range,
Far regions of eternal change.
Nay, and since death, which wipes out man,
Finds him with many an unsolved plan,
With much unknown, and much untried,
Wonder not dead, and thirst not dried,
Still gazing on the ever full
Eternal mundane spectacle,—
This world in which we draw our breath,
In some sense, Fausta, outlasts death.

Blame thou not, therefore, him who dares
Judge vain beforehand human cares;
Whose natural insight can discern
What through experience others learn;
Who needs not love and power, to know
Love transient, power an unreal show;
Who treads at ease life’s uncheered ways:
Him blame not, Fausta, rather praise!
Rather thyself for some aim pray,
Nobler than this, to fill the day;
Rather that heart, which burns in thee,
Ask, not to amuse, but to set free;
Be passionate hopes not ill resigned
For quiet, and a fearless mind.
And though fate grudge to thee and me
The poet’s rapt security,
Yet they, believe me, who await
No gifts from chance, have conquered fate.
They, winning room to see and hear,
And to men’s business not too near,
Through clouds of individual strife
Draw homeward to the general life.
Like leaves by suns not yet uncurled;
To the wise, foolish; to the world,
Weak: yet not weak, I might reply,
Not foolish, Fausta, in His eye,
To whom each moment in its race,
Crowd as we will its neutral space,
Is but a quiet watershed
Whence, equally, the seas of life and death are fed.

Enough, we live! and if a life
With large results so little rife,
Though bearable, seem hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth;
Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread,
The solemn hills around us spread,
This stream which falls incessantly,
The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky,
If I might lend their life a voice,
Seem to bear rather than rejoice.
And even could the intemperate prayer
Man iterates, while these forbear,
For movement, for an ampler sphere,
Pierce Fate’s impenetrable ear;
Not milder is the general lot
Because our spirits have forgot,
In action’s dizzying eddy whirled,
The something that infects the world.

About This Book