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The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 22: RESPITE
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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

RESPITE

O Beauty, heal my heart! I lean to thee,
Faint, having supped with horrors: give me drink!
—Red slopes beneath tall pines, ranged tree on tree;
Long cool gray lakes, with iris round the brink
In knightly companies purple and proud;
Birches as altar-candles slender and white;
A late gold sun, traced curiously with cloud;
The spacious splendors of the moon-filled night;
Among the wild-rose crowds, the perfect one;
White sea-gulls like white lilies, on brown bars
That slant athwart blue bays; gulls in the sun
Rising as galaxies of trembling stars:
Lull me awhile, O Beauty, drug my dread!
—To-morrow morn War stands beside my bed.