The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 28: ROOSEVELT, 1919

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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.

ROOSEVELT, 1919

How shall we say “God rest him!”

Of him who loved not rest,

But the pathless plunge in the forest

And the pauseless quest,

And the call of the billowing mountains,

Crest beyond crest?

Hope rather, God will give him

His spirit’s need—

Rapture of ceaseless motion

That is rest indeed,

As the cataract sleeps on the cliff-side

White with speed.

So shall his soul go ranging

Forever, swift and wide,

With a strong man’s rejoicing,

As he loved to ride;

But all our days are poorer

For the part of him that died.