The Project Gutenberg eBook of Nantucket windows, by Edwina Stanton Babcock.

Ball on bright ball,
On the sky glowing,
The old dreams recall
Of a child’s knowing;
Eggs laid by a flying bird,
Jellies in globed curd,
Fruits on a strange tree,
By the winds blowing.

Now as each bobbing ball
Tugs at its holder,
I, who these dreams recall,
Feel hardly older....
Drinking enchanted Cup
From Balloons, I rise up,
Swaying on sea and sky,
Color and flight am I!

Appled Balloon Tree,
Arched efflorescence,
Grow shining globes for me,
Of joyous essence;
Until bright bubbles spill
From a cup fancies fill
Brimmed iridescence!

THEY PASS.

Down the long road they go—
Elinor, Mary, Flo—
Hasting toward Something.
Daisies rank high today,
Wild roses spread the way;
Laughing, light words, they say,
Speeding toward ... Something!

Peg, on the other side,
Watches their splendid stride,
Shrinking from Something....
Jennie, with broken tread,
Where a damp sun is shed,
Black shawl around her head,
Staggers from Something!

ON THE BEACH.

She sat in her gleaming robes
With the two hard-shining globes
Of her soul-less eyes, stare-fixed,
And said: “It is mine to know
How far he may come and go;
Mine to make him dance and sing,
His heart and his money fling
Away. He is mine to take,
And play with and bend and break;
The better for him I think.
We are put here to try each other.
Is he strong? He will not sink.”

The other woman pulled
The thin shawl over her head.
“If he is strong?” she murmured
“If he is strong,” you said.
“But are we strong?” It is ours
To spare, to shield, to tend;
It is his to be hurt and broken,
To struggle and to fend.
It is equal, therefore we suffer.
(He suffers most, I think.)
We are put here to help each other.
Are we strong? He will not sink.”

SAUL’S HILLS

This is a world gone wild with wine of life,
Tossed in bright cups on frost enholied air;
Here Autumn swings the west wind’s winnowing scythe,
Or amber shod strays down the coral flare.
And on the shimmering slopes the swallows blithe
Still turn ecstatic honey-tipped wings
And dart anew on rhythmic balancings.

I think that he who walks this undulance
Goes like a child back to some crystal Source,
Rich in adventures of the fields’ romance,
The thistles’ aeroplane, the gold of gorse;
Or buoyant, treading silver lichen crisp
Wing-footed on the elastic sod,
Fares on the milkweed’s fanned ethereal wisp
Past semaphore of broom or goldenrod.

For here he finds the ineffable escape,
The clarity, the cleanness and the soul;
Here’s laying on of hands, here things reshape
Into the round equilibrated Whole.
Here all is light and line, this grey fence strings
Its silver loops in limpid meadow lights;
Or drops its bars to infinite wanderings
By glimmering swamps on brake-illumined nights.

So suave these moor roads that the grasses blur
Along their misty lines; their curious curves
Unwind through dusks of bay and juniper
Past where the marsh hawk flares or rabbit swerves;
Where pond on mirroring pond among the hills
Is cupped in vital blue; whose magnet draws
Spiked pickerel weed; or starred sabatia thrills
Grass threaded ripples on the sandy shores.

So dumb are human hearts to every sound
That Nature has! Strangely attuned—dumb still!
There is no keynote to their most profound,
No language for true passion of their will;
Yet in these valleys on these sun-pooled moors,
Where turf roads wind to fountains of the sky,
I have seen Souls freed by the out-of-doors,
To find out here, their liberate ecstasy.

Perhaps these gemmy berries on the slope,
Perhaps these dryads of the circling hedge
Write runes of health and happiness and hope,
Or limn new truth in sand and rippled sedge.
For those who tread these wastes of Autumn’s reach
Find dream and vision on the wind-washed lea;
Thoughts broaden, there is fire in the speech,
Minds stir beyond their wonted sophistry.

It is the other Self, the questing Ghost
That walks with us the bayberries’ pungent trail;
Seeing this life an empty thing, at most,
Seeing dreams die and all beliefs grow pale.
Musing on hopes and visions, scattered hosts,
Till here, beside some mossy lichen rail,
The sky seems light with truth and starving minds,
Bathed in new energy of moorland winds!

The rosaries here are little mealy plums
Trailing like rubies through the tufted moss,
Here a late bee to evening primrose comes.
The fields’ grey wreathéd smoky censers toss,
Where goldenrod has burned from gold to grey;
And asters smoke on an empurpled way.

Turfed roads that curve away to Madaket,
Dim roads that wind the valleys to Gibbs Pond,
Grass roads that dream to Polpis, we have yet
To find your subtle ends, what lies beyond!
You wind to wind the world; the simple ways
Of faith and trust and nobleness and love;
We only guess the towers beyond your haze,
We only glimpse the ends toward which you move!

Yet rutted roads, whose mild evasions lie
Seemingly blind or tortuous or dense,
Ye are most human in your subtlety,
Human in all your gentle evidence.
For though you pause and double, turn again
And seem to curve and hesitate, your moods
Are human moods; tired women and worn men
Follow in dream your errant solitudes.

They come for shriving by the hedgerow things
Where life, obedient to great moving laws
Brilliantly dies, or in birth scatterings
Writes mystical trail with myriad seeds and spores;
Where the dried weeds with hoary tresses blown
Quiver in brittle faith and stand serene,
Where in a tidal sunshine, every cone
Smells of sea-tree-branch, balsam-broomed and clean.

Solitude on the moors and to one’s self—!
The blessing comes in spite of torturings;
In spite of all the gods upon the shelf
And all the false gods of material things.
Here where the thistle sends its wayward floss
Or where the marsh hawk swirls for meadow-food,
Alone on cloistered roads redeem thy loss
Of Spirit, in a bay-bushed solitude!

Oh, Spirit of ours, whom we have so betrayed,
As round these swimming hills our footsteps dream,
We see thy fugitive shimmer on the blade
Of every spear of grass; and by the gleam
Of sea light out at Pocomo and glade
Of twisted beech by rambling Polpis farm,
Or by the reedy pool where cattle strayed
Far from the fields stir up the midgy swarm.

Where all the rolling hillsides soft combine
On amphitheatres spread to open clefts,
There is hypnotic soothing in the line
Merging and melting in soft grassy wefts.
The brave bright cups that grail the open mead
Pour flower-libation on some tawny stretch;
And lily grails snowy processions lead,
And sweet fern banners guide the banded vetch.

And what does Man? He takes a wealth like this
And breaks it on the wheel of his machine.
Tarring it with the foul metropolis.
Caging its wildness and its free desmesne;
Little they know they build but to destroy,
Little they guess what gift they take away;
The heritage of every girl and boy
To roam these stretches of the heath and bay.

The exquisite clear candors of these moors
Seem to their eyes as sad as empty doom;
Their trivial gaze turns from the barren shores
And blurs along the ragged hills of broom.
They pant, they say, for human nature’s food,
Yes—but they have not walked with happy Solitude!

Grey rain slow drifting over summer hill,
Over corn fields and through the meadow rifts,
With falling curtain calms the water till
Under its scorcery the landscape drifts;
The loomed mirage goes sailing to the sky,
The deep lines darken on the distant moors,
A placid silence lifts in mystery,
And headlands purple down to light-struck shores.

Then open farm a sterner grandeur takes,
The church dome glitters on fantastic North,
The wild ducks’ chain expansion suddenly breaks,
And many a wedge-shaped line of geese fares forth;
Fateful the moorland looks and tawny drear,
Then the clouds lift and all the Island’s clear.

O Truth, that moves upon the water’s face!
O Truth, that cleaves the fire and cloud to be!
Help me with single eye thy form to trace,
In every form of flower and web and tree;
Help me to find thee in the cores of waves,
In every face that dreams into my ken;
Help me to see thee in the man that braves
The condemnation of his fellow men!

O shining Truth, sweeping across these fields,
Calm on the water’s surface, or in storm,
Help me to find thee in the harvest yields,
In cloistered rooms and in the market’s swarm!
Help me to find thee in the name of Sin,
The immortal shape of Woe that walks alone;
Help me to hear thy subtle lesson in
The negative, the dirge, the monotone!

Help me to know thee in the sturdy Mind
That holds its vision straight across the dark,
That dares to blaze a trail for all mankind
Yet wins no high serene nor earthly mark!
Help me to find thee behind solemn doors
Where men declare for finer, nobler codes;
Help me to find thee on the rainy moors,
And on the wanderings of these rutted roads!

The days are warm all Indian Summer through,
Placid and mild with dreaming full content;
Beach plums and grapes glimmer with frosty dew,
Rabbits career from hunter provident;
Mellow and hazy blurs the moorland scene,
Placid and still on dreamy tides of noon;
The fishing fleet comes silver laden in,
And over haystacks floats the harvest moon.

Horizoned moon, so round and thin and strange,
Great mellow bowl of gold September brew,
Diaphanous rolling over rolling range
Of solemn hills that part to let thee through.
Thou last great Toy of Summer, yellow boon,
All honey filled, lambent with creamy light,
Hardly a gazer of us but will croon
Some childish nonsense to thy disk tonight!

Upon a night of stars, the grave old Mill
Spreads out its fans upon a scudding sky;
The crescent harbor’s ebony is still,
Studded with plangent lights trailed silvery.
Here is true self, once more with hand on lip,
Trying to read the night’s deep graven lines,
Watching the shadow of some late come ship,
Or muffling darkness of the blotted pines.

The summer streets are filled with flickering swarms,
The village band is playing and the wheels
Of farmer wagons clatter past the farms....
Bright headlights of black bulking automobiles
Flit back of Monomoy, where Indians, now
Pressing the clover with accustomed heels,
Would find great modern monsters on their track
Beside their wigwam or beyond their shack.

But as the music filters through the town,
And honey-suckle breathes around the doors,
One finds the lane as secret as the shores;
No modern engine treads its sweetness down,
No smart prospector makes this isle his own,
For pattern of the cheap and opportune—
Not ’neath this honey-suckle and this moon!

Back of the town where all the houses turn
Their mild grey fronts to winds that buffet strong,
The cobbled streets in patterns quaint and stern,
Lead to four trees spread on the sky like song;
Looking at these I paused the other day,
Wondering that beauty so bestript, forlorn,
Should strike a chord that takes processional way,
Crashed on the skies in branches gaunt and worn.

Twisted and starved these bitter trees that blow
Upon the Western sky like choral song,
Flinging strange rapture on the after glow;
Still radiant? Do these dead trees belong
To some tree-part of us, where bent and maimed
Green branches wither? Hampered twigs grow wrong ...?
Hush! On the screen of the bright Western sky
The crippled trees again burst into song.

Modest these little houses of the town,
Staring with sober windows over the lea,
Scattered are peaks and gables toward the down,
Trailing slow march from seaport to the sea.
Charmed thing to hear one’s foot-fall sound along
Some moonlit, bricked, hedged street, whose panneled doors
Gleam with bright knockers, where the oblivioned stone
Was trodden once by Quaker ancestors.

The minstered Vast of immemorial sea,
Blue vaults and green that cave the Island tides
Choruses solemn dark immensity
To that Moon priest that with its law abides;
The hoodéd waves march on cathedral dunes,
Flagelant spring the breakers on the rips,
And the encircling shore is writ with runes
Of voyaging souls and questing sails and ships.

Yea, all around Cathedral Vast of sea
Blue vaults and green that cave the island’s tides
Curled toppling Uncials of Eternity
Illumining the beaches’ glistening sides;
New consecrate the sand’s communion shell
With every moonlight chrism and sunrise swell.

Clean Island, cloistered ways unspoiled by man,
The thorn trees cloaked like prophets, and the reeds
Organ with murmurings of furtive Pan;
The spirits’ intense strange music, lost from creeds,
Lost far from love—lost in all modern places;
Lost from the reading by all human faces,
Isolate—dumb; but if one wanders here,
Vocal and strong, immaculate and clear.

For now one figure left of all the gods
Goes singing down the thistle-lighted way;
One figure wanders through these island moods
Back from the town and back of all the bay.
And where the goldenrods their censers sway
Against a brake or by a grey swamp wood,
Over the moor steals happy Solitude.

The corn is stacked, the pumpkins’ on the roof,
Globule on grey their ponderous green and gold,
The laughing gull wantons its wild reproof,
The water’s blue is strangely laced with cold;
Vermilion berries coral the black-hedged pond,
Around the shore the chilly foam-patch quivers,
The sweet fern shrivels up its copper frond,
The owl flaps heavily, the farmland shivers.

These are the roads the island farmers took,
Slow-following flocks that tinkled towards the town,
And stopped to crop the clover or to look
With hornéd stare across the purple down.
These are the roads the shearers of the sheep
In high-swung wagons rode; these winding trails
Moccasins knew, where now the children keep
To Shimmo Shore with huckleberry pails.

What is the thing that on these commons gives
Me back to Me? What is this thing that heals
The cities’ wounds, that shows to me where lives
The Being of Me? What scorcery reveals
My hidden Native, blind, unnamed, unsung,
Wrapped in its passionate ardors like a shape
Of chambered chrysalid Soul—close woofed, high swung,
Waiting for sun and rain and winged escape?

There are wild days out on the winter heath,
Wild days asmoke in mystery and flame;
The black ducks break their columns into wreath,
The gaunt trees cringe away in windblown shame;
The moody skies press to the barren earth,
Sullen the sea hangs foam around the shore;
There is a look of starving and of dearth
Along the shivering roads across the moor.

Then, as if space awed of its yawning breach
Desired rhythms to sound some message home,
Crash in great clouds, dark waves of earthy speech,
The farmlands’ seaweed pile and stubbled loam.
There is cloud-writing on the scrolled West,
The church’s dome swells symboled on the sky;
Austere the landscape, yet so clear expressed,
It looms to awe and brooding majesty!

And then on Headland or on barren dune,
The wild light leaps, born of the naked sea;
The North cliffs are cathedral; there is rune
And choral in the surf’s antiphony.
The laborer, who slowly takes his way
Back to the hamlet in the early night,
Sees the old village set in convent grey,
And candled shrines of votive window light.

There are great days in Autumn, when the world
Turns to blue fire and all the hills are red;
One hears the fishing gulls’ wild screaming skirled
Up to the wingéd comrades overhead.
The Sound is flecked with scudding green and white,
And beaches stretch away to golden glow,
Till stars hang garlanded along the night,
And constellations swing liquid and low.

And foggy days, when wrapped in trailing pause,
The trees, like ships, sail pearly seas bemused
With melting sails and ropes of rainy gauze
Making for harbor, tenuous, confused,
Anchored in subtle inlets, phantom cruised;
Where voyagers land unchallenged, unperused,
With silver myrrh to sanctify the homes,
And cloudy swirls to hallow forth the domes.

These ships bring stores by which my heart is fed,
The voyagers of this filmy vapor flight
Lay balm on gashes where the soul has bled,
Wrapping its wounds in meshes of soft light.
And I am soothed of grief, who take a white
Communion under calm of dripping trees,
Walking uncandled avenues of rainy night
With veiléd forms to nebulous mysteries.

Charmed thing to drift along the narrow lanes
Where some dear door flies open to the rap,
To sit behind windows of whaling days;
A lantern in the hall, a chair mayhap
Some geniused Folger used, to read a log
Stamped with inked whales, kept blue from boyhood cruise;
The Swift that wound the yarn, peat from the bog—
The horn the Town Crier used to cry the news.

Charmed thing to catch a sea-word full of spice,
To eat of beach plum jelly by the fire,
To see rag rugs hooked like a sailor’s splice,
To watch the peats’ blue flicker on the fire;
To see the rafters carved in sailor-ways,
Paintings of canvased ships crossing the bars,
When daring whalers went uncharted ways,
And laid their course by youth’s adventurous stars.

Along the street in early morning’s glow,
Down to their boats the Portuguese fishers go;
And through the cobbled alleys bootéd feet
Drown the gruff voice as sailors comrades meet.
Then shawled forms slip down to the baker’s shop,
The Spanish bell rings in the tower top,
The placid tradesmen wait the lifted latch,
And quahog diggers launch for the clamming patch.

But village stir and village matters keep
Free Masonry too subtle and too deep
For strangers’ smattering tongue and half-taught eye
That sees them through a garbled mystery.
What shall be known of souls that live and love,
Marry and bear, know joy and agony,
Under blue circle of an Island sky
Within the silver ring of sounding sea?

Their quiet dreams take root in resolute ways,
Their poetry is blown to spurts of flame;
From their grim grandeur of forgotten days
Comes many a high and sober-minded name.
Their character persists where many a door
Opened its narrow pride to let them roam,
Their feet stand firm on an unshaken floor,
Roofed by great roof-trees of New England home.

So to the memory their great names come
What time they reckoned life and grasped its fact,
Their splendid hours when their spirits’ dumb,
Unworded promise became conscious act;
The Islanders, Nantucketers, their theme
Endures in a worth that cannot fail,
Across the country their progressive dream
Steadily marks the Great New England Trail.

For even now in times of want and war,
In times of apathy and greed and fear,
The challenges to spirit skyward soar,
The core of stalwart things is hidden here;
The white shoals lift like new creative shore,
The Sound’s salt breath comes like a stirrup cup,
Till every wanderer takes his burden up.

So, with it all remote, tranquil, unchanged,
Untouched in depths of solitude and peace,
The Island fades away, the shoals are ranged,
Backward in sliding rank the bluffs decrease;
Backward they slide, the glittering Sound spreads wide.
Now is no road to Island paths but foam,
A long, long water-path twixt us and home.

Yet when we sit in silence at the board
And shapen silver glitters on the white
Damask, bubbled with flower and glass and scored
With sensuous patterns of the candle light,
One smiles and speaks of ’Sconset Lighthouse flare,
Of sails like wings tapered upon the Sound,
Of tossing cross-rip by the bell buoy, where
The schooners get their ranges outward bound.

There falls a silence until someone tells
An old wife’s tale; another speaks of bay,
Another one of canterbury bells,
And someone else of meadows stacked with hay.
The kindling smile goes round, the voices muse,
The light is kind that travels from eye to eye,
And many lonely Island trampings fuse;
Along rut roads go many a memory.

With eyes alight we say: “When shall I go
Where the blue chicory twinkles toward the town,
Or Bouncing Bet bathes in a rosy snow,
Or where the night wafts scent across the down;
When shall I breathe the breath of inshore spins,
And see the darkling fern of water-flaws,
And catch the drive of myriad mackerel fins
Where the furred trawler floats its netted jaws!”

In spite of foppish talk and city form,
We take the lane and loiter on the crest,
Speaking in terms of Island sun and storm;
The marlins’ tarry smell, the breakers’ breast,
Until across the light and baffling word
There steals the old sea-wind, and with a thrill
The stagnant pools of city minds are stirred,
Incoming tides the vapid channels fill.

But we (who know) speak in no idle way,
We hold no rendezvous, nor name an hour;
We make no promise when to go or stay,
We do not plan to gather fruit or flower;
We only tell the Image deep within
Our struggling beings: “Beyond all abodes
And all the challenging, whether we lose or win,
Spirit, we two shall take the Island roads!”

THEY PASS.

ON THE BEACH.

SAUL’S HILLS

SEA-MEASURE.

IN AN OLD BURYING GROUND.

CHRISTMAS EVE ON NANTUCKET.