Edgar Fawcett

Edgar Fawcett Poems

I saw, one sultry night above a swamp,
The darkness throbbing with their golden pomp!
And long my dazzled sight did they entrance
...

Before I was famous I used to sit
In a dull old under-ground room I knew,
And sip cheap beer, and be glad for it,
...

How falls it, oriole, thou hast come to fly
In tropic splendor through our Northern sky?

At some glad moment was it nature's choice
...

On long, serene midsummer days
Of ripening fruit and yellow grain,
How sweetly, by dim woodland ways,
In tangled hedge or leafy lane,
...

Edgar Fawcett Biography

Edgar Fawcett (May 26, 1847 - May 2, 1904) was an American novelist and poet. Fawcett was born in New York on May 26, 1847, and spent much of his life there. Educated at Columbia College, he obtained the A.B. there in 1867 and his M.A. three years later. At Columbia, he was a member of the Fraternity of Delta Phi. Although successful in his time, his works are mostly forgotten today. His best known novels, such as 1873's Purple and Fine Linen and 1898's New York, were satirical studies of New York high society. Fawcett also wrote a parody of the King Arthur legends entitled the New King Arthur: An Opera Without Music (1885), as well as numerous works for children, such as 1872's Short Poems for Short People. His volumes of verse included 1884's Song and Story and 1891's Songs of Doubt and Dream. His verse was frequently anthologized. Fawcett spent many of the last years of his life in London, where he died on May 2, 1904. A study by Stanley R. Harrison, entitled Edgar Fawcett, was published in 1972. The rather remarkable novels Solarion (about a dog given human intelligence) and Douglas Duane (1885) (on scientific body-switching) as well as The Ghost of Guy Thryle (1895) (which has astral projection as a means of interplanetary travel) deserve to be better known. The Harrison volume above lists many unpublished manuscripts sent in for copyright with such titles as "The Man from Mars" and "The Destruction of the Moon," but no trace of most of these beyond the listing seems to exist; "The Man from Mars" was published in the June 1892 issue of Short Stories: A Magazine of Select Fiction.)

The Best Poem Of Edgar Fawcett

Fireflies

I saw, one sultry night above a swamp,
The darkness throbbing with their golden pomp!
And long my dazzled sight did they entrance
With the weird chaos of their dizzy dance!
Quicker than yellow leaves, when gales despoil,
Quivered the brilliance of their mute turmoil,
Within whose light was intricately blent
Perpetual rise, perpetual descent.
As though their scintillant flickerings had met
In the vague meshes of some airy net!
And now mysteriously I seemed to guess,
While watching their tumultuous loveliness,
What fervor of deep passion strangely thrives
In the warm richness of these tropic lives,
Whose wings can never tremble but they show
These hearts of living fire that beat below!

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