John Hall Wheelock Poems

Grasshopper, your fairy song
And my poem alike belong
To the dark and silent earth
From which all poetry has birth;
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Life burns us up like fire,
   And Song goes up in flame:
The radiant body smoulders
   To the ashes whence it came.
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I do not fear to lay my body down
   In death, to share
The life of the dark earth and lose my own,
   If God is there.
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Sleep on -- I lie at heaven's high oriels,
   Over the stars that murmur as they go
   Lighting your lattice-window far below;
And every star some of the glory spells
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In the pain, in the loneliness of love,
   To the heart of my sweet I fled.
I knocked at the door of her living heart,
   "Let in -- let in --" I said.
...

I dreamed I passed a doorway
   Where, for a sign of death,
White ribbons one was binding
   About a flowery wreath.
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There is a panther caged within my breast,
But what his name, there is no breast shall know
Save mine, nor what it is that drives him so,
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All my love for my sweet
I bared one day to her.
Carelessly she took it,
And like a conqueror
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Look—on the topmost branches of the world
The blossoms of the myriad stars are thick;
Over the huddled rows of stone and brick,
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His gaze through the bars forever going by him
Has grown so dulled it takes in nothing else.
To him it seems a thousand bars go by him,
...