Philip Henry Savage
Philip Henry Savage Poems
AT rest upon some quiet limb
And singing to his pretty 'marrow,'
Sweet-breasted friend of child and man,
I love the bright eyes and the tan,
...
THE sun is up, Great God, the sun is up,
High o'er the eastern hill among white clouds
Insufferable! I thank Thee for the call.
...
The sea is silent round this rocky shore;
The forest wind
From the loud level beach behind
Brings rolling up the distant water's roar.
...
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are
your ways my ways, saith the Lord.
GOD, thou art good, but not to me.
...
ON the terrace lies the sunlight, fretted with the shade
Of the wilding apple-orchard Wordsworth made.
...
LIGHTER than dandelion down,
Or feathers from the white moth's wing,
Out of the gates of bramble-town
The silkweed goes a-gypsying.
...
'T IS man with man in the bitter end
Whatever the love and the heart of woman;
Iron with iron, friend with friend,
...
I turn and see you passing in the street
When you are not. I take another way,
Lest missing you the fragrance of the day
...
This is thy brother, this poor silver fish,
Close to the surface, dying in his dish;
Thy flesh, thy beating heart, thy very life;
...
LET men remember, when they pray,
The rose and silver dawns of May,
Most palely, spiritually gray;
...
To G.S.
GLIMPSED now and again in his pine-tree tower,
A chickadee sang the soft hours away.
...
THE leaf will fall, through green and gold,
To dissolution in the mould.
The tree will fall, and in the sod
...
Mary, when the wild-rose
Blossomed on the vine,
Hearts were light, eyes were bright,
But none so bright as thine.
...
The extreme beauty and the dear delight,
Wherewith the world accosts me as I go,
Catch up the heart, and like a flake of snow
...
BE more concrete, immediate to man!
So did he counsel me, the sage; and I,
Taking for naught the gentle guidances
...
Roll down, roll down, thou darkling earth,
To the eastern shores of light,
Where the plashing waves of the morning's birth
...
Spinoza polished glasses clear
To view the heavenly hemisphere;
I verses, that my friend therethrough
My arc of earth may rightly view.
...
THE fickle wind, by ebb and flaw,
Wavers uncertain as a girl:
The fire delays and will not draw:
The smoke creeps out in lip and curl;
...
WESTMORELAND and the hills of Cumberland,
Though Alps may overpeer them, have a name
Unperishing while the earth still bears in man
...
DEATH has a power to fright the soul,
And unseat courage from control.
But when, by love and sorrow led,
...
Philip Henry Savage Biography
Philip Henry Savage (February 11, 1868 - June 4, 1899) was an American poet. Born in North Brookfield, Massachusetts on February 11, 1868, he was the son of Minot Judson Savage, a well-known Unitarian minister, and Ella A. Dodge. The family moved several times during his early life: to Framingham, then to Chicago and finally to Boston in 1874. He graduated from the English High School of Boston in 1885. He worked at the leather and shoe company Bachfelder and Lincoln, spending "a number of years drumming boots and shoes in the northeastern states" before he began attending Harvard in 1889 at age 21. He graduated there in 1893, and was conferred the degree of A.M. in 1896. During his time there, he edited the Harvard Monthly for three years, as well as editing a bi-weekly literary periodical, The Mahogany Tree, which was published out of Boston. After spending a year (1893-1894) at the Harvard Divinity School, he became an English instructor in Harvard's English department, and was able to publish his first volume of poems, First Poems and Fragments, in 1895. Refusing a position as an English instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he began work at the Boston Public Library as Secretary to the Librarian (who was, at the time, Herbert Putnam), becoming a Clerk of the Corporation in 1899. On May 31, 1899, he was stricken with appendicitis, and after a weeklong illness, he died on June 4th at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1901, his collected poems were posthumously edited and released by his friend, well-known composer and musicologist, Daniel Gregory Mason, as the Poems of Philip Henry Savage. Mason praised Savage for "delicate idealism." Savage's nature poetry won the most praise from critics of his time. He was a close friend of another Harvard poet, William Vaughn Moody, who he entered Harvard with in 1889. Savage is often linked with a group known as the Harvard poets (or the Harvard Pessimists), many of whom died young (such as Trumbull Stickney, George Cabot Lodge and Hugh McCulloch).)
The Best Poem Of Philip Henry Savage
The Song-Sparrow
AT rest upon some quiet limb
And singing to his pretty 'marrow,'
Sweet-breasted friend of child and man,
I love the bright eyes and the tan,
Gray-mottled coat that suits the trim
And winsome singing-sparrow.
He seeks no dear and lofty ground;
His home is every ridge and furrow;
In the low alder bushes he's
At home, and in the wayside trees;
Wherever man lives I have found
The nest of the song-sparrow,
Except among the chimney-tops
A-smoking where the streets are narrow;
Where man has banished living green
And scarce a blade of grass is seen
He rarely comes, he never stops,
The little rustic sparrow.
Where twigs are small and branches low
And scarce the name of woods can borrow,
He flits and sings the whole day long
And 'Rivers run,' is still his song,
'And flowers blossom, breezes blow,
And all for the song-sparrow!'
I meet him in the tufted field
Among the clover-tops and yarrow;
I hear him by the quiet brook,
And always with the open look
Of one who would not be concealed;
And then I meet the sparrow
When golden lights at evening run
Among the trees the copses thorough;
And there I catch his joyous song,
Stealing the moments that belong
To songsters of the setting sun
And not to the song-sparrow.
When touches of the coming night
Set free the bands of hidden sorrow
The night-bird sounds his ringing note,
And from his melancholy throat
The hermit pours a sad delight,
And no one hears the sparrow.
His song is tuned for his to-day,
With hope and promise for the morrow;
More lofty notes are upward sent,
But none more simple and content,
None cheerfuller in work and play
Than that of the song-sparrow.
Philip Henry Savage Comments
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