Earth And Man
I
On her great venture, Man,
Earth gazes while her fingers dint the breast
Which is his well of strength, his home of rest,
And fair to scan.
II
More aid than that embrace,
On A Horn
The joy of man, the pride of brutes,
Domestic subject for disputes,
Of plenty thou the emblem fair,
Adorn'd by nymphs with all their care!
I saw thee raised to high renown,
Supporting half the British crown;
And often have I seen thee grace
The chaste Diana's infant face;
And whensoe'er you please to shine,
Less useful is her light than thine:
Rejected
Alas ! I have lost my God,
My beautiful God Apollo.
Wherever his footsteps trod
My feet were wont to follow.
But Oh ! it fell out one day
My soul was so heavy with weeping,
That I laid me down by the way ;
And he left me while I was sleeping.
My Longshore Lass
Far in the mellow western sky,
Above the restless harbor bar,
A beacon on the coast of night,
Shines out a calm, white evening star;
But your deep eyes, my 'longshore lass,
Are brighter, clearer far.
The glory of the sunset past
Still gleams upon the water there,
But all its splendor cannot match
Here's A Nut
'Here's a nut, there's a nut;
Hide it quick away,
In a hole, under leaves,
To eat some winter day.
Acorns sweet are plenty,
We will have them all:
Skip and scamper lively
Till the last ones fall.'
The Christian’s New Year Prayer
Thou Christ of mine, Thy gracious ear low bending
Through these glad New Year days,
To catch the countless prayers to heaven ascending –
For e’en hard hearts do raise
Some secret wish for fame, or gold, or power,
Or freedom from all care –
Dear, patient Christ, who listeneth hour on hour,
Hear now a Christian’s prayer.
Let this young year, silent, walks beside me,
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all
this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
I Sit And Look Out
I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband--I see the treacherous seducer
of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be
The Fools
BELOW, the street was hoarse with cries,
With groan of carts and scuffling feet,
With laughter worse than blasphemies,
Was choked with dust and blind with heat,
This room was still--too still for peace.
It heard the livid words we said
Of hate and passion, watched us where
I sat, as one beside the dead--
You lay with all your glorious hair
A Crazed Girl
THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
Florida
The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
held together by mangrave roots
that bear while living oysters in clusters,
and when dead strew white swamps with skeletons,
dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks
like ancient cannon-balls sprouting grass.
The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,
and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale
every time in a tantrum.
We Play At Paste,
We play at paste,
Till qualified for pearl,
Then drop the paste,
And deem ourself a fool.
The shapes, though, were similar,
And our new hands
Learned gem-tactics
Practising sands.
Bad Days
When Passion week started and Jesus
Came down to the city, that day
Hosannahs burst out at his entry
And palm leaves were strewn in his way.
But days grow more stern and more stormy.
No love can men's hardness unbend;
Their brows are contemptuously frowning,
And now comes the postscript, the end.
Careers
Father is quite the greatest poet
That ever lived anywhere.
You say you’re going to write great music—
I chose that first: it’s unfair.
Besides, now I can’t be the greatest painter and
do Christ and angels, or lovely pears
and apples and grapes on a green dish,
or storms at sea, or anything lovely,
Because that’s been taken by Claire.
Innocent Heart
Innocent heart, what has happened to you?
Alas, what is the cure to this pain?
We are interested, and they are displeased,
Oh Lord, what is this affair?
I too possess a tongue-
just ask me what I want to say.
Though there is none present without you,
Waking
Even the man who is happy
glimpses something
or a hair of sound touches him
and his heart overflows with a longing
he does not recognize
then it must be that he is remembering
in a place out of reach
shapes he has loved
Hesperus
Through the starry hollow
Of the summer night
I would follow, follow
Hesperus the bright,
To seek beyond the western wave
His garden of delight.
Hesperus the fairest
Of all gods that are,
Peace and dreams thou bearest
My Lady's Grave
THE linnet in the rocky dells,
The moor-lark in the air,
The bee among the heather bells
That hide my lady fair:
The wild deer browse above her breast;
The wild birds raise their brood;
And they, her smiles of love caress'd,
Have left her solitude!
A Wanderer
When Watkin shifts the burden of his cares
And all that irked him in his bound employ,
Once more become a vagrom-hearted boy,
He moves to roundelays and jocund airs;
Loitering with dusty harvestmen, he shares
Old ale and sunshine; or, with maids half-coy,
Pays court to shadows; fools himself with joy,
Shaking a leg at junketings and fairs.
Sometimes, returning down his breezy miles,
Barter
Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children's faces looking up,
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like the curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,