Herman Melville- Complete Poems

by Herman Melville

  Cool and sweet.

  Stock-still I stand,

  And him I see

  Prying, peeping

  From Beech Tree;

  Crickling, crackling

  Gleefully!

  But, affrighted

  By wee sound,

  Presto! vanish—

  Whither bound?

  So did Baby,

  Crowing mirth,

  E’en as startled

  By some inkling

  Touching Earth,

  Flit (and whither?)

  From our hearth!

  Field Asters

  LIKE the stars in commons blue

  Peep their namesakes, Asters here,

  Wild ones every autumn seen—

  Seen of all, arresting few.

  Seen indeed. But who their cheer

  Interpret may, or what they mean

  When so inscrutably their eyes

  Us star-gazers scrutinize.

  Always with us!

  BETIMES a wise guest his visit will sever.

  Yes, absence endears.

  Revisit he would, so remains not forever.

  Well,

  Robin the wise one,

  He went yestreen,

  Bound for the South

  Where his chums convene.

  Back, he’ll come back

  In his new Spring vest,

  And the more for long absence

  Be welcomed with zest.

  But thou, black Crow,

  Inconsiderate fowl,

  Wilt never away—

  Take elsewhere thy cowl?

  From the blasted hemlock’s

  Whitened spur,

  Whatever the season,

  Or Winter or Ver

  Or Summer or Fall,

  Croaker, foreboder,

  We hear thy call—

  Caw! caw! caw!

  Stockings in the farm-house Chimney

  HAPPY, believe, this Christmas Eve

  Are Willie and Rob and Nellie and May—

  Happy in hope! in hope to receive

  These stockings well stuffed from Santa Claus’ sleigh.

  O the delight to believe in a wight

  More than mortal, with something of man,

  Whisking about, an invisible spright,

  Almoner blest of Oberon’s clan.

  Stay, Truth, O stay in a long delay!

  Why should these little ones find you out?

  Let them forever with fable play,

  Evermore hang the Stocking out!

  A Dutch Christmas

  Up the Hudson

  In the Time of Patroons

  OVER the ruddy hearth, lo, the green bough!

  In house of the sickle and home of the plough,

  Arbored sit and toast apples now!

  Hi, there in barn! have done with the flail.

  Worry not the wheat, nor winnow in the gale:

  ’Tis Christmas and holiday, turkey too and ale!

  Creeping round the wainscot of old oak red,

  The ground-pine, see—smell the sweet balsam shed!

  Leave off, Katrina, to tarry there and scan:

  The cream will take its time, girl, to rise in the pan.

  Meanwhile here’s a knocking, and the caller it is Van—

  Tuenis Van der Blumacher, your merry Christmas man.

  Leafless the grove now where birds billed the kiss:

  To-night when the fiddler wipes his forehead, I wis,

  And panting from the dance come our Hans and Cousin Chris,

  Yon bush in the window will never be amiss!

  But oats have ye heaped, men, for horses in stall?

  And for each heifer young and the old mother-cow

  Have ye raked down the hay from the aftermath-mow?

  The Christmas let come to the creatures one and all!

  Though the pedlar, peering in, doubtless deemed it but folly,

  The yoke-cattle’s horns did I twine with green holly.

  Good to breathe their sweet breath this blest Christmas morn,

  Mindful of the ox, ass, and Babe new-born.

  The snow drifts and drifts, and the frost it benumbs:

  Elsie, pet, scatter to the snow-birds your crumbs.

  Sleigh-bells a’ jingle! ’Tis Santa Claus: hail!

  Villageward he goes through the spooming of the snows;

  Yea, hurrying to round his many errands to a close,

  A mince-pie he’s taking to the one man in jail.—

  What! drove right out between the gate-posts here?

  Well, well, little Sharp-Eyes, blurred panes we must clear!

  Our Santa Claus a clever way has, and a free:

  Gifts from him some will take who would never take from me.

  For poor hereabouts there are none:—none so poor

  But that pudding for an alms they would spurn from the door.

  All the same to all in the world’s wide ways—

  Happy harvest of the conscience on many Christmas Days.

  PART II: THIS, THAT

  AND THE OTHER

  Time’s Betrayal

  THE tapping of a mature maple for the syrup, however recklessly done, does not necessarily kill it. No; since being an aboriginal child of Nature, it is doubtless blest with a constitution enabling it to withstand a good deal of hard usage. But systematically to bleed the immature trunk, though some sugar-makers, detected in the act on ground not their own, aver that it does the sylvan younker a deal of good, can hardly contribute to the tree’s amplest development or insure patriarchal long-life to it. Certain it is, that in some young maples the annual tapping would seem to make precocious the autumnal ripening or change of the leaf. And such premature change would seem strikingly to enhance the splendor of the tints.

  Someone, whose morals need mending,

  Sallies forth like the pillaging bee;

  He waylays the syrup ascending

  In anyone’s saccharine tree;

  So lacking in conscience indeed,

  So reckless what life he makes bleed,

  That to get at the juices, his staple,

  The desirable sweets of the Spring,

  He poignards a shapely young maple,

  In my second-growth coppice—its king.

  Assassin! secure in a crime never seen,

  The underwood dense, e’en his victim a screen.

  So be. But the murder will out,

  Never doubt, never doubt:

  In season the leafage will tell,

  Turning red ere the rime,

  Yet, in turning, all beauty excel

  For a time, for a time!

  Small thanks to the scamp. But, in vision, to me

  A goddess, mild pointing the glorified tree,

  “So they change who die early, some bards who life render:

  Keats, stabbed by the Muses, his garland’s a splendor!”

  Profundity and Levity

  AN owl in his wonted day-long retirement ruffled by the meadow-lark curvetting and caroling in the morning-sun high over the pastures and woods, comments upon that rollicker, and in so doing lets out the meditation engrossing him when thus molested. But the weightiness of the wisdom ill agrees with its somewhat trilling expression; an incongruity attributable doubtless to the contagious influence of the reprehended malapert’s overruling song.

  So frolic, so flighty,

  Leaving wisdom behind,

  Lark, little you ween


  Of the progress of mind.

  While fantastic you’re winging,

  Up-curving and singing,

  A skylarking dot in the sun;

  Under eaves here in wood

  My wits am I giving

  To this latest theme:

  Life blinks at strong light,

  Life wanders in night like a dream—

  Is then life worth living?

  Inscription

  For a Boulder near the spot

  Where the last Hardhack was laid low

  By the new proprietor

  of the Hill of Arrowhead

  A WEED grew here.—Exempt from use,

  Weeds turn no wheel, nor run;

  Radiance pure or redolence

  Some have, but this had none.

  And yet heaven gave it leave to live

  And idle it in the sun.

  The Cuban Pirate

  SOME of the more scintillant West Indian humming-birds are in frame hardly bigger than a beetle or bee.

  Buccaneer in gemmed attire—

  Ruby, amber, emerald, jet—

  Darkling sparkling dot of fire,

  Still on plunder are you set?

  Summer is your sea, and there

  The flowers afloat you board and ravage,

  Yourself a thing more dazzling fair—

  Tiny, plumed, bejewelled Savage!

  Midget! yet in passion a fell

  Furioso, Creoles tell.

  Wing’d, are you Cupid in disguise,

  You flying spark of Paradise?

  The Avatar

  BLOOM or repute for graft or seed

  In flowers the flower-gods never heed.

  The rose-god once came down and took—

  Form in a rose? Nay, but indeed

  The meeker form and humbler look

  Of Sweet-Briar, a wilding or weed.

  The American Aloe

  On Exhibition

  IT is but a floral superstition, as everybody knows, that this plant flowers only once in a century. When in any instance the flowering is for decades delayed beyond the normal period (eight or ten years at furthest) it is owing to something retarding in the environment or soil.

  But few they were who came to see

  The Century-Plant in flower:

  Ten cents admission—price you pay

  For bon-bons of the hour.

  In strange inert blank unconcern

  Of wild things at the Zoo,

  The patriarch let the sight-seers stare—

  Nor recked who came to view.

  But lone at night the garland sighed

  While moaned the aged stem:

  “At last, at last! but joy and pride

  What part have I with them?

  “Let be the dearth that kept me back

  How long from wreath decreed;

  But, ah, ye Roses that have passed

  Accounting me a weed!”

  A Ground-Vine

  Intercedes with the Queen of Flowers

  For the merited recognition of Clover

  HYMNED down the years from ages far,

  The theme of lover, seer, and king,

  Reign endless, Rose! for fair you are,

  Nor heaven reserves a fairer thing.

  To elfin ears the bell-flowers chime

  Your beauty, Queen, your fame;

  Your titles, blown through Ariel’s clime,

  Thronged trumpet-flowers proclaim.

  Not less with me, a groundling, bear,

  Here bold for once, by nature shy:—

  If votaries yours be everywhere,

  And flattering you the laureats vie,—

  Meekness the more your heart should share.

  O Rose, we plants are all akin.

  Our roots enlock. Each strives to win

  The ampler space, the balmier air.

  But beauty, plainness, shade, and sun—

  Here share-and-share-alike is none!

  And, ranked with grass, a flower may dwell,

  Cheerful, if never high in feather,

  With pastoral sisters thriving well

  In bloom that shares the broader weather;

  Charmful, mayhap, in simple grace,

  A lowlier Eden mantling in her face.

  My Queen, so all along I lie,

  But creep I can, scarce win your eye.

  But, O, your garden-wall peer over,

  And, if you blush, ’twill hardly be

  At owning kin with Cousin Clover

  Who winsome makes the low degree.

  PART III: RIP VAN WINKLE’S LILAC

  To

  A Happy Shade

  UNDER THE golden maples where thou now reclinest, sharing fame’s Indian Summer with those mellowing Immortals who as men were not only excellent in their works but pleasant and love-worthy in their lives; little troublest thou thyself, O Washington Irving, as to who peradventure may be poaching in that literary manor which thou leftest behind. Still less is it thou, happy Shade, that wilt charge with presumption the endeavor to render something tributary to the story of that child of thy heart—Rip Van Winkle. For aught I, or anybody, knows to the contrary, thy vision may now be such that it may even reach here where I write, and thy spirit be pleased to behold me inspired by whom but thyself.

  Rip Van Winkle’s Lilac

  RIVERWARD EMERGING toward sunset in leafy June from a dark upper clove or gorge of the Kattskills, dazed with his long sleep in an innermost hollow of those mountains, the good-hearted good-for-nothing comes to an upland pasture. Hearing his limping footfall in the loneliness, the simpletons of young steers, there left to themselves for the summer, abruptly lifting their heads from the herbage, stand as stupified with astonishment while he passes.

  In further descent he comes to a few raggedly cultivated fields detached and apart; but no house as yet, and presently strikes a wood-chopper’s winding road lonesomely skirting the pastoral uplands, a road for the most part unfenced, and in summer so little travelled that the faint wheel-tracks were traceable but as forming long parallel depressions in the natural turf. This slant descending way the dazed one dimly recalls as joining another less wild and leading homeward. Even so it proved. For anon he comes to the junction. There he pauses in startled recognition of a view only visible in perfection at that point; a view deeply stamped in his memory, he having been repeatedly arrested by it when going on his hunting or birding expeditions. It was where, seen at the far end of a long vistaed clove, the head of one distant blue summit peered over the shoulder of a range not so blue as less lofty and remote. To Rip’s present frame of mind, by no means normal, that summit seemed like a man standing on tiptoes in a crowd to get a better look at some extraordinary object. Inquisitively it seemed to scrutinise him across the green solitudes, as much as to say “Who, I wonder, art thou? And where, pray, didst thou come from?” This freak of his disturbed imagination was not without pain to poor Rip. That mountain so well remembered, on his part, him had it forgotten? quite forgotten him, and in a day? But the evening now drawing on revives him with the sweet smells it draws from the grasses and shrubs. Proceeding on his path he after a little becomes sensible of a prevailing fragrance wholly new to him, at least in that vicinity, a wafted deliciousness growing more and more pronounced as he nears his house, one standing all by itself and remote from others. Suddenly, at a turn of the road it comes into view. Hereupon, something that he misses there, and quite another thing that he sees, bring him amazed to a stand. Where, according to his hazy reminiscences, all had been without floral embellishment of any kind save a sm
all plot of pinks and hollyhocks in the sunny rear of the house—a little garden tended by the Dame herself—lo, a Lilac of unusual girth and height stands in full flower hard by the open door, usurping, as it were, all but the very spot which he could only recall as occupied by an immemorial willow.

  Now Rip’s humble abode, a frame one, though indeed, as he remembered it, quite habitable, had in some particulars never been carried to entire completion; the builder and original proprietor, a certain honest woodman, while about to give it the last touches having been summoned away to join his progenitors in that paternal house where the Good Book assures us are many mansions. This sudden arrest of the work left the structure in a condition rather slatternly as to externals. Though a safe shelter enough from the elements, ill fitted was it as a nuptial bower for the woodman’s heir, none other than Rip, his next living kin; who, enheartened by his inheritance, boldly took the grand venture of practical life—matrimony. Yes, the first occupants were Rip and his dame, then the bride. A winsome bride it was too, with attractiveness all her own; her dowry consisting of little more than a chest of clothes, some cooking utensils, a bed and a spinning-wheel. A fair shape, cheeks of dawn, and black eyes were hers, eyes indeed with a roguish twinkle at times, but apparently as little capable of snapping as two soft sable violets.

  Well, after a few days’ occupancy of the place, returning thereto at sunset from a romantic ramble among the low-whispering pines, Rip the while feelingly rehearsing to his beloved some memories of his indulgent mother now departed, she suddenly changed the subject. Pointing to the unfinished house, she amiably suggested to the bridegroom that he could readily do what was needful to putting it in trim; for was not her dear Rip a bit of a carpenter? But Rip, though rather taken at unawares, delicately pleaded something to the effect that the clattering hammer and rasping saw would be a rude disturbance to the serene charm of the honeymoon. Setting out a little orchard for future bearing, would suit the time better. And this he engaged shortly to do. “Sweetheart” he said in conclusion, with sly magnetism twining an arm round her jimp waist, “Sweetheart, I will take up the hammer and saw in good time.” That good time proved very dilatory; in fact, it never came. But, good or bad, time has a persistent never-halting way of running on, and by so doing brings about wonderful changes and transformations. Ere very long the bride developed into the dame; the bridegroom into that commonplace entity, the married man. Moreover, some of those pleasing qualities which in the lover had won the inexperienced virgin’s affections, turned out to be the very points least desirable, as of least practical efficacy in a husband, one not born to fortune, and who therefore, to advance himself in the work-a-day world, must needs energetically elbow his way therein, quite regardless of the amenities while so doing; either this, or else resort to the sinuous wisdom of the serpent.