By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall! 20
They climb up into my turret
O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.
They almost devour me with kisses, 25
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!
Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall, 30
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon 35
In the round-tower of my heart.
And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away! 40
Enceladus
Written February 3, 1859. “I have written,” says Mr. Longfellow in a letter to Mr. Sumner, “a lyric on Italy, entitled Enceladus, from which title your imagination can construct the poem. It is not a war-song, but a kind of lament for the woes of the country.” Mr. Longfellow used the money paid him for the poem, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, August, 1859, in aid of the Italian widows and the soldiers wounded in the war then going on for the deliverance of Italy from Austrian rule.
UNDER Mount Etna he lies,
It is slumber, it is not death;
For he struggles at times to arise,
And above him the lurid skies
Are hot with his fiery breath. 5
The crags are piled on his breast,
The earth is heaped on his head;
But the groans of his wild unrest,
Though smothered and half suppressed,
Are heard, and he is not dead. 10
And the nations far away
Are watching with eager eyes;
They talk together and say,
“To-morrow, perhaps to-day,
Enceladus will arise!” 15
And the old gods, the austere
Oppressors in their strength,
Stand aghast and white with fear
At the ominous sounds they hear,
And tremble, and mutter, “At length!” 20
Ah me! for the land that is sown
With the harvest of despair!
Where the burning cinders, blown
From the lips of the overthrown
Enceladus, fill the air; 25
Where ashes are heaped in drifts
Over vineyard and field and town,
Whenever he starts and lifts
His head through the blackened rifts
Of the crags that keep him down. 30
See, see! the red light shines!
‘T is the glare of his awful eyes!
And the storm-wind shouts through the pines
Of Alps and of Apennines,
“Enceladus, arise!” 35
The Cumberland
AT anchor in Hampton Roads we lay,
On board of the Cumberland, sloop-of-war;
And at times from the fortress across the bay
The alarum of drums swept past,
Or a bugle blast 5
From the camp on the shore.
Then far away to the south uprose
A little feather of snow-white smoke,
And we knew that the iron ship of our foes
Was steadily steering its course 10
To try the force
Of our ribs of oak.
Down upon us heavily runs,
Silent and sullen, the floating fort;
Then comes a puff of smoke from her guns, 15
And leaps the terrible death,
With fiery breath,
From each open port.
We are not idle, but send her straight
Defiance back in a full broadside! 20
As hail rebounds from a roof of slate,
Rebounds our heavier hail
From each iron scale
Of the monster’s hide.
“Strike your flag!” the rebel cries, 25
In his arrogant old plantation strain.
“Never!” our gallant Morris replies;
“It is better to sink than to yield!”
And the whole air pealed
With the cheers of our men. 30
Then, like a kraken huge and black,
She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp!
Down went the Cumberland all a wrack,
With a sudden shudder of death,
And the cannon’s breath 35
For her dying gasp.
Next morn, as the sun rose over the bay,
Still floated our flag at the mainmast head.
Lord, how beautiful was Thy day!
Every waft of the air 40
Was a whisper of prayer,
Or a dirge for the dead.
Ho! brave hearts that went down in the seas!
Ye are at peace in the troubled stream;
Ho! brave land! with hearts like these, 45
Thy flag, that is rent in twain,
Shall be one again,
And without a seam!
Snow-Flakes
OUT of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow 5
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession, 10
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair, 15
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
A Day of Sunshine
O GIFT of God! O perfect day:
Whereon shall no man work, but play;
Whereon it is enough for me,
Not to be doing, but to be!
Through every fibre of my brain, 5
Through every nerve, through every vein,
I feel the electric thrill, the touch
Of life, that seems almost too much.
I hear the wind among the trees
Playing celestial symphonies; 10
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument.
And over me unrolls on high
The splendid scenery of the sky,
Where through a sapphire sea the sun 15
Sails like a golden galleon,
Towards yonder cloud-land in the West,
Towards yonder Islands of the Blest,
Whose steep sierra far uplifts
Its craggy summits white with drifts. 20
Blow, winds! and waft through all the rooms
The snow-flakes of the cherry-blooms!
Blow, winds! and bend within my reach
The fiery blossoms of the peach!
O Life and Love! O happy throng 25
Of thoughts, whose only speech is song!
O heart of man! canst thou not be
Blithe as the air is, and as free?
Something Left Undone
LABOR with what zeal we will,
Something still remains undone,
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun.
By the bedside, on the stair, 5
At the threshold, near the gates,
With its menace or its prayer,
Like a mendicant it waits;
Waits, and will not go away;
Waits, and will not be gainsaid; 10
By the cares of yesterday
Each to-day is heavier made;
Till at length the burden seems
Greater than our strength can bear,
Heavy as the weight of dreams, 15
Pressing on us everywhere.
And we stand from day to day,
Like the dwarfs of times gone by,
Who, as Northern legends say,
On their shoulders held the sky. 20
Weariness
O LITTLE feet! that such long years
Must wander on through hopes and fears,
Must ache and bleed beneath your load;
I, nearer to the wayside inn
Where toil shall cease and rest begin, 5
Am weary, thinking of your road!
O little hands! that, weak or strong,
Have still to serve or rule so long,
Have still so long to give or ask;
I, who so much with book and pen 10
Have toiled among my fellow-men,
Am weary, thinking of your task.
O little hearts! that throb and beat
With such impatient, feverish heat,
Such limitless and strong desires; 15
Mine, that so long has glowed and burned,
With passions into ashes turned,
Now covers and conceals its fires.
O little souls! as pure and white
And crystalline as rays of light 20
Direct from heaven, their source divine;
Refracted through the mist of years,
How red my setting sun appears,
How lurid looks this soul of mine!
SONGS AND SONNETS
CONTENTS
The Day is done
Afternoon in February
To an Old Danish Song Book
Walter von der Vogelweid
Drinking Song
The Old Clock on the Stairs
The Arrow and the Song
Mezzo Cammin
The Evening Star
Autumn
Dante
Curfew
The Day is done
Written in the fall of 1844 as proem to The Waif, a small volume of poems selected by Mr. Longfellow and published at Christmas of that year.
THE DAY is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
I see the lights of the village 5
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain, 10
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling, 15
And banish the thoughts of day.
Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time. 20
For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life’s endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.
Read from some humbler poet, 25
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;
Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease, 30
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.
Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction 35
That follows after prayer.
Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice. 40
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.
Afternoon in February
THE DAY is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.
Through clouds like ashes 5
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red.
The snow recommences;
The buried fences 10
Mark no longer
The road o’er the plain;
While through the meadows,
Like fearful shadows,
Slowly passes 15
A funeral train.
The bell is pealing,
And every feeling
Within me responds
To the dismal knell; 20
Shadows are trailing,
My heart is bewailing
And tolling within
Like a funeral bell.
To an Old Danish Song Book
Mr. Longfellow upon Andersen’s Story of my Life, notes in his diary: “Autumn always brings back very freshly my autumnal sojourn in Copenhagen, delightfully mingled with bracing air and yellow falling leaves. I have tried to record the impression in the song To an Old Danish Song Book.”
WELCOME, my old friend,
Welcome to a foreign fireside,
While the sullen gales of autumn
Shake the windows.
The ungrateful world 5
Has, it seems, dealt harshly with thee,
Since, beneath the skies of Denmark,
First I met thee.
There are marks of age,
There are thumb-marks on thy margin, 10
Made by hands that clasped thee rudely
At the alehouse.
Soiled and dull thou art;
Yellow are thy time-worn pages,
As the russet, rain-molested 15
Leaves of autumn.
Thou art stained with wine
Scattered from hilarious goblets,
As the leaves with the libations
Of Olympus. 20
Yet dost thou recall
Days departed, half-forgotten,
When in dreamy youth I wandered
By the Baltic, —
When I paused to hear 25
The old ballad of King Christian
Shouted from suburban taverns
In the twilight.
Thou recallest bards,
Who, in solitary chambers, 30
And with hearts by passion wasted,
Wrote thy pages.
Thou recallest homes
Where thy songs of love and friendship
Made the gloomy Northern winter 35
Bright as summer.
Once some ancient Scald,
In his bleak, ancestral Iceland,
Chanted staves of these old ballads
To the Vikings. 40
Once in Elsinore,
At the court of old King Hamlet,
Yorick and his boon companions
Sang these ditties.
Once Prince Frederick’s Guard 45
Sang them in their smoky barracks; —
Suddenly the English cannon
Joined the chorus!
Peasants in the field,
Sailors on the roaring ocean, 50
Students, tradesmen, pale mechanics,
All have sung them.
Thou hast been their friend;
They, alas! have left thee friendless!
Yet at least by one warm fireside 55
Art thou welcome.
And, as swallows build
In these wide, old-fashioned chimneys,
So thy twittering song shall nestle
In
my bosom, — 60
Quiet, close, and warm,
Sheltered from all molestation,
And recalling by their voices
Youth and travel.
Walter von der Vogelweid
VOGELWEID the Minnesinger,
When he left this world of ours,
Laid his body in the cloister,
Under Würtzburg’s minster towers.
And he gave the monks his treasures, 5
Gave them all with this behest:
They should feed the birds at noontide
Daily on his place of rest;
Saying, “From these wandering minstrels
I have learned the art of song; 10
Let me now repay the lessons
They have taught so well and long.”
Thus the bard of love departed;
And, fulfilling his desire,
On his tomb the birds were feasted 15
By the children of the choir.
Day by day, o’er tower and turret,
In foul weather and in fair,
Day by day, in vaster numbers,
Flocked the poets of the air. 20
On the tree whose heavy branches
Overshadowed all the place,
On the pavement, on the tombstone,
On the poet’s sculptured face,
On the cross-bars of each window, 25
On the lintel of each door,
They renewed the War of Wartburg,
Which the bard had fought before.
There they sang their merry carols,
Sang their lauds on every side; 30
Delphi Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Delphi Poets Series Book 13) Page 15
