And speak no lie.
For He is nothing;
He is less
Than Echo answering
“Nothingness.!”—
Less than the heat
Of the furthest star
To the ripening wheat;
Less by far,
When all the lipping
Is said and sung,
Than the sweat dripping
From a dog’s tongue.
This being so,
And I being such,
I would liever go
On a cripple’s crutch,
Lopped and felled;
Liever be dependent
On a chair propelled
By a surly attendant
With a foul breath,
And be spooned my food,
Than go with Death
Where nothing good,
Not even the thrust
Of the summer gnat,
Consoles the dust
For being that.
Needy, lonely,
Stitched by pain,
Left with only
The drip of the rain
Out of all I had;
The books of the wise,
Badly read
By other eyes,
Lewdly bawled
At my closing ear;
Hated, called
A lingerer here;—
Withstanding Death
Till Life be gone,
I shall treasure my breath,
I shall linger on.
I shall bolt my door
With a bolt and a cable;
I shall block my door
With a bureau and a table;
With all my might
My door shall be barred.
I shall put up a fight,
I shall take it hard.
With his hand on my mouth
He shall drag me forth,
Shrieking to the south
And clutching at the north.
Song
Gone, gone again is Summer the lovely.
She that knew not where to hide,
Is gone again like a jeweled fish from the hand,
Is lost on every side.
Mute, mute, I make my way to the garden,
Thither where she last was seen;
The heavy foot of the frost is on the flags there,
Where her light step has been.
Gone, gone again is Summer the lovely,
Gone again on every side,
Lost again like a shining fish from the hand
Into the shadowy tide.
To the Wife of a Sick Friend
Shelter this candle from the wind.
Hold it steady. In its light
The cave wherein we wander lost
Glitters with frosty stalactite,
Blossoms with mineral rose and lotus,
Sparkles with crystal moon and star,
Till a man would rather be lost than found:
We have forgotten where we are.
Shelter this candle. Shrewdly blowing
Down the cave from a secret door
Enters our only foe, the wind.
Hold it steady. Lest we stand,
Each in a sudden, separate dark,
The hot wax spattered upon your hand,
The smoking wick in my nostrils strong,
The inner eyelid red and green
For a moment yet with moons and roses,—
Then the unmitigated dark.
Alone, alone, in a terrible place,
In utter dark without a face,
With only the dripping of the water on the stone,
And the sound of your tears, and the taste of my own.
The Bobolink
Black bird scudding
Under the rainy sky,
How wet your wings must be!
And your small head how sleek and cold with water.
Oh, Bobolink, ’tis you!
Over the buffeted orchard in the summer draught,
Chuckling and singing, charging the rainy cloud,
A little bird gone daft,
A little bird with a secret.
Only the bobolink on the rainy
Rhubarb blossom,
Knows my heart. . . .
For whom adversity has not a word to say that can be heard
Above the din of summer.
The rain has taught us nothing. And the hooves of cattle, and the cat in the grass
Have taught us nothing.
The hawk that motionless above the hill
In the pure sky
Stands like a blackened planet
Has taught us nothing,—seeing him shut his wings and fall
Has taught us nothing at all.
In the shadow of the hawk we feather our nests.
Bobolink, you and I, an airy fool and an earthy,
Chuckling under the rain!
I shall never he sad again.
I shall never be sad again.
Ah, sweet, absurd,
Belovèd, bedraggled bird!
The Hawkweed
Between the red-top and the rye,
Between the buckwheat and the corn,
The ploughman sees with sullen eye
The hawkweed licking at the sky:
Three level acres all forlorn,
Unfertile, sour, outrun, outworn,
Free as the day that they were born.
Southward and northward, west and east,
The sulphate and the lime are spread;
Harrowed and sweetened, urged, increased,
The furrow sprouts for man and beast:
While of the hawkweed’s radiant head
No stanchion reeks, no stock is fed.
Triumphant up the taken field
The tractor and the plough advance;
Blest be the healthy germ concealed
In the rich earth, and blest the yield:
And blest be Beauty, that enchants
The frail, the solitary lance.
To a Friend Estranged from Me
Now goes under, and I watch it go under, the sun
That will not rise again.
Today has seen the setting, in your eyes cold and senseless as the sea,
Of friendship better than bread, and of bright charity
That lifts a man a little above the beasts that run.
That this could be!
That I should live to see
Most vulgar Pride, that stale obstreperous clown,
So fitted out with purple robe and crown
To stand among his betters! Face to face
With outraged me in this once holy place,
Where Wisdom was a favoured guest and hunted
Truth was harboured out of danger,
He bulks enthroned, a lewd, an insupportable stranger
I would have sworn, indeed I swore it:
The hills may shift, the waters may decline,
Winter may twist the stem from the twig that bore it,
But never your love from me, your hand from mine.
Now goes under the sun, and I watch it go under.
Farewell, sweet light, great wonder!
You, too, farewell,—but fare not well enough to dream
You have done wisely to invite the night before the darkness came.
The Road to Avrillé
April again in Avrillé,
And the brown lark in air.
And you and I a world apart,
That walked together there.
The cuckoo spoke from out the wood,
The lark from out the sky.
Embraced upon the highway stood
Love-sick you and I.
The rosy peasant left his bees,
The carrier slowed his cart,
To shout us blithe obscenities,
And bless us from the heart,
Who long before the year was out,
Under the autumn rain,
Far from the road to Avrillé,<
br />
Parted with little pain.
For Pao-Chin, a Boatman on the Yellow Sea
Where is he now, in his soiled shirt reeking of garlic,
Sculling his sampan home, and night approaching fast—
The red sail hanging wrinkled on the bamboo mast;
Where is he now, I shall remember my whole life long
With love and praise, for the sake of a small song
Played on a Chinese flute?
I have been sad;
I have been in cities where the song was all I had,—
A treasure never to be bartered by the hungry days.
Where is he now, for whom I carry in my heart
This love, this praise?
Northern April
O mind, beset by music never for a moment quiet,—
The wind at the flue, the wind strumming the shutter;
The soft, antiphonal speech of the doubled brook, never for a moment quiet;
The rush of the rain against the glass, his voice in the eaves-gutter
Where shall I lay you to sleep, and the robins be quiet?
Lay you to sleep—and the frogs be silent in the marsh?
Crashes the sleet from the bough and the bough sighs upward, never for a moment quiet.
April is upon us, pitiless and young and harsh.
O April, full of blood, full of breath, have pity upon us!
Pale, where the winter like a stone has been lifted away, we emerge like yellow grass.
Be for a moment quiet, buffet us not, have pity upon us,
Till the green come back into the vein, till the giddiness pass.
There at Dusk I Found You
There at dusk I found you, walking and weeping
Upon the broken flags,
Where at dusk the dumb white nicotine awakes and utters her fragrance
In a garden sleeping.
Looking askance you said:
Love is dead.
Under our eyes without warning softly the summer afternoon let fall
The rose upon the wall,
And it lay there splintered.
Terribly then into my heart the forgotten anguish entered.
I saw the dark stone on the smallest finger of your hand,
And the clean cuff above.
No more, no more the dark stone on the smallest finger
Of your brown and naked arm,
Lifting my body in love!
Worse than dead is he of the wounded wing,
Who walks between us, weeping upon the cold flags,
Bleeding and weeping, dragging his broken wing.
He has gathered the rose into his hand and chafed her with his breath.
But the rose is quiet and pale. She has forgotten us all.
Even spring.
Even death.
As for me, I have forgotten nothing,—nor shall I ever forget—
But this one thing:
I have forgotten which of us it was
That hurt his wing.
I only know his limping flight above us in the blue air
Toward the sunset cloud
Is more than I can bear.
You, you there,
Stiff-necked and angry, holding up your head so proud,
Have you not seen how pitiful lame he flies, and none to befriend him?
Speak! Are you blind? Are you dead?
Shall we call him back? Shall we mend him?
Being Young and Green
Being young and green, I said in love’s despite:
Never in the world will I to living wight
Give over, air my mind
To anyone,
Hang out its ancient secrets in the strong wind
To be shredded and faded. . . .
Oh, me, invaded
And sacked by the wind and the sun!
Mist in the Valley
These hills, to hurt me more,
That am hurt already enough,—
Having left the sea behind,
Having turned suddenly and left the shore
That I had loved beyond all words, even a song’s words, to convey,
And built me a house on upland acres,
Sweet with the pinxter, bright and rough
With the rusty blackbird long before the winter’s done,
But smelling never of bayberry hot in the sun,
Nor ever loud with the pounding of the long white breakers,—
These hills, beneath the October moon,
Sit in the valley white with mist
Like islands in a quiet bay,
Jut out from shore into the mist,
Wooded with poplar dark as pine,
Like points of land into a quiet bay.
(Just in that way
The harbour met the bay)
Stricken too sore for tears,
I stand, remembering the islands and the sea’s lost sound. . . .
Life at its best no longer than the sand-peep’s cry,
And I two years, two years,
Tilling an upland ground
The Hardy Garden
Now let forever the phlox and the rose be tended
Here where the rain has darkened and the sun has dried
So many times the terrace, yet is love unended,
Love has not died.
Let here no seed of a season, that the winter
But once assails, take root and for a time endure;
But only such as harbour at the frozen centre
The germ secure.
Set here the phlox and the iris, and establish
Pink and valerian, and the great and lesser bells;
But suffer not the sisters of the year, to publish
That frost prevails.
How far from home in a world of mortal burdens
Is Love, that may not die, and is forever young!
Set roses here: surround her only with such maidens
As speak her tongue.
The Pigeons
Well I remember the pigeons in the sunny arbour
Beyond your open door;
How they conversed throughout the afternoon in their monotonous voices never for a moment still;
Always of yesterday they spoke, and of the days before,
Rustling the vine-leaves, twitching the dark shadows of the leaves on the bright sill.
You said, the soft curring and droning of the pigeons in the vine
Was a pretty thing enough to the passer-by,
But a maddening thing to a man with his head in his hands,—“Like mine! Like mine!”
You said, and ran to the door and waved them off into the sky.
They did not come back. The arbour was empty of their cooing.
The shadows of the leaves were still. “Whither have they flown, then?”
I said, and waited for their wings, but they did not come back.
If I had known then
What I know now, I never would have left your door.
Tall in your faded smock, with steady hand
Mingling the brilliant pigments, painting your intersecting planes you stand,
In a quiet room, empty of the past, of its droning and cooing,
Thinking I know not what, but thinking of me no more,
That left you with a light word, that loving and rueing
Walk in the streets of a city you have never seen,
Walk in a noise of yesterday and of the days before,
Walk in a cloud of wings intolerable, shutting out the sun as if it never had been.
The Buck in the Snow
White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.
Now lies he here, his wild blood scalding the snow.
How stra
nge a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing,—a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass
Shift their loads a little, letting fall a feather of snow—
Life, looking out attentive from the eyes of the doe.
The Anguish
I would to God I were quenched and fed
As in my youth
From the flask of song, and the good bread
Of beauty richer than truth.
The anguish of the world is on my tongue.
My bowl is filled to the brim with it; there is more than I can eat.
Happy are the toothless old and the toothless young,
That cannot rend this meat.
Justice Denied in Massachusetts
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room.
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting-room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed uprooted—
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.
What from the splendid dead
We have inherited—
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued—
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children’s children this beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
Collected Poems Page 10
