And lifts her soft eyes freighted with a heavy pledge
To your eyes empty of pledges, even of pledges broken?
From Poems Selected for Young People
From a Very Little Sphinx
I
Come along in then, little girl!
Or else stay out!
But in the open door she stands,
And bites her lip and twists her hands,
And stares upon me, trouble-eyed:
“Mother,” she says, “I can’t decide!
I can’t decide!”
II
Oh, burdock, and you other dock,
That have ground coffee for your seeds,
And lovely long thin daisies, dear—
She said that you are weeds!
She said, “Oh, what a fine bouquet!”
But afterwards I heard her say,
“She’s always dragging in those weeds.”
III
Everybody but just me
Despises burdocks. Mother, she
Despises ’em the most because
They stick so to my socks and drawers.
But father, when he sits on some,
Can’t speak a decent word for ’em.
IV
I know a hundred ways to die.
I’ve often thought I’d try one:
Lie down beneath a motor truck
Some day when standing by one.
Or throw myself from off a bridge—
Except such things must be
So hard upon the scavengers
And men that clean the sea.
I know some poison I could drink.
I’ve often thought I’d taste it.
But mother bought it for the sink,
And drinking it would waste it.
V
Look, Edwin! Do you see that boy
Talking to the other boy?
No, over there by those two men—
Wait, don’t look now—no w look again.
No, not the one in navy-blue;
That’s the one he’s talking to.
Sure you see him? Striped pants?
Well, he was born in Paris, France.
VI
All the grown-up people say,
“What, those ugly thistles?
Mustn’t touch them! Keep away!
Prickly! Full of bristles!”
Yet they never make me bleed
Half so much as roses!
Must be purple is a weed,
And pink and white is posies.
VII
Wonder where this horseshoe went.
Up and down, up and down,
Up and past the monument ,
Maybe into town.
Wait a minute. “Horseshoe,
How far have you been?”
Says it’s been to Salem
And half-way to Lynn.
Wonder who was in the team.
Wonder what they saw.
Wonder if they passed a bridge—
Bridge with a draw.
Says it went from one bridge
Straight upon another.
Says it took a little girl
Driving with her mother.
From Wine from These Grapes
The Return
Earth does not understand her child,
Who from the loud gregarious town
Returns, depleted and defiled,
To the still woods, to fling him down.
Earth can not count the sons she bore:
The wounded lynx, the wounded man
Come trailing blood unto her door;
She shelters both as best she can.
But she is early up and out,
To trim the year or strip its bones;
She has no time to stand about
Talking of him in undertones
Who has no aim but to forget,
Be left in peace, be lying thus
For days, for years, for centuries yet,
Unshaven and anonymous;
Who, marked for failure, dulled by grief,
Has traded in his wife and friend
For this warm ledge, this alder leaf:
Comfort that does not comprehend.
October—An Etching
There where the woodcock his long bill among the alders
Forward in level flight propels,
Tussocks of faded grass are islands in the pasture swamp
Where the small foot, if it be light as well, can pass
Dry-shod to rising ground.
Not so the boo t of the hunter.
Chilly and black and halfway to the knee
Is the thick water there, heavy wading,
Uneven to the step; there the more cautious ones,
Pausing for a moment, break their guns.
There the white setter ticked with black
Sets forth with silky feathers on the bird’s track
And wet to his pink skin and half his size comes back.
Cows are pastured there; they have made a path among the alders.
By now the keeper’s boy has found
The chalk of the woodcock on the trampled ground.
Autumn Daybreak
Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud
At dawn, a fortnight overdue,
Jostling the doors, and tearing through
My bedroom to rejoin the cloud,
I know—for I can hear the hiss
And scrape of leaves along the floor—
How many boughs, lashed bare by this,
Will rake the cluttered sky once more.
Tardy, and somewhat south of east,
The sun will rise at length, made known
More by the meagre light increased
Than by a disk in splendour shown;
When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,
Bleak and remembered, patched with red,
The hill all summer hid from me.
The Oak-Leaves
Yet in the end, defeated too, worn out and ready to fall,
Hangs from the drowsy tree with cramped and desperate stem above the ditch the last leaf of all.
There is something to be learned, I guess, from looking at the dead leaves under the living tree;
Something to be set to a lusty tune and learned and sung, it well might be;
Something to be learned—though I was ever a ten-o’clock scholar at this school—
Even perhaps by me.
But my heart goes out to the oak-leaves that are the last to sigh
“Enough,” and loose their hold;
They have boasted to the nudging frost and to the two-and-thirty winds that they would never die,
Never even grow old.
(These are those russet leaves that cling
All winter, even into the spring,
To the dormant bough, in the wood knee-deep in snow the only coloured thing.)
The Fledgling
So, art thou feathered, art thou flown,
Thou naked thing?—and canst alone
Upon the unsolid summer air
Sustain thyself, and prosper there?
Shall I no more with anxious note
Advise thee through the happy day,
Thrusting the worm into thy throat,
Bearing thine excrement away?
Alas, I think I see thee yet,
Perched on the windy parapet,
Defer thy flight a moment still
To clean thy wing with careful bill.
And thou art feathered, thou art flown;
And hast a project of thine own.
The Hedge of Hemlocks
Somebody long ago
Set out this hedge of hemlocks; brought from the woods, I’d say,
Saplings ten inches tall, curving and delicate, not shaped like trees,
And set them out, to shut the marshes from the lawn,
A hedge of ferns.
Four feet apart h
e set them, far apart, leaving them room to grow . . .
Whose crowded lower boughs these fifty years at least
Are spiky stumps outthrust in all directions, dry, dropping scaly bark, in the deep shade making a thick
Dust which here and there floats in a short dazzling beam.
Green tops, delicate and curving yet, above this fence of brush, like ferns,
You have done well: more than the marshes now is shut away
from his protected dooryard;
The mountain, too, is shut away; not even the wind
May trespass here to stir the purple phlox in the tall grass.
And yet how easily one afternoon between
Your stems, unheard, snapping no twig, dislodging no shell of loosened bark, unseen
Even by the spider through whose finished web he walked, and left it as he found it,
A neighbour entered.
Cap D’Antibes
The storm is over, and the land has forgotten the storm; the trees are still.
Under this sun the rain dries quickly.
Cones from the sea-pines cover the ground again
Where yesterday for my fire I gathered all in sight;
But the leaves are meek. The smell of the small alyssum that grows wild here
Is in the air. It is a childish morning.
More sea than land am I; my sulky mind, whipped high by tempest in the night, is not so soon appeased.
Into my occupations with dull roar
It washes,
It recedes.
Even as at my side in the calm day the disturbed Mediterranean
Lurches with heavy swell against the bird-twittering shore.
From a Train Window
Precious in the light of the early sun the Housatonic
Between its not unscalable mountains flows.
Precious in the January morning the shabby fur of the cat-tails by the stream.
The farmer driving his horse to the feed-store for a sack of cracked corn
Is not in haste; there is no whip in the socket.
Pleasant enough, gay even, by no means sad
Is the rickety graveyard on the hill. Those are not cypress trees
Perpendicular among the lurching slabs, but cedars from the neighbourhood,
Native to this rocky land, self-sown. Precious
In the early light, reassuring
Is the grave-scarred hillside.
As if after all, the earth might know what it is about.
The Fawn
There it was I saw what I shall never forget
And never retrieve.
Monstrous and beautiful to human eyes, hard to believe,
He lay, yet there he lay,
Asleep on the moss, his head on his polished cleft small ebony hooves,
The child of the doe, the dappled child of the deer.
Surely his mother had never said, “Lie here
Till I return,” so spotty and plain to see
On the green moss lay he.
His eyes had opened; he considered me.
I would have given more than I care to say
To thrifty ears, might I have had him for my friend
One moment only of that forest day:
Might I have had the acceptance, not the love
Of those clear eyes;
Might I have been for him the bough above
Or the root beneath his forest bed,
A part of the forest, seen without surprise.
Was it alarm, or was it the wind of my fear lest he depart
That jerked him to his jointy knees,
And sent him crashing off, leaping and stumbling
On his new legs, between the stems of the white trees?
I
Valentine
Oh, what a shining town were Death
Woke you therein, and drew your breath,
My buried love; and all you were,
Caught up and cherished, even there.
Those evil windows loved of none
Would blaze as if they caught the sun.
Woke you in Heaven, Death’s kinder name,
And downward in sweet gesture came
From your cold breast your rigid hand,
Then Heaven would be my native land.
But you are nowhere: you are gone
All roads into Oblivion.
Whither I would disperse, till then
From home a banished citizen.
II
In the Grave No Flower
Here dock and tare.
But there
No flower.
Here beggar-ticks, ’tis true;
Here the rank-smelling
Thorn-apple,—and who
Would plant this by his dwelling?
Here every manner of weed
To mock the faithful harrow:
Thistles, that feed
None but the finches; yarrow,
Blue vervain, yellow charlock; here
Bindweed, that chokes the struggling year;
Broad plantain and narrow.
But there no flower.
The rye is vexed and thinned,
The wheat comes limping home,
By vetch and whiteweed harried, and the sandy bloom
Of the sour-grass; here
Dandelions,—and the wind
Will blow them everywhere.
Save there.
There
No flower.
III
Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green striped bag, or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.
And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it’s much too small, because she won’t curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months,
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God!
Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,—mothers and fathers don’t die.
And if you have said, “For heaven’s sake, must you always be kissing a person?”
Or, “I do wish to gracious you’d stop tapping on the window with your thimble!”
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you’re busy having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, “I’m sorry, mother.”
To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.
Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries; they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide back into their chairs.
Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.
IV
Th
e Solid Sprite Who Stands Alone
The solid sprite who stands alone,
And walks the world with equal stride,
Grieve though he may, is not undone
Because a friend has died.
He knows that man is born to care,
And ten and threescore’s all his span;
And this is comfort and to spare
For such a level man.
He is not made like crooked me,
Who cannot rise nor lift my head,
And all because what had to be
Has been, what lived is dead;
Who lie among my tears and rust,
And all because a mortal brain
That loved to think, is clogged with dust,
And will not think again.
V
Spring in the Garden
Ah, cannot the curled shoots of the larkspur that you loved so,
Cannot the spiny poppy that no winter kills
Instruct you how to return through the thawing ground and the thin snow
Into this April sun that is driving the mist between the hills?
A good friend to the monkshood in a time of need
You were, and the lupine’s friend as well;
But I see the lupine lift the ground like a tough weed
And the earth over the monkshood swell,
And I fear that not a root in all this heaving sea
Of land, has nudged you where you lie, has found
Patience and time to direct you, num b and stupid as you still must be
From your first winter underground.
VI
Sonnet
Time, that renews the tissues of this frame,
That built the child and hardened the soft bone,
Taught him to wail, to blink, to walk alone,
Stare, question, wonder, give the world a name,
Forget the watery darkness whence he came,
Attends no less the boy to manhood grown,
Brings him new raiment, strips him of his own:
All skins are shed at length, remorse, even shame.
Such hope is mine, if this indeed be true,
I dread no more the first white in my hair,
Or even age itself, the easy shoe,
Collected Poems Page 12
