The old giant drowsed

With his bones in the sun.

Over the sleeper,

So stolid and wrinkled and still,

The pigmies swarmed

With their cobwebs of steel

And their trickles of stone.

“For all time,” said the pigmy swarm,

“These things shall endure!”

 

The tired old giant,

Where a flurry of cities freckled his skin,

Moved a muscle,

And sighed,

And resumed his sleep.

I saw the crowd in the noonday street

Stand with uplifted faces,

Reverent and oddly silent.

And for a fleeting moment I wondered

If men still sought for God.

But the thing that held them rapt

Was a sky-writer, weaving his letters of smoke,

High up in the limitless azure,—

Zooming and wheeling and banking again,

A lonely mote in the blue,

In the infinite blue

Where an Angel’s wings might hover

Or a Prophet sit on a cloud:

Yet ’twas nothing more than a man,

A goggled man and a motor,

Where God should have been.

A rind of light hangs low

On the rim of the world;

A sound of feet disturbs

The quiet of the cell

And proclaims the awaited guard

Where a rope and a beam looms high

At the end of the yard.

 

But in the lightening dusk

Of that walled yard waits a woman;

And as the Thing from its cell,

Still shackled and bruised and bound,

Crosses that pitiful space,

Silent, for ten brief steps,

A woman hangs on his neck.

 

And that walk from a cell to a sleep

Is commonly known as Life,

And those lingering ten

Reluctant steps

Of tangled rapture and tears

Is known as Love to men.

Below me,

In the blue-shadowed valley,

I see a far-off scythe-man

Felling his swathes of grain.

From side to side he swings

On a tilted shelf of gold,

And the sun leans over him

And there is no sound at all.

But abruptly he stops in his work,

Stands black in the opal light,

To whet his arrested blade.

The loud clangor of the stone

Along the resounding steel

Startles the quiet meadows.

Then the keen knife swings again,

And no sound comes up to us.

 

O Dear-To-Me,

Let us be silent too,

With the reaping that wakes no echo,

With the sheaf that makes no sound,

Forgetting the voluble clangor

Where stone against steel is song,

And men who know little of love

Talk of love too long!

Let me learn from you, Leaves,

That sing in the dusk

And dance in the autumn wind;

Lend me your valor, Leaves,

And teach me to turn

A face as laughing and light

To the passing of wonder,

The coming of winter

And Night.

 

Let me learn from you, Leaves,

Since we go alike

To the same far home

And sleep for so long

In the same quiet loam,—

Let me learn, in the end,

That this crimson of courage,

This valorous scarlet

That brightens the West,

This laugh before leaving,

This song before silence,

Is best!

The cell seemed very dark

And as I groped about in a daze,

Exploring unfriendly walls

And the steel bars bastioned in stone,

Something fragile and small

Crunched under my feet.

When I stopped and stooped low

I found on the granite floor

A little heap of cherry-stones,

Carved cherry-stones,

Patiently tooled and polished

By a lifer who’d lived and died

With so little to do and know

In the darkness.

The man I hated,

As he hated me,

Lies dead to-day.

Mine enemy of old has gone,

And I remain.

That means the steel is sheathed,

The life-long battle ends,

The rancor falls away.

No more shall his black scorn

Shadow my tumbled dreams.

No more, from those cold lips,

Shall fall the flippant sneer,

The hot words flecked with fire.

He died, they tell me, died last night;

And I—I should be glad

That he no longer harries me

And sours my life with hate.

Yet I, the victor, who should hold the field,

Sit numbed with a new defeat.

For he, forlornly valorous,

He, triumphant to the last,

Has fared into a far country

Where I erewhile must go,

Must go with a whisper on my lips,

Gropingly, asking of the Dark

If any friend dwell there.

Mournful the summer moon

Rose from the quiet sea.

Golden and sad and full of regret

As though it would ask of earth

Where all her lovers had vanished

And whither had gone the rose-red lips

That had sighed to her light of old.

Then I caught a pulse of music,

Brokenly, out at the pier-end,

And I heard the voices of girls

Going home in the dark,

Laughing along the sea-wall

Over a lover’s word!

I saw a woman stand

Under the seas of bloom,

Under the waves of color and light,

The showery snow and rose of the odorous trees

That made a glory of earth.

She stood where the petals fell,

And her hands were on her breast,

And her lips were touched with wonder,

And her eyes were full of pain—

For pure she was, and young,

And it was Spring!

Under each moccasined heel

The snow is crisp as charcoal;

There is no moon,

But the night is crystal-clear,

And above the blue-white drifts

The maples stand black;

The orange lamps in the valley

Blink up from another world.

 

On their corded wisp of wood,

In moccasin, jersey and toque,

The tobogganers arrange themselves.

A motley chorus of color,

They sit expectant,

They move,

Leaning forward a little

As their barque goes over the brink,

Gathering speed as it takes the dip.

 

In a smother of snow,

In a screaming glitter of ice,

It sinks to that lower world

Where the orange lamps are waiting,

A fall that is softened to flight,

A flight that dies down to a flow,

An arrow that sings through the gloom

To its target of Joy,

A plowshare that rips the belly of Fear

Open to laughter!

The thin gold of the sun lies slanting on the hill;

In the sorrowful grays and muffled violets of the old orchard

A group of girls are quietly gathering apples.

Through the mingled gloom and green they scarcely speak at all,

And their broken voices rise and fall unutterably sad.

There are no birds,

And the goldenrod is gone.

And a child calls out, far away, across the autumn twilight;

And the sad gray of the dusk grows slowly deeper,

And all the world seems old!

When they flagged our train because of a broken rail,

I stepped down out of the crowded car,

With its clamor and dust and heat and babel of broken talk.

I stepped out into the cool, the velvet cool, of the night,

And felt the balm of the prairie-wind on my face,

And somewhere I heard the running of water,

I felt the breathing of grass,

And I knew, as I saw the great white stars,

That the world was made for good!

This traveler

Who trod the hills of Mars

And headed often out where Algol waits,

This searcher of the skies

Who fared past ruddy Antares,

And walked with Regulus,

And was most friendly with grim Betelgeux,—

Who herded time-shy comets through the Void,

And gipsied down the garden-paths of Pollux,

And paddled often in the Milky Way,—

Who chummed with Arcturus,

And wandered on his tilted tube

Up through the Magellanic Clouds,—

Who hailed Aldebaran the Red

And knew Orion as a friend

And waved a hand to Mira,—

Who called on cold-eyed Procyon,

And waded boy-like in the Star-Drift,

And bumped his head against the Asteroids,

And, homing through the Planets,

Would brush the star-dust from his knees

And so raptly talk of light-years,—

How still he lies

In this small room,

Where in those shuttered eyes

That sought all far-off light

There is no answering light!

Close to each light-hearted woman

Who kisses her lover

And laughs and retreats,

Reluctant yet melting,

At war with herself,

Withholding yet warm,

Enkindled yet cold,

Stands a shadow,

The sentinel ghost of a ghost

Who whispers past pulsing of blood

And panting of breast:

“All I ask of you, fool,

Is a seed in this soil,

Is a thread for the loom.

Grow pale with your rapture,

Poor quivering tool,

But leave me a link for the chain,

A child in the womb!”

Ours is a dark country

When winter closes in.

The leaves are gone,

And the lakes give up their laughter,

And the snows come down,

And the tumbling streams turn quiet,

And there are no birds to sing.

Blue-white the bald hills stand

In that new-born hush,

When there is no wind,

And the world seems lost in sleep,

And the twilight sets in early

Where the saw-toothed edge of the pinelands

Gnaws at its rind of gold

Low down in the West.

 

Ours is a dark country,

But into its gloomy valleys

And its windrowed slopes of white

The loggers and teamsters come;

And the snow-muffled silence awakes

To the clang of the echoing ax,

The clank-clank-clink of the peavies,

The creak and whine of the log-chains

Where the great teams, rimed with frost,

Move slowly along the ice

To the crack of indignant whips

And the scream of the iron-shod runners

And the clangor of loosened chains

And the shouts of red-toqued drivers,

Snow-splashed and feathered with frost,

Where the silence is beaten back

By men at their toil.

 

But mostly between the hills

We hear the appeasing sound

Of their bells;

Bells through the blue-hilled morning,

Bells through the white-hilled day,

Bells through the lone long dusk

And the gathering twilight,

Deep-tongued and jubilant bells

Commingling in tone

And fading to far-off chimes;

The clamorous bells of the teamsters,

On slow-moving sleigh-tongues,

On shaken neck-yokes and hame-points,

Persistent, silvery sweet,

Oddly forlorn and musical;

Bells on horse-collars whitened with hoar,

Valorous and jocund bells

On the buckles of straining tugs;

Bells that chime and carol and sing

Through the lonely winter woodlands

Where the lonely stars come out

And men must have their music

In the midst of toil.

The song of the white-throat

Bubbled like water up from its breast,

Cascaded and curved and flashed

Like a glistening blade of joy

In the curving blue

Of the sky.

 

But sharper still was the curve

Of the gray hawk out of the blue,

And the curve of the bloodied beak

That struck like a bolt

And shattered the blade of song.

Close about my shack,

My shack in the little clearing,

Glooms the immeasurable forest.

But my box is heaped with birch-wood,

My lamp is alight on the table,

My kettle sings in the quiet,

And close to the fire

My lean bitch sleeps,—

Sleeps for a spell and wakens

And studies with gentle eyes

The answering eyes of Man.

 

But into this place of peace,

Where my bitch has her bone

And I have a book,

A call comes out of the night,

A challenge,

A wailing of want,

Where a timber-wolf skulks and waits

At the edge of our clearing.

 

And my bitch,

Who loves both me

And her appointed place by the fire,

Stirs in her sleep.

She rouses,

And walks to the door and whines,

Whines with something afar from hate

In her eye that evades my eye,

Forgetful of shelter and fire,

Forgetful of houses and men,

Ready to mate on a wind-swept hill

And suckle a half-starved litter

In a hole in a rock,

And forage and drag her kill

To a moldy den!

Solemn and slow they move

As one together,

Plowman and plow and straining team,

Dark-shadowed on the ground-swells,

Ant-like against the wash

Of tawny light.

They wheel and crawl again

Across the pulsing prairie-rim

Where the plowshare tears implacably

At the tangled roots of life

And the mold-board hides away

Bunch-grass and crocus-bloom and prairie-rose

And leaves blank waves of black.

 

Silent and utterly alone

The plowman widens that long aisle

Of umber loam and emptiness.

Yet not alone he goes,

And still majestical he moves

Along each conquering furrow

That flings its promise back

Where a thousand sheaves of grain

Like a thousand girls with golden hair

Are singing at his side!

The air is warm

In the white-walled room

Where the white bed waits,

And the meaningless flowers

Have wilted a little.

 

Far down in the rain-swept drive

I can see a ghostly row

Of motor-cars, side by side,

Oblongs of meaningless black

In a meaningless mist.

 

It is very quiet,—

So quiet that the sound of steps

In the corridor dusk

Stirs a flutter of hope

Where a door is opened and closed,

And a murmur of voices fails,

And the odor of ether creeps

Out to the hall.

 

The wind-blown rain

Grows louder against blurred glass

And lessens again;

Phantasmal and very far off

A bell rings twice;

And somebody laughs

In a distant room.

 

They can laugh,

When the woman I love,

When that proud and regal body

Once warm with the wine of joy

And wise in the ways of life,

Is a tortured bundle of bones

Under a turned-back sheet!

They can laugh,

When the last of hope

Hangs on the rotten thread

Of a fluttering pulse!

 

Then a mounded thing on wheels

Moves slowly down the hall,

And a tired-eyed girl in white

Stops with a tired smile

And whispers over her shoulder:

“Everything’s fine!”

And from the sudden light of the doorway

A deeper voice booms out:

“You’ve got a boy!”

The blue, blue sea,

And the drone of waves,

And the wheeling swallows,

And the sun on the opal sails,

And the misty and salt-bleached headlands,

And the milkweed thick at my feet,

And the milkweed held in the hand of a child

Who dreams on the misty cliff-edge,

Watching the fading sails

And the noonday blue

Of the lonely sea!

 

Was it all years ago,

Or was it but yesterday?

I only know that the scent

Of the milkweed brings it back,

Back with a touch of pain:

The child and the pallid headlands,

The drone of the dark blue sea,

And the opal sails

In the sun!

I am tired of the dust

And the fever and noise

And the meaningless faces of men;

And I want to go home!

Oh, day after day I get thinking of home

Where the black firs fringe the sky-line,

And the birds wheel down the silence,

And the hemlocks whisper peace,

And the hill-winds cool the blood,

And the dusk is crowned with glory,

And the lone horizon softens,

And the world’s at rest with Time!

Oh, I want to go there!

I want to go home!

I lounge on the deck of the river-steamer,

Homeward bound with its load,

Churning from headland to headland,

Through moonlight and silence and dusk.

And the decks are alive with laughter and music and singing,

And I see the forms of the sleepers

And the shadowy lovers that lean so close to the rail,

And the romping children behind,

And the dancers amidships.

But high above us there in the gloom,

Where the merriment breaks like a wave at his feet,

Unseen of lover and dancer and me,

Is the Pilot, impassive and stern,

With his grim eyes watching the course.

Some day, O Seeker of Dreams, they will seek even us!

Some day they will wake, Fellow Singer, and hunger and want

For the Ways to the Lonelier Height!

So let us, Shy Weaver of Beauty, take heart,

For out of their dust they will call to us yet!

Let us wait, and sing, and be wise,

As the sea has waited and sung,

As the hills through the night have been wise!

For we are the Bringers of Light, and the Voices of Love,

Aye, we are the Soothers of Pain, the Appeasers of Death,

The Dusk and the Star and the Gleam and the Loneliest Peak!

And when they have found and seen, and know not whither they trend,

They will come to us, crying aloud like a child in the night;

And when they have learned of our lips,

Still back to our feet they will grope

For that ultimate essence and core of all song,

To usher them empty and naked, then, out to the unanswering stars,

Where Silence and Dreaming and Music are one!

I watched the men at work on the stubborn rock,

But mostly the one man poised on a drill

Above the steam that hissed and billowed about him

White in the frosty air,

Where the lordly house would stand.

 

Majestic, muscular, high like a god,

He stood,

And controlled and stopped

And started his thundering drill,

Offhand and careless and lordly as Thor,

Begrimed and solemn and crowned with sweat,

Where the great steel chains swung over the buckets of rock.

 

Then out of a near-by house came a youth,

All gloved and encased in fur and touched with content,

Thin-shouldered and frail and finished,

Leading a house-dog out on a silver chain.

 

He peered at the figure that fought with the drill

Above the billowing steam and tumult of sound,

Peered up for a moment impassive,

With almost pitying eyes,

And then went pensively down the Avenue’s calm,

In the clear white light of the noonday sun,

Not holding, but held by his silvery chain!

I have drunk deep

Of the well of bitterness.

Black hours have harried me,

Blind fate has bludgeoned my bent head,

And on my brow the iron crown

Of sorrow has been crushed.

And being mortal, I have cried aloud

At anguish ineluctable.

But over each black hour has hung

Forlorn this star of knowledge:

The path of pain too great to be endured

Leads always unto peace;

And when the granite road of anguish mounts

Up and still up to its one ultimate

And dizzy height of torture,

Softly it dips and meets

The valley of endless rest!

In an old and ashen island,

Beside a city gray with death,

They are seeking Sappho’s tomb!

Beneath a vineyard ruinous

And a broken-columned temple

They are delving where she sleeps!

There between a lonely valley

Filled with noonday silences

And the headlands of soft violet

Where the sapphire seas still whisper,

Whisper with her sigh;

Through a country sad with wonder

Men are seeking vanished Sappho,

Men are searching for the tomb

Of muted Song!

They will find a Something there,

In a cavern where no sound is,

In a room of milky marble

Walled with black amphibolite

Over-scored with faded words

And stained with time!

Sleeping in a low-roofed chamber,

With her phials of perfume round her,

In a terra-cotta coffin

With her image on the cover,

Childish echo of her beauty

Etched in black and gold barbaric—

Lift it slowly, slowly, seekers,

Or your search will end in dust!

With a tiny nude Astarte,

Bright with gilt and gravely watching

Over grass-green malachite,

Over rubies pale, and topaz,

And the crumbled dust of pearls!

With her tarnished silver mirror,

With her rings of beaten gold,

With her robes of faded purple,

And the stylus that so often

Traced the azure on her eyelids,—

Eyelids delicate and weary,

Drooping, over-wise!

And at her head will be a plectron

Made of ivory, worn with time,

And a flute and gilded lyre

Will be found beside her feet,

And two little yellow sandals,

And crude serpents chased in silver

On her ankle rings—

And a cloud of drifting dust

All her shining hair!

In that lost and lonely tomb

They may find her;

Find the arms that ached with rapture,

Softly folded on a breast

That for ever more is silent;

Find the eyes no longer wistful,

Find the lips no longer singing,

And the heart, so hot and wayward

When that ashen land was young,

Cold through all the mists of time,

Cold beneath the Lesbian marble

In the low-roofed room

That drips with tears!

Summer is dead.

And love is gone.

And life is glad of this.

For sad were both, with having given much;

And bowed were both, with great desires fulfilled;

And both were grown too sadly wise

Ever to live again.

Too aged with hours o’er-passionate,

Too deeply sung by throats

That took no thought of weariness,

Moving too madly toward the crest of things,

Giving too freely of the fountaining sap,

Crowding too gladly into grass and leaves,

Breathing too blindly into flower and song!

Again the lyric hope may thrill the world,

Again the sap may sweeten into leaves,

Again will gray-eyed April come

With all her choiring throats;

But not to-day—

For the course is run,

And the cruse is full,

And the loin ungirt,

And the hour ordained!

And now there is need of rest;

And need of renewal there is;

And need of silence,

And need of sleep.

Too clear the light

Now lies on hill and valley;

And little is left to say,

And nothing is left to give.

Summer is dead;

And love is gone!

I am through with regret.

No more shall I kennel with pain.

I have called to this whimpering soul,

This soul that is sodden with tears

And sour with the reek of the years!

And now we shall glory in light!

Like a tatter of sail in the wind,

Like a tangle of net on the sand,

Like a hound stretched out in the heat,

My soul shall lie in the sun,

And be drowsy with peace,

And not think of the past!

A village wrapped in slumber,

Silent between the hills,

Empty of moon-lit market-place,

Empty of moving life—

Such is my quiet heart.

Shadowy-walled it rests,

Sleeping its heavy sleep;

But sudden across the dark

Tingles a sound of drums!

The drums, the drums, the distant drums.

The throb of the drums strikes up,

The beat of the drums awakes!

Then loud through the little streets,

And strange to the startled roofs,

The drums, the drums approach and pound,

And throb and clamor and thrill and pass,

And between the echoing house-walls

All swart and grim they go,

The battalions of regret,

After the drums, the valiant drums

That die away in the night!

I caught the smell of ether

From the glass-roofed room

Where the hospital stood.

Suddenly all about me

I felt a mist of anguish

And the old, old hour of dread

When Death had shambled by.

 

Yellow with time it is,

This letter on which I look;

But up from it comes a perfume

That stabs me still to the heart;

And suddenly, at the odor,

Through a ghostlike mist I know

Rapture and love and wild regret

When Life and You went by.

In the dead of the night

You turned in your troubled sleep

As you heard the wild swans pass;

And then you slept again.

 

You slept——

While a new world swam beneath

That army of eager wings,

While plainland and slough and lake

Lay wide to those outstretched throats,

While the far lone Lights allured

That phalanx of passionate breasts.

 

And I who had loved you more

Than a homing bird loves flight,—

I watched with an ache for freedom,

I rose with a need for life,

Knowing that love had passed

Into its unknown North!

Odor of incense, pride of purple and gold,

Burst of music and praise, and passion of flute and pipe!

O voices of silver o’er-sweet, and soothing antiphonal chant!

O Harmony, ancient, ecstatic, a-throb to the echoing roof,

With tremulous roll of awakened reverberant tubes, and thunder of sound!

And illusion of mystical song and outclangor of jubilant bell,

And glimmer of gold and taper, and throbbing, insistent pipe—

If song and emotion and music were all—

Were it only all!

For see, dark heart of mine,

How the singers have ceased and gone!

See, how all of the music is lost and the lights are low,

And how, as our idle arms, these twin ineloquent towers

Grope up through the old inaccessible Night to His stars!

How in vain we have stormed on the bastions of Silence with sound!

How in vain with our music and song and emotion assailed the Unknown,

How beat with the wings of our worship on Earth’s imprisoning bars!

For the pinions of Music have wearied, the proud loud tubes have tired,

Yet still grim and taciturn stand His immutable stars,

And, lost in the gloom, to His frontiers old I turn

Where glimmer those sentinel fires,

Beyond which, Dark Heart, we two

Some night must steal us forth,

Quite naked, and alone!

Listen!

Footsteps

Are they,

That falter through the gloom,

That echo through the lonely chambers

Of our house of life?

 

Listen!

Did a door close?

Did a whisper waken?

Did a ghostly something

Sigh across the dusk?

 

From the mournful silence

Something, something went!

Far down some shadowy passage

Faintly closed a door—

And O how empty lies

Our house of life!

You stood alone

In the dusky window,

Watching the racing river.

Touched with a vague unrest,

And if tired of loving too much

More troubled at heart to find

That the flame of love could wither

And the wonder of love could pass,

You kneeled at the window-ledge

And stared through the black-topped maples

Where an April robin fluted,—

Stared idly out

At the flood-time sweep of the river,

Touched with vague unrest,

Silver and paling gold

In the ghostly April twilight.

 

Shadowy there in the dusk

You watched with shadowy eyes

The racing, sad, unreasoning

Hurrying torrent of silver

Seeking its far-off sea.

Faintly I heard you sigh,

And faintly I heard the robin’s flute,

And faintly from rooms remote

Came a broken murmur of voices.

And life, for a breath, stood bathed

In a wonder crowned with pain,

And immortal the moment hung;

And I know that the thought of you

There at the shadowy window,

And the matted black of the maples,

And the sunset call of a bird,

And the sad wide reaches of silver,

Will house in my haunted heart

Till the end of Time!

The pines shake and the winds wake,

And the dark waves crowd the sky-line!

The birds wheel out on a troubled sky;

The widening road runs white and long,

And the page is turned,

And the world is tired!

 

So I want no more of twilight sloth,

And I want no more of resting,

And of all the earth I ask no more

Than the green sea, the great sea,

The long road, the white road,

And a change of life for me!

If I love you, woman of rose

And warmth and wondering eyes,

If it so fall out

That you are the woman I choose,

Oh, what is there left to say,

And what should it matter to me,

Or what can it mean to you?

For under the two white breasts

And the womb that makes you woman

The call of the ages whispers

And the countless ghosts awaken,

And stronger than sighs and weeping

The urge that makes us one,

And older than hate or loving or shame

This want that builds the world!

What shall I care for the ways

Of these idle and thin-flanked women in silk

And the lisping men-shadows that trail at their heels?

What are they worth in my world

Or the world that I want,

These flabby-armed, indolent, delicate women

And these half-women daring to call themselves men

Yet afraid to get down to the earth

And afraid of the wind,

Afraid of the truth,

And so sadly afraid of themselves?

How can they help me in trouble and death?

How can they keep me from hating my kind?

Oh, I want to get out of their coffining rooms,

I want to walk free with a man,

A man who has lived and dared

And swung through the cycle of life!

God give me a man for a friend

To the End,

Give me a man with his heel on the neck of Hate,

With his fist in the face of Death,

A man not fretted with womanish things,

Unafraid of the light,

Of the worm in the lip of a corpse,

Unafraid of the call from the cell of his heart,—

God give me a man for friend!

When the sun is high,

And the hills are happy with light,

Then virile and strong I am!

Then ruddy with life I fare,

The fighter who feels no dread,

The roamer who knows no bounds,

The hunter who makes the world his prey,

And shouting and swept with pride,

Still mounts to the lonelier height!

In the cool of the day,

When the huddling shadows swarm,

And the ominous eyes look out

And night slinks over the swales

And the silence is chill with death,

Then I am the croucher beside the coals,

The lurker within the shadowy cave,

Who listens and mutters a charm

And trembles and waits,

A hunted thing grown

Afraid of the hunt,

A silence enisled in silence,

A wonder enwrapped in awe!

I am desolate,

Desolate because of a woman.

When at midnight walking alone

I look up at the slow-wheeling stars,

I see only the eyes of this woman.

In bird-haunted valleys and byways secluded,

Where once I sought peace,

I find now only unrest

And this one unaltering want.

When the dawn-wind stirs in the pine-tops

I hear only her voice’s whisper.

When by day I gaze into the azure above me

I see only the face of this woman.

In the sunlight I can not find comfort,

Nor can I find peace in the shadows.

Neither can I take joy in the hill-wind,

Nor find solace on kindlier breasts;

For deep in the eyes of all women I watch

I see only her eyes stare back.

Nor can I shut the thought of her out of my heart

And the ache for her out of my hours.

Ruthlessly now she invades even my dreams

And wounds me in sleep;

And my body cries out for her,

Early and late and for ever cries out for her,

And her alone,—

And I want this woman!

 

I am sick at heart because of this woman;

I am lost to shame because of my want;

And mine own people have come to mean naught to me;

And with many about me still am I utterly alone,

And quite solitary now I take my way

Where men are intent on puny things

And phantasmal legions pace!

And a wearisome thing is life,

And for ever the shadow of this one woman

Is falling across my path.

The turn in the road is a promise of her.

The twilight is thronged with her ghosts;

The grasses speak only of her,

The leaves whisper her name for ever;

The odorous fields are full of her.

Her lips, I keep telling myself,

Are a cup from which I must drink;

Her breast is the one last pillow

Whereon I may ever find peace!

Yet she has not come to me,

And being denied her, everything stands denied,

And all men who have waited in vain for love

Cry out through my desolate heart;

And the want of the hungering world

Runs like fire through my veins

And bursts from my throat in the cry

That I want this woman!

 

I am possessed of a great sickness

And likewise possessed of a great strength,

And the ultimate hour has come.

I will arise and go unto this woman,

And with bent head and my arms about her knees

I shall say unto her: “Beloved beyond all words,

Others have sought your side,

And many have craved your kiss,

But none, O body of flesh and bone,

Has known a hunger like mine!

And though evil befall, or good,

This hunger is given to me,

And is now made known to you,—

For I must die,

Or you must die,

Or Desire must die

This night!”

You bid me to sleep,—

But why, O Daughter of Beauty,

Was beauty thus born in the world?

Since out of these shadowy eyes

The wonder shall pass!

And out of this surging and passionate breast

The dream shall depart!

And out of these delicate rivers of warmth

The fire shall wither and fail!

And youth like a bird from your body shall fly!

And Time like a fang on your flesh shall feed!

And this perilous bosom that pulses with love

Shall go down to the dust from which it arose,—

Yet Daughter of Beauty, close,

Close to its sumptuous warmth

You hold my sorrowing head,

And smile with shadowy eyes,

And bid me to sleep again!

Quietly I closed the door.

Then I said to my soul:

“I shall never come back,

Back to this haunted room

Where Sorrow and I have slept.”

I turned from that hated door

And passed through the House of Life,

Through its ghostly rooms and glad

And its corridors dim with age.

Then lightly I crossed a threshold

Where the casements showed the sun

And I entered an unknown room,—

And my heart went cold,

For about me stood that Chamber of Pain

I had thought to see no more!

The opal afternoon

Is cool, and very still.

A wash of tawny air,

Sea-green that melts to gold,

Bathes all the sky-line, hill by hill.

Out of the black-topped pinelands

A black crow calls,

And the year seems old!

A woman from a doorway sings,

And from the valley-slope a sheep-dog barks,

And through the umber woods the echo falls.

Then silence on the still world lies,

And faint and far the birds fly south,

And behind the dark pines drops the sun,

And a small wind wakes and sighs,

And Summer, see, is done!

Alone amid the Rockies I have stood;

Alone across the prairie’s midnight calm

Full often I have fared

And faced the hushed infinity of night;

Alone I have hung poised

Between a quietly heaving sea

And quieter sky,

Aching with isolation absolute;

And in Death’s Valley I have walked alone

And sought in vain for some appeasing sign

Of life or movement,

While over-desolate my heart called out

For some befriending face

Or some assuaging voice!

But never on my soul has weighed

Such loneliness as this,

As here amid the seething London tides

I look upon these ghosts that come and go,

These swarming restless souls innumerable,

Who through their million-footed dirge of unconcern

Must know and nurse the thought of kindred ghosts

As lonely as themselves,

Or else go mad with it!

“The sting of it all,” you said, as you stooped low over your roses,

“The worst of it is, when I think of Death,

That Spring by Spring the Earth shall still be beautiful,

And Summer by Summer be lovely again,

—And I shall be gone!”

“I would not care, perhaps,” you said, watching your roses,

“If only ’twere dust and ruin and emptiness left behind!

But the thought that Earth and April

Year by casual year

Shall waken around the old ways, soft and beautiful,

Year by year when I am away,

—This, this breaks my heart!”

I watched the workers in steel,

The Pit-like glow of the furnace,

The rivers of molten metal,

The tremulous rumble of cranes,

The throb of the Thor-like hammers

On sullen and resonant anvils!

I saw the half-clad workers

Twisting earth’s iron to their use,

Shaping the steel to their thoughts;

And, in some way, out of the fury

And the fires of mortal passion,

It seemed to me,

In some way, out of the torture

And tumult of inchoate Time,

The hammer of sin is shaping

The soul of man!

The city is old in sin,

And children are not for cities,

And, wan-eyed woman, you want them not,

You say with a broken laugh.

Yet out of each wayward softness of voice,

And each fulness of breast,

And each flute-throated echo of song,

Each flutter of lace and quest of beautiful things,

Each coil of entangling hair built into its crown,

Each whisper and touch in the silence of night,

Each red unreasoning mouth that is lifted to mouth,

Each whiteness of brow that is furrowed no more with thought,

Each careless soft curve of lips that can never explain,

Arises the old and the inappeasable cry!

Every girl who leans from a tenement sill

And flutters a hand to a youth,

Every woman who waits for a man in the dusk,

Every harlotous arm flung up to a drunken heel

That would trample truth down in the dust,

Reaches unknowingly out for its own,

And blind to its heritage waits

For its child!

Over my homesick head,

High in the paling light

And touched with the sunset’s glow,

Soaring and strong and free,

The unswerving phalanx sweeps,

The honking wild geese go,—

Go with a flurry of wings

Home to their norland lakes

And the sedge-fringed tarns of peace

And the pinelands soft with Spring!

 

I can not go as the geese go,

But into the steadfast North,

The North that is dark and tender,

My homesick spirit wings,—

Wings with a flurry of longing thoughts

And nests in the tarns of youth.

Dim-lit and dewy lawn-slopes,

Is this the day she comes?

O wild-flower face of Morning,

Must you never wake?

Silvery, silvery sea-line,

Does she come to-day?

O murmurous, murmurous birch-leaves,

Beneath your whispering shadow

She will surely pass;

And thrush beneath the black-thorn

And white-throat in the pine-top,

Sing as you have never sung,

For she will surely come!

The lone green of the lawn-slope,

The gray light on the sky-line,

The mournful stir of birch-leaves,

The thin note of the brown thrush,

And the call of troubled white-throats

Across the afternoon!—

Ah, Summer now is over,

And for us the season closed,

For she who came an hour ago

Has gone again—

Has gone!

God knows that I’ve tinkled and jingled and strummed,

That I’ve piped it and jigged it until I’m fair sick of the game,

That I’ve given them slag and wasted the silver of song,

That I’ve thrown them the tailings and they’ve taken them up content!

But now I want to slough off the bitterness born of it all,

I want to throw off the shackles and chains of time,

I want to sit down with my soul and talk straight out,

I want to make peace with myself,

And say what I have to say,

While still there is time!

 

Yea, I will arise and go forth, I have said,

To the uplands of truth, to be free as the wind,

Rough and unruly and open and turbulent-throated!

Yea, I will go forth and fling from my soul

The shackles and chains of song!

 

But, lo, on my wrists are the scars,

And here on my ankles the chain-galls,

And the cell-pallor, see, on my face!

And my throat seems thick with the cell-dust,

And for guidance I grope to the walls,

And after my moment of light

I want to go back to the Dark,

Since the Open still makes me afraid,

And silence seems best in the sun,

And song in the dusk!

Black with a batter of mud

Stippled with silvery pools

Stands the pavement at the street-end;

And the gutter snow is gone

From cobble and runneling curb;

And no longer the ramping wind

Is rattling the rusty signs;

And moted and soft and misty

Hangs the sunlight over the cross-streets,

And the home-bound crowds of the city

Walk in a flood of gold.

 

And suddenly out of the dusk

There comes the ancient question:

Can it be that I have lived

In earlier worlds unknown?

Or is it that somewhere deep

In this husk that men call Me

Are kenneled a motley kin

I never shall know or name,—

Are housed still querulous ghosts

That sigh and awaken and move,

And sleep once more?

I tire of these empty masks,

These faces of city women

That seem so vapid and well-controlled.

I get tired of their guarded ways

And their eyes that are always empty

Of either passion or hate

Or promise or love,

And that seem to be old

And are never young!

I think of the homelier faces

That I have seen,

The vital and open faces

In the byways of the world:

A Polish girl who met

Her lover one wintry morning

Outside the jail at Ossining;

A lean young Slav violinist

And the steerage women about him,

Held by the sound of his music;

A young and deep-bosomed Teuton

Suckling her shawl-wrapped child

On a gray stone bridge in Detmold;

A group of girls from Ireland,

Crowding the steps of a colonist-car

And singing half-sadly together

As their train rocked on and on

Over the sun-bathed prairie;

A mournful Calabrian mother

Standing and staring out

Past the mists of Ischia

After a fading steamer;

A Nautch girl held by a sailor

Who’d taken a knife from her fingers

But not the fire from her eyes;

And a silent Sicilian mother

Standing alone in the Marina

Awaiting her boy who had been

Long years away!—

These I remember!

And of these

I never tire!

There is strength in the soil;

In the earth there is laughter and youth.

There is solace and hope in the upturned loam.

And lo, I shall plant my soul in it here like a seed!

And forth it shall come to me as a flower of song;

For I know it is good to get back to the earth

That is orderly, placid, all-patient!

It is good to know how quiet

And non-committal it breathes,

This ample and opulent bosom

That must some day nurse us all!

On opal Aprilian mornings like this

I seem dizzy and drunk with life.

I waken and wander and laugh in the sun;

With some mystical knowledge enormous

I lift up my face to the light.

Drunk with a gladness stupendous I seem;

With some wine of Immensity god-like I reel;

And my arm could fling Time from his throne;

I could pelt the awed taciturn arch

Of Morning with music and mirth;

And I feel, should I find but a voice for my thought,

That the infinite orbits of all God’s loneliest stars

That are weaving vast traceries out on the fringes of Night

Could never stand more than a hem on the robe of my Song!

My heart stood empty and bare,

So I hung it with thoughts of a woman.

The remembered ways of this woman

Hung sweet in my heart.

So I followed where thought should lead,

And it led to her feet.

But the mouth of this woman was pain,

And the love of this woman, regret;

And now only the thought

Of all those remembered thoughts

Of remembered ways,

Is shut in my heart!

There’s a poet tombed in you,

Man of blood and iron!

There’s a dreamer dead and buried

Deep beneath your cynic frown.

 

And deep beneath my music,

There’s a strong man stirs in me;

There’s a ghost of blood and granite

Coffined in this madness

Carpentered of Song!

 

You live your day and drain it;

I weave my dream and lose it;

But the red blood lost in me awakens still at times,

At all your city’s sky-line,

At all your roaring market-place,

At all its hum of power—

And the poet dead within you stirs

Still at the plaintive note or two

Of a dreamer’s plaintive song!

Glad with the wine of life,

Reeling I go my way,

Drunk with the ache of living

And mouthing my drunken song!

Then comes the lucid moment

And the shadow across the lintel;

And I hear the ghostly whisper,

And I glimpse with startled eyes

The Door beyond the doorway,

And I see the small dark house

Where I must sleep.

Then song turns sour on my lips,

And the warmth goes out of my blood,

And I turn me back to the beaker,

And redraining my cup of dream,

I drown the whispering voices,

I banish the ghostly question

As to which in the end is true:

The wine and the open road?

Or the waiting Door?

Empty it seems, at times, their cry about Love,

Their claim that love is the only thing that survives.

For I who am born of my centuries strewn with hate,

Who was spewed into life from a timeless tangle of sin,

I can hate as strong and as long as I love!

 

There are hours and issues I hate;

There are creeds and deeds and doubts I hate;

There are men I hate to the uttermost;

And although in their graves they listen and weep,

Earth’s mothers and wistful women who cried for peace,

I hate this King of Evil who has crowned my heart with Hate!

I lay by your side last night.

By you, in my dreams,

I felt the damp of the grave.

I was dead with you—

And my bones still ache with Death.

For my hand went out and I touched your lips,

And I found them fallen away,

Wasted and lost!

Those lips once warm with life

Were eaten and gone!

And my soul screamed out in the dark

At the intimate blackness of Death.

And then I arose from the dead

And returned to the day;

And my bones and my heart still ache with it all,

And I hunger to hear the relieving babble of life,

The crowd in the hurrying street,

The tumult and laughter and talk,

To make me forget!

One room in my heart shall be closed, I said;

One chamber at least in my soul shall be secret and locked!

I shall hold it my holy of holies, and no one shall know it!

But you, calm woman predestined, with casual hands,

You came with this trivial key,

And ward by obdurate ward the surrendering lock fell back,

And disdainfully now you wander and brood and wait

In this room that I thought was my own!

You have said that I sold

My life for a song;

Laid bare my heart

That men might listen

And go their ways—

My inchoate heart

That I dare not plumb,

That goes unbridled

To the depths of Hell,

That sings in the sun

To the brink of Heaven!

I have tossed you the spindrift

Born of its fretting

On its shallowest coast,

But over the depths of it

Bastioned in wonder

And silent with fear

God sits with me!

All my lean life

I garnered nothing but a dream or two.

These others gathered harvests

And grew fat with grain.

But no man lives by bread,

And bread alone.

So, forgetful of their scorn,

When starved, they cried for life,

I gave them my last dreams,

I bared for them my heart,

That they might eat!

A canyon of granite and steel,

A river of grim unrest,

And over the fever and street-dust

Arches the azure of dream.

And fretting along the tumult,

Threading the iron curbs,

Tawdry in tinsel and feather

Drift the daughters of pleasure,

The sad-eyed traders in song,

The makers of joy,

The Columbines of the city

Seeking their ends!

But under the beaded eyelash,

Under the lip with its rouge,

Under the mask of white

Splashed with geranium-red,

As God’s own arch of azure

Leans softly over the street,

Surely, this day, runs warmer

The blood through a wasted breast!

Ere the thread is loosed,

And the sands run low,

And the last hope fails,

Wherever we fare,

O Fond and True,

May it fall that we come in the end,

Come back to the crimson valleys,

Back to the Indian Summer,

Back to the northern pinelands,

And the gray lakes draped with silence,

And the sunlight thin and poignant,

And the leaf that flutters earthward,

And the sky-line green and lonely,

And the ramparts of the dead world

Ruddy with wintry rose!

May we fare, O Fond and True,

Through our soft-houred Indian Summer,

Through the paling twilight weather,

And facing the lone green uplands,

And greeting the sun-warmed hills,

Step into the pineland shadows

And enter the sunset valley

And go as the glory goes

Out of the dreaming autumn,

Out of the drifting leaf

And the dying light!

If I tire of you, beautiful woman,

I know that the fault is mine;

Yet not all mine the failure

And not all mine the loss.

In loveliness still you walk;

But I have walked with sorrow.

I have threaded narrows,

And I have passed through perils

That you know nothing of.

And I in my grief have gazed

In eyes that were not yours;

And my emptier hours have known

The sigh of kindlier bosoms,

The kiss of kindlier mouths.

Yet the end of all is written,

And nothing, O rose-leaf woman,

You ever may dream or do

Henceforth can bring me anguish

Or crown my days with joy!

Three tears, soft-smiling woman,

You said could float your soul,

So little a thing it seemed!

Yet all that’s left of life

I’d give to know your love,

I’d give to show my love,

And feel your kiss again!

I sat in the sunlight thinking of life;

I sat there, dreaming of Death.

And a moth alit on the sun-dial’s face,

And the birds sang sleepily,

And the leaves stirred,

And the sun lay warm on the hills,

And the afternoon grew old.

 

So, some day I knew the birds would sing,

And the leaves would stir,

And the afternoon grow old—

And I would not be there.

And the warmth went out of the day,

And a wind blew out of the West where I sat,

And the birds were still!