Works

From the German of Dessler.

O Lord, how happy is the time
When in thy love I rest!
When from my weariness I climb
Even to thy tender breast!
The night of sorrow endeth there--...

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate....

Ye Bards in all your thousand dens,
Great souls with fewer pence than pens,
Sublime adorers of Apollo,
With folios full, and purses hollow;
Whose very souls with rapture glisten,...

Arm'd year! year of the struggle!
No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year!
Not you as some pale poetling, seated at a desk, lisping cadenzas piano;...

Now, Yankee inventors can beat a retreat,
And German professors may take a back seat,
For their colours we're going to lower:
They've invented a wonderful plough in the West,...

They recruited William Evans
From the ploughtail and the spade;
Ten years' service in the Devons
Left him smart as they are made.

Thirty or a trifle older,
Rather over six foot high,...

I've watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bass'e and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so...

John Dillinger and Baby-Faced Nelson
in a dream together
- one shooting holes thru
theories of his untimely death,
the other frying in an old-time
(e) Electric Chair
with balloons waving, bonbons...

My young son asks me: Must I learn mathematics?
What is the use, I feel like saying. That two pieces
Of bread are more than one's about all you'll end up with.
My young son asks me: Must I learn French?...

I only woke this morning
To find the world is fair,
I'm going on for forty,
With scarcely one grey hair;

I'm going on for forty,
Where man's strong life begins,...

Where the rails converge to the station yard
She stands one moment, breathing hard,

And then, with a snort and a clang of steel,
She settles her strength to the stubborn wheel,
...

The sextant of the meetinouse, which sweeps
And dusts, or is supposed too! and makes fiers,
And lites the gas and sometimes leaves a screw loose,
in which case it smells orful - worse than lampile;...

Better than granite, Spoon River,
Is the memory-picture you keep of me
Standing before the pioneer men and women
There at Concord Church on Communion day.
Speaking in broken voice of the peasant youth...

Like Bunyan's pilgrim with his pack,
Forth went the dreaming youth
To seek, to find, and make his own
Wisdom, virtue, and truth.
Life was his book, and patiently
He studied each hard page;...

Why speak of Rajah rubies,
And roses of the South?
I know a sweeter crimson
A baby's mouth.

Why speak of Sultan sapphires
And violet seas and skies?
I know a lovelier azure...

As a drenched, drowned bee
Hangs numb and heavy from a bending flower,
So clings to me
My baby, her brown hair brushed with wet tears
And laid against her cheek;...

I knew that a baby was hid in the house;
Though I saw no cradle and heard no cry,
But the husband went tiptoeing round like a mouse,
And the good wife was humming a soft lullaby;...

When the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass
The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind,
They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water;...

I.

A little soul scarce fledged for earth
Takes wing with heaven again for goal
Even while we hailed as fresh from birth
A little soul.

Our thoughts ring sad as bells that toll,...

A little white soul went up to God,
Out of the mire of the city street;
It grew like a flower in the highway broad,
Close to the trample of heedless feet.

It fell like a snow-flake over night,...