Works

He has a taste that's superfine who flouts at every subway sign,
He reckons not that some there be, who cannot tell, unless they see
Spelled plain before them on the wall, what things their own they ought to call...

[1]


Silence is in our festal halls,--
Sweet Son of Song! thy course is o'er;
In vain on thee sad Erin calls,
Her minstrel's voice responds no more;--
All silent as the Eolian shell...

1.
As from an ancestral oak
Two empty ravens sound their clarion,
Yell by yell, and croak by croak,
When they scent the noonday smoke
Of fresh human carrion: -

2....

Since first Thy Word awaked my heart,
Like new life dawning o'er me,
Where'er I turn mine eyes, Thou art,
All light and love before me.
Naught else I feel, or hear or see--
All bonds of earth I sever--...

(See Note 17)

Sin and Death, those sisters two,
Two, two,
Sat together while dawned the morning.
Sister, marry! Your house will do,
Do, do,
For me, too, was Death's warning.
...

Sing for the garish eye,
When moonless brandlings cling!
Let the froddering crooner cry,
And the braddled sapster sing.
For never, and never again,
Will the tottering beechlings play,...

Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou,
Heroic sailor-soul,
Art passing on thine happier voyage now
Toward no earthly pole.

Ah! the solace in the sitting,
Sitting by the fire,
When the wind without is calling
And the fourfold clouds are falling,
With the rain-racks intermitting,
Over slope and spire....

Here's never a bough to be tossed in the breeze,
For it's long since the forest was green;
And round all the trunks of the naked white trees
The marks of the death-ring are seen....

How cheering are thy prospects, airy hill,
To him who, pale and languid, on thy brow
Pauses, respiring, and bids hail again
The upland breeze, the comfortable sun,...

Its eyes are gray;
Its hair is either brown
Or black;
And, strange to say,
Its dresses button down
The back!

It wears a plume
That loves to frisk around
My ear....

"And now," quoth the goddess, in accents jocose,
"Having got good materials, I'll brew such a dose
"Of Double X mischief as, mortals shall say,
"They've not known its equal for many a long day."...

Sleep flies me like a lover
Too eagerly pursued,
Or like a bird to cover
Within some distant wood,
Where thickest boughs roof over
Her secret solitude.

The nets I spread to snare her,...

They sleep within. . . .
I cower to the earth, I waking, I only.
High and cold thou dreamest, O queen, high-dreaming and lonely.

We have slept too long, who can hardly win...

Lene Levi went out in the evening,
Mincing, her skirt bunched up,
Through the long, empty streets
Of a suburb.

And she spoke weeping, aching, crazy,
Strange words,...

Deep-hearted roses of the purple dusk
And lilies of the morn;
And cactus, holding up a slender tusk
Of fragrance on a thorn;
All heavy flowers, sultry with their musk,
Her presence puts to scorn.
...

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
Descends the snow.
...

I wonder what they are,
These pretty, wayward things,
That o'er the gloomy earth
The wind of heaven flings.

Each one a tiny star,
And each a perfect gem;
What magic in the art...

So fair, so sweet, withal so sensitive,
Would that the little Flowers were born to live,
Conscious of half the pleasure which they give;

That to this mountain-daisy's self were known...

So far, and so far, and on toward the end,
Singing what is sung in this book, from the irresistible impulses of me;
But whether I continue beyond this book, to maturity,...