Anthology of Massachusetts Poets | Page 4

of us went scheming to surprise?The other with our homely, laureate flowers.?Sonnets and odes?Fringing our daily roads.?Can amaranth and asphodel?Bring merrier laughter to your eyes??Oh, if the Blest, in their serene abodes,?Keep any wistful consciousness of earth,?Not grandeurs, but the childish ways of love,?Simplicities of mirth,?Must follow them above?With touches of vague homesickness that pass?Like shadows of swift birds across the grass.?Beneath some foreign arch of sky,?How many a time the rover?You or I,?For life oft sundered look from look,?And voice from voice, the transient dearth?Schooling my soul to brook?This distance that no messages may span,?Would chance?Upon our wilding by a lonely well,?Or drowsy watermill,?Or swaying to the chime of convent bell,?Or where the nightingales of old romance?With tragical contraltos fill?Dim solitudes of infinite desire;?And once I joyed to meet?Our peasant gadabout?A trespasser on trim, seigniorial seat,?Twinkling a saucy eye?As potentates paced by.
Our golden cord! our soft, pursuing flame?From friendship's altar fire!?How proudly we would pluck and tame
The dimpling clusters, mutinously gay!?How swiftly they were sent?Far, far away?On journeys wide,?By sea and continent,?Green miles and blue leagues over,?From each of us to each,?That so our hearts might reach,?And touch within the yellow clover,
Love's letter to be glad about?Like sunshine when it came!
My sorrow asks no healing; it is love;?Let love then make me brave?To bear the keen hurts of?This careless summertide,?Ay, of our own poor flower,?Changed with our fatal hour,?For all its sunshine vanished when you died;?Only white clover blossoms on your grave.
KATHERINE LEE BATES
THE RETURNING
We long for her, we yearn for her--?Yes, ardently we yearn?For her return.?Recalling those beloved days?(Days intimate with ways?Of friends so near to us?And life so dear to us),?We yearn unspeakably for her return.
And come she must. . .Yet while we trust?We soon may see the passing of this agony?Which makes intrusive years still seem?A fearsome dream,?We know that when she comes?She really comes not back again.
She'll come in other guise?And under fairer skies--?And yet to bitter pain!?That day she went away?Our homes with laughing youth were filled.?Where then was happiness?Is now distress,?The laughter stilled;?For when she left?Youth followed herWe?stay bereft.
So all our golden joy?For what she brings?Must carry gray alloy:?The sorrow that she can not lay,?The mysery that she can not stayWhile?all the gladsome songs she sings?Must bear for undertones?Old sighs and echoed moans.
As they who go away?In flush of youth?May come quite worn and gray?And bringing naught but ruthSo,?when the strife shall cease,?And when she comes at last,?When all the armies vast?Shall at her feet?Kneel down to greet?Thrice welcome Peace,?This world will be so changed?(So many dear ones dead,?So many friends estranged,?So many blessings fled,?So many wonted ways forever barred,?So many coming days forever marred)?That then?She truly comes not back again--?She, the Peace we knew.
Yet how we long for her!?How ardently we yearn?For her return!
SYLVESTER BAXTER
TWO MOODS FROM THE HILL
I.
YOUTH
I LOVE to watch the world from here, for all?The numberless living portraits that are drawn?Upon the mind. Far over is the sea,?Fronting the sand, a few great yellow dunes,?A salt marsh stumbling after, rank and green,?With brackish gullies wandering in between,?All this from the hill.?And more: a clump of dwarfed and twisted cedars,?Sentinels over the marsh, and bright with the sun?A field of daises wandering in the wind?As though a hidden serpent glided through,?A broken wall, a new-plowed field, and then?The dusty road and the abodes of men?Surrounding the hill.?How small the enclosure is wherein there lives?Each phase and passion of life, the distant sail?Dips in the limpid bosom of the sea,?From that far place to where in state the turf?Raises a throne for me upon the hill,?Each little love and lust of a living thing?Can thus be compassed in a rainbow ring?And seen from the hill.
II.?AGE
Why did I build my cottage on a hill?Facing the sea?
Why did I plan each terraced lawn to slope?Down to the deep blue billowy breast of hope,?Surging and sweeping,?laughing and leaping,?Tumbling its garments of foam upon the shore,?Rustling the sands that know my step no more,?I should have found a valley, deep and still,?To shelter me.
There flows the river, and it seems asleep?So far away,?Yet I remember whip of wave and roar?Of wind that rose and smote against the oar,?Smote and retreated,?Proud but defeated,?While I rejoiced and rowed into the brine,?Drawing on wet and heavy -straining line?The great cod quivering from the deep?As counterplay.
What is the solace of these hills and vales?That rise and fall??What is there glorious in the greenwood glen,?Or twittering thrush or wing of darting wren??Give me the gusty,?Raucous and rusty?Call of the sea gull in the echoing sky,?The wild shriek of the winds that cannot die,?Give me the life that follows the bending sails,?Or none at all!
ERNEST BENSHIMOL
A BANQUET?ONE MEMORY FROM SOCRATES
AFTER the song the love, and after the love the play,?Flute girl and pretty boy blowing?Bubbles of sparkling?Wine into darkling?Beards of a