Poems Class of 29 (1851-1889) | Page 3

morning broke,?To please the gray-haired boys.
REMEMBER--FORGET
1855
AND what shall be the song to-night,?If song there needs must be??If every year that brings us here?Must steal an hour from me??Say, shall it ring a merry peal,?Or heave a mourning sigh?O'er shadows cast, by years long past,?On moments flitting by?
Nay, take the first unbidden line?The idle hour may send,?No studied grace can mend the face?That smiles as friend on friend;?The balsam oozes from the pine,?The sweetness from the rose,?And so, unsought, a kindly thought?Finds language as it flows.
The years rush by in sounding flight,?I hear their ceaseless wings;?Their songs I hear, some far, some near,?And thus the burden rings?"The morn has fled, the noon has past,?The sun will soon be set,?The twilight fade to midnight shade;?Remember-and Forget!"
Remember all that time has brought--?The starry hope on high,?The strength attained, the courage gained,?The love that cannot die.?Forget the bitter, brooding thought,--?The word too harshly said,?The living blame love hates to name,?The frailties of the dead!
We have been younger, so they say,?But let the seasons roll,?He doth not lack an almanac?Whose youth is in his soul.?The snows may clog life's iron track,?But does the axle tire,?While bearing swift through bank and drift?The engine's heart of fire?
I lift a goblet in my hand;?If good old wine it hold,?An ancient skin to keep it in?Is just the thing, we 're told.?We 're grayer than the dusty flask,--?We 're older than our wine;?Our corks reveal the "white top" seal,?The stamp of '29.
Ah, Boys! we clustered in the dawn,?To sever in the dark;?A merry crew, with loud halloo,?We climbed our painted bark;?We sailed her through the four years' cruise,?We 'll sail her to the last,?Our dear old flag, though but a rag,?Still flying on her mast.
So gliding on, each winter's gale?Shall pipe us all on deck,?Till, faint and few, the gathering crew?Creep o'er the parting wreck,?Her sails and streamers spread aloft?To fortune's rain or shine,?Till storm or sun shall all be one,?And down goes TWENTY-NINE!
OUR INDIAN SUMMER
1856
You 'll believe me, dear boys, 't is a pleasure to rise,?With a welcome like this in your darling old eyes;?To meet the same smiles and to hear the same tone?Which have greeted me oft in the years that have flown.
Were I gray as the grayest old rat in the wall,?My locks would turn brown at the sight of you all;?If my heart were as dry as the shell on the sand,?It would fill like the goblet I hold in my hand.
There are noontides of autumn when summer returns.?Though the leaves are all garnered and sealed in their urns, And the bird on his perch, that was silent so long,?Believes the sweet sunshine and breaks into song.
We have caged the young birds of our beautiful June;?Their plumes are still bright and their voices in tune;?One mcment of sunshine from faces like these?And they sing as they sung in the green-growing trees.
The voices of morning! how sweet is their thrill?When the shadows have turned, and the evening grows still!?The text of our lives may get wiser with age,?But the print was so fair on its twentieth page!
Look off from your goblet and up from your plate,?Come, take the last journal, and glance at its date:?Then think what we fellows should say and should do,?If the 6 were a 9 and the 5 were a 2.
Ah, no! for the shapes that would meet with as here,?From the far land of shadows, are ever too dear!?Though youth flung around us its pride and its charms,?We should see but the comrades we clasped in our arms.
A health to our future--a sigh for our past,?We love, we remember, we hope to the last;?And for all the base lies that the almanacs hold,?While we've youth in our hearts we can never grow old!
MARE RUBRUM
1858
FLASH out a stream of blood-red wine,?For I would drink to other days,?And brighter shall their memory shine,?Seen flaming through its crimson blaze!?The roses die, the summers fade,?But every ghost of boyhood's dream?By nature's magic power is laid?To sleep beneath this blood-red stream!
It filled the purple grapes that lay,?And drank the splendors of the sun,?Where the long summer's cloudless day?Is mirrored in the broad Garonne;?It pictures still the bacchant shapes?That saw their hoarded sunlight shed,--?The maidens dancing on the grapes,--?Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.
Beneath these waves of crimson lie,?In rosy fetters prisoned fast,?Those flitting shapes that never die,--?The swift-winged visions of the past.?Kiss but the crystal's mystic rim,?Each shadow rends its flowery chain,?Springs in a bubble from its brim,?And walks the chambers of the brain.
Poor beauty! Time and fortune's wrong?No shape nor feature may withstand;?Thy wrecks are scattered all along,?Like emptied sea-shells on the sand;?Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain,?The dust restores each blooming girl,?As if the sea-shells moved again?Their glistening lips of pink and pearl.
Here lies the home of school-boy life,?With creaking stair and wind-swept