Second April | Page 8

more that Oberon--?Never doubt that Pan?Lived, and played a reed, and ran?After nymphs in a dark forest,?In the merry, credulous days,--?Lived, and led a fairy band?Over the indulgent land!?Ah, for in this dourest, sorest?Age man's eye has looked upon,?Death to fauns and death to fays,?Still the dog-wood dares to raise--?Healthy tree, with trunk and root--?Ivory bowls that bear no fruit,?And the starlings and the jays--?Birds that cannot even sing--?Dare to come again in spring!
LAMENT
Listen, children:?Your father is dead.?From his old coats?I'll make you little jackets;?I'll make you little trousers?From his old pants.?There'll be in his pockets?Things he used to put there,?Keys and pennies?Covered with tobacco;?Dan shall have the pennies?To save in his bank;?Anne shall have the keys?To make a pretty noise with.?Life must go on,?And the dead be forgotten;?Life must go on,?Though good men die;?Anne, eat your breakfast;?Dan, take your medicine;?Life must go on;?I forget just why.
EXILED
Searching my heart for its true sorrow,?This is the thing I find to be:?That I am weary of words and people,?Sick of the city, wanting the sea;
Wanting the sticky, salty sweetness?Of the strong wind and shattered spray;?Wanting the loud sound and the soft sound?Of the big surf that breaks all day.
Always before about my dooryard,?Marking the reach of the winter sea,?Rooted in sand and dragging drift-wood,?Straggled the purple wild sweet-pea;
Always I climbed the wave at morning,?Shook the sand from my shoes at night,?That now am caught beneath great buildings,?Stricken with noise, confused with light.
If I could hear the green piles groaning?Under the windy wooden piers,?See once again the bobbing barrels,?And the black sticks that fence the weirs,
If I could see the weedy mussels?Crusting the wrecked and rotting hulls,?Hear once again the hungry crying?Overhead, of the wheeling gulls,
Feel once again the shanty straining?Under the turning of the tide,?Fear once again the rising freshet,?Dread the bell in the fog outside,--
I should be happy,--that was happy?All day long on the coast of Maine!?I have a need to hold and handle?Shells and anchors and ships again!
I should be happy, that am happy?Never at all since I came here.?I am too long away from water.?I have a need of water near.
THE DEATH OF AUTUMN
When reeds are dead and a straw to thatch the marshes,?And feathered pampas-grass rides into the wind?Like aged warriors westward, tragic, thinned?Of half their tribe, and over the flattened rushes,?Stripped of its secret, open, stark and bleak,?Blackens afar the half-forgotten creek,--?Then leans on me the weight of the year, and crushes?My heart. I know that Beauty must ail and die,?And will be born again,--but ah, to see?Beauty stiffened, staring up at the sky!?Oh, Autumn! Autumn!--What is the Spring to me?
ODE TO SILENCE
Aye, but she??Your other sister and my other soul?Grave Silence, lovelier?Than the three loveliest maidens, what of her??Clio, not you,?Not you, Calliope,?Nor all your wanton line,?Not Beauty's perfect self shall comfort me?For Silence once departed,?For her the cool-tongued, her the tranquil-hearted,?Whom evermore I follow wistfully,?Wandering Heaven and Earth and Hell and the four seasons through; Thalia, not you,?Not you, Melpomene,?Not your incomparable feet, O thin Terpsichore,?I seek in this great hall,?But one more pale, more pensive, most beloved of you all.?I seek her from afar,?I come from temples where her altars are,?From groves that bear her name,?Noisy with stricken victims now and sacrificial flame,?And cymbals struck on high and strident faces?Obstreperous in her praise?They neither love nor know,?A goddess of gone days,?Departed long ago,?Abandoning the invaded shrines and fanes?Of her old sanctuary,?A deity obscure and legendary,?Of whom there now remains,?For sages to decipher and priests to garble,?Only and for a little while her letters wedged in marble,?Which even now, behold, the friendly mumbling rain erases,?And the inarticulate snow,?Leaving at last of her least signs and traces?None whatsoever, nor whither she is vanished from these places. "She will love well," I said,?"If love be of that heart inhabiter,?The flowers of the dead;?The red anemone that with no sound?Moves in the wind, and from another wound?That sprang, the heavily-sweet blue hyacinth,?That blossoms underground,?And sallow poppies, will be dear to her.?And will not Silence know?In the black shade of what obsidian steep?Stiffens the white narcissus numb with sleep??(Seed which Demeter's daughter bore from home,?Uptorn by desperate fingers long ago,?Reluctant even as she,?Undone Persephone,?And even as she set out again to grow?In twilight, in perdition's lean and inauspicious loam).?She will love well," I said,?"The flowers of the dead;?Where dark Persephone the winter round,?Uncomforted for home, uncomforted,?Lacking a sunny southern slope in northern Sicily,?With sullen pupils focussed on a dream,?Stares on the stagnant stream?That moats the unequivocable battlements of Hell,?There, there will she be found,?She that is Beauty veiled from men and Music in a swound."
"I long for Silence as they long for breath?Whose helpless nostrils drink the bitter sea;?What thing can be?So stout, what so redoubtable, in Death?What fury, what considerable rage, if only she,?Upon whose icy breast,?Unquestioned, uncaressed,?One