Rebellion against death, the old rebellion
Is over; I have nothing left to fight;
Battles have always had their meed of music
But peace is quiet as a windless night.
Therefore I make no songs--I have grown certain
Save when he comes too late, death is a friend,
A shepherd leading home his flock serenely
Under the planet at the evening’s end.
We walked in the dew, in the drowsy starlight
To the sleepless, sleepy sound
Of insects singing in the low sea-meadows
For miles and miles around;
With a wheel and a whirr the resistless rhythm
Trembled incessantly;
Antares was red in the sky before us,
And behind us, the blackness of the sea.
The stars are like gold-fish in a deep blue bowl,
Swimming round and round the centuries.
Sometimes one dies of the hot summer night;
I watch it falling —
Fading —
And I watch the others,
Floating in their blue bowl,
Eternally golden,
Immortally indifferent.
The destined bullet wounded him,
They brought him down to die,
Far-off a bugle sounded him
“Retreat,” Good-bye.
Strange, that from ways so hated,
And tyranny so hard
Should come this strangely fated
And farewell word.
He thought, “Some Old Sweat might
Have thrilled at heart to hear,
Gone down into the night
Too proud to fear!
But I--the fool at arms,
Musician, poet to boot,
Who hail release; what charms
In this salute?”
Silent, bathed in firelight, in dusky light and gloom
The boys squeeze together in the smoky dirty room,
Crowded round the fireplace, a thing of bricks and tin,
They watch the shifting embers till the good dreams enter in,
That fill the low hovel with blossoms fresh with dew,
And blue sky and white clouds that sail the clear air through.
They talk of daffodillies and the bluebells’ skiey bed,
Till silence thrills and murmurs at the things they have said.
And yet, they have no skill of words, whose eyes glow so deep,
They wait for night and silence and the strange power of sleep,
To lift them and drift them like sea-birds over the sea
Where some day I shall walk again, and they walk with me.
My days are like sands; colourless,
Each matched to each, unerringly
They drift. The salt bleach of a sea
Has washed them clean and lustreless;
The teeth of rock on ragged strands
Have ground them to an even grey,
And one wind blows them a one way.
But Oh, the slow making of sands.
All is here; forgotten things
Mix with the unforgettable.
Granite blends with tinted shell.
And nothing so stable that it clings
To its stability. Had there
Been more of marble, more of gold.
The sands would hide in their grim hold
Nothing more wise, nothing more fair.
When they said the time to hide was mine,
I hid back under a thick grape vine.
And while I was still for the time to pass,
A little gray thing came out of the grass.
He hopped his way through the melon bed
And sat down close by a cabbage head.
He sat down close where I could see,
And his big still eyes looked hard at me,
His big eyes bursting out of the rim,
And I looked back very hard at him.
I saw a Tiger's golden flank,
I saw what food he ate,
By a desert spring he drank;
The Tiger's name was Hate.
Then I saw a placid Lamb
Lying fast asleep;
Like a river from its dam
Flashed the Tiger's leap.
I saw a Lion tawny-red,
Terrible and brave;
The Tiger's leap overhead
Broke like a wave.
In sand below or sun above
He faded like a flame.
The Lamb said, "I am Love";
"Lion, tell your name."
The pale road winds faintly upward into the dark skies,
And beside it on the rough grass that the wind invisibly stirs,
Sheltered by sharp-speared gorse and the berried junipers,
Shining steadily with a green light, the glow-worm lies.
We regard it ; and this hill and all the other hills
That fall in folds to the river, very smooth and steep,
And the hangers and brakes that the darkness thickly fills
Fade like phantoms round the light and night is deep, so deep,—
That all the world is emptiness about the still flame
And we are small shadows standing lost in the huge night.
We gather up the glow-worm, stooping with dazzled sight,
And carry it to the little enclosed garden whence we came,
August is gone and now this is September,
Softer the sun in a cloudier sky ;
Yellow the leaves grow and apples grow golden,
Blackberries ripen and hedges undress.
Watch and you'll see the departure of summer,
Here is the end, this the last month of all :
Pause and look back and remember its promise,
All that looked open and easy in May.
Nothing will stay them, the seasons go onward,
Lightly the bright months fly out of my hand,
Softly the leading note calls a new octave ;
Autumn is coming and what have I done ?
Even as summer my young days go over,
No day to pause on and nowhere to rest :
Slowly they go but implacably onwards,
Ah ! and my dreams, alas, still they are dreams.
No matter what I say,
All that I really love
Is the rain that flattens on the bay,
And the eel-grass in the cove;
The jingle-shells that lie and bleach
At the tide-line, and the trace
Of higher tides along the beach:
Nothing in this place.
A chaplain in the army,
A chaplain in the prisons,
An exhorter in Spoon River,
Drunk with divinity, Spoon River—
Yet bringing poor Eliza Johnson to shame,
And myself to scorn and wretchedness.
But why will you never see that love of women,
And even love of wine,
Are the stimulants by which the soul, hungering for divinity,
Reaches the ecstatic vision
And sees the celestial outposts?
Only after many trials for strength,
Only when all stimulants fail,
Does the aspiring soul
By its own sheer power
Find the divine