My father's friend came once to tea.
He laughed and talked. He spoke to me.
But in another week they said
That friendly pink-faced man was dead.
"How sad . ." they said, "the best of men . ."
So I said too, "How sad"; but then
Deep in my heart I thought with pride,
"I know a person who has died."
I WAKENED on my hot, hard bed,
Upon the pillow lay my head;
Beneath the pillow I could hear
My little watch was ticking clear.
I thought the throbbing of it went
Like my continual discontent;
I thought it said in every tick:
I am so sick, so sick, so sick;
O Death, come quick, come quick, come quick,
Come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick.
My mother earth I shall forget
When I am sick and like to die;
There, in a breathless chamber set,
My mother earth I shall forget,
These hedges starred with flowers wet,
These muddy roads beneath the sky.
My mother earth I shall forget,
When I am sick and like to die.
Turn down the lamp; my life is done.
The fitful moments drift to ease —
Rosemary for the dreams that died.
And mignonette for cherished hopes.
Turn down the lamp; my soul gains life;
I rise above the narrow pale
Of cities bought with gold and slime,
I spread my sorrow strengthened wings
Above the armies of the world,
In quest of kingdoms built in youth.
The hour of death that men call life
Is closing as a troubled dream,
The flame within my lamp is low,
I seek eternal liberty.
The freedom of the endless sky.
Good nurse, enfold my arms.
The rose lay dying in the summer heat
And longed to save her life so fair and brief.
A dryad, bathing in the noonday sun,
Spied her and dropped a tear to show her grief.
The panting bloom drank deep the sweetening drop-
And lived an hour to deck a singer's wreath.
When I die my song shall be,
Crooning of the summer breeze;
When I die my shroud shall be,
Leaves plucked from the maple trees ;
On a couch as green as moss
And a bed as soft as down,
I shall sleep and dream my dream
Of a poet's laurel crown.
When I die my star shall drop
Singing like a nightingale;
When I die my soul shall rise.
Where the lyre strings never fail ;
In the rose my blood shall lie.
In the violet the smile.
And the moonbeams thousand strong,
Past my grave each night shall file.
We who are mourners make no moan
For the Body lost in the grave,
For the Soul is a shining wave
And the Body is but a stone
Dragged out in the under tow
And tossed by the waves to and fro,
And worn and tormented and cast
Back again on the rocks at last.
Ah, the body lost in the grave
Is freed from the tyrant soul,
Delivered from wind and wave.
Current and quicksand and shoal.
Freed from the cruel sea ... .
But the spirit is never free ....
There is no truce in that war
Of the tides that clash near the shore.
The two little children that died long ago
Away in the woods on the top of a hill--
And a good little robin that knew all about it
Came with strawberry leaves in her bill,
To cover them up, and she kept very quiet
And brought the leaves one at a time, I think.
And some of the leaves would have little holes in them,
And some would be red and pink.
And these little Babes-in-the-Woods that were dead
Must have lain very still, and they heard all the talk
That the bees would be saying to more little bees,
And maybe they even could hear the ants walk.
And they could look out through a crack in the leaves
And see little bushes and some of the sky.
They could see robin coming with leaves in her mouth,
Sleep falls, with limpid drops of rain,
Upon the steep cliffs of the town.
Sleep falls; men are at peace again
Awhile the small drops fall softly down.
The bright drops ring like bells of glass
Thinned by the wind, and lightly blown;
Sleep cannot fall on peaceful grass
So softly as it falls on stone.
Peace falls unheeded on the dead
Asleep; they have had deep peace to drink;
Upon a live man's bloody head
It falls most tenderly, I think.
Gone--faded out of the story, the sea-faring friend I remember?
Gone for a decade, they say: never a word or a sign.
Gone with his hard red face that only his laughter could wrinkle,
Down where men go to be still, by the old way of the sea.
Never again will he come, with rings in his ears like a pirate,
Back to be living and seen, here with his roses and vines;
Here where the tenants are shadows and echoes of years uneventful,
Memory meets the event, told from afar by the sea.
Smoke that floated and rolled in the twilight away from the chimney
Floats and rolls no more. Wheeling and falling, instead,
Down with a twittering flash go the smooth and inscrutable swallows,
We never knew the sorrow or the pain
Within him, for he seemed as one asleep--
Until he faced us with a dying leap,
And with a blast of paramount, profane,
And vehement valediction did explain
To each of us, in words that we shall keep,
Why we were not to wonder or to weep,
Or ever dare to wish him back again.
He may be now an amiable shade,
With merry fellow-phantoms unafraid
Around him--but we do not ask. We know
That he would rise and haunt us horribly,
And be with us o’ nights of a certainty.
Did we not hear him when he told us so?
He knocked, and I beheld him at the door--
A vision for the gods to verify.
“What battered ancientry is this,” thought I,
“And when, if ever, did we meet before?”
But ask him as I might, I got no more
For answer than a moaning and a cry:
Too late to parley, but in time to die,
He staggered, and lay shapeless on the floor.
When had I known him? And what brought him here?
Love, warning, malediction, hunger, fear?
Surely I never thwarted such as he?--
Again, what soiled obscurity was this:
Out of what scum, and up from what abyss,
Had they arrived--these rags of memory?