We've kept the faith. Our souls' high dreams
Untouched by bondage and its rod,
Burn on! and on! and on! It seems
We shall have FRIENDS--while God is God!
Beauty lies so deep
On all the fields,
Nothing for the eyes
But blessing yields.
Tall elms, greedy of light,
Stand tip-toe. See
The last light linger in
Their tracery.
The guns are dumb, are still
All evil noises.
The singing heart in peace
Softly rejoices,
Only unsatisfied
With Beauty’s hunger
And sacramental thirst--
Nothing of anger.
“MAIL’S UP!” The vast of night is over,
And love of friends fills all one’s mind.
(His wife, his sister, or his lover.)
Mail’s up, the vast of night is over,
The grey-faced heaven joy does cover
With love, and God once more seems kind.
“Mail’s up!” the vast of night is over,
And love of friends fills all one’s mind.
So, my proud soul, so you, whose shining force
Had galloped with me to eternity,
Stand now, appealing like a tired horse:
Unharness me.
O passionate world! O faces of my friends!
O half-grasped meanings, intricate and deep! —
Sudden, as with a child, the tumult ends,
Silenced by sleep.
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,
As we the withered ferns
By the roadway lying,
Time, the jester, spurns
All our prayers and prying --
All our tears and sighing,
Sorrow, change, and woe --
All our where-and-whying
For friends that come and go.
Life awakes and burns,
Age and death defying,
Till at last it learns
All but Love is dying;
Love's the trade we're plying,
God has willed it so;
Shrouds are what we're buying
For friends that come and go.
Strange that I did not know him then,
That friend of mine!
I did not even show him then
One friendly sign;
But cursed him for the ways he had
To make me see
My envy of the praise he had
For praising me.
I would have rid the earth of him
Once, in my pride! . . .
I never knew the worth of him
Until he died.
I have a friend
And my heart from hence
Is closed to friendship,
Nor the gods’ knees hold but one;
He watches with me thru the long night,
And when I call he comes,
Or when he calls I am there;
He does not ask me how beloved
Are my husband and children,
Nor ever do I require
Details of life and love
In the grave--his home,--
We are such friends.