Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In one last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. ‘This is all,’ they sighed,
‘Good-night to woods.’ But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
The town is still asleep.
The sky is pale with quickening light.
Quenched, the long night of stars
Swirls under the earth, but one,
That silver planet, Venus, holds
Over the ice-haired lawns
A vernal promise: that love is not lost.
Walk through the streets
With birds and the clatter-clack
Of streetlights as they change,
A little tremble as the chill of night
Dies in a sunburst from the trees,
A vacant house whose owner dies,
A fallen elm, an abscess in the line
Of shops, a broken pane. I hold
My book which is all I may carry away,
The music sighs and slumbers.
It stirs and sleeps again . . .
Hush, it wakes and weeps and murmurs
Like a woman's heart in pain ;
Now it laughs and calls and coaxes.
Like a lover in the night.
Now it pants with sudden longing.
Now it sobs with spent delight.
Like bright and wind-blown lilies,
The dancers sway and shine.
Swift in a rhythmic circle.
Soft in a rhythmic line ;
Their lithe limbs gleam like amber
Thro' their veils of golden gauze,
As they glide and bend and beckon,
As they wheel and wind and pause.
When I am not with you
I am alone,
For there is no one else
And there is nothing
That comforts me but you.
When you are gone
Suddenly I am sick,
Blackness is round me,
There is nothing left.
I have tried many things,
Music and cities,
Stars in their constellations
And the sea,
But there is nothing
That comforts me but you;
And my poor pride bows down
Your criss-crossed ringlets of hair
Are tipped with faltering opalescence.
At dawn a lost smile ever returns
And hides in your hair because he fears
The solemn marble profile of your face.
His presence caresses your lips to wings of color
That beat against each other and release
Dulcet, feathery tinges of love descending to your heart.
And thus, each morning, your rising heart
Wears a new bridal robe.
The green pine-needles shiver glassily,
Each cased in ice. Harsh winter, grey and dun,
Shuts out the sun.
But with live, scarlet fire,
Enfolding seed of sweet Junes yet to be,
Rose-berries melt the snow, and burn above
The thorny briar,
Like beauty with its deathless seed of love.
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."
I am Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when “Butch” Weldy
Captured me after a brutal hunt.
He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
Will some one go to the village newspaper,
And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—
I thirsted so for love
I hungered so for life!
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
What was not done on earth by incapacity
Of old, was promised for the life to be.
But I will build a heaven which shall prove
A lovelier paradise
To your brave mortal eyes
Than the eternal tranquil promise of the Good.
For freedom I will give perfected love,
For which you shall not pay in shelter or in food.
For the work of my head and hands I will be paid,
But I take no fee to be wedded, or to remain a maid.
You glow in my heart
Like the flames of uncounted candles.
But when I go to warm my hands,
My clumsiness overturns the light,
And then I stumble
Against the tables and chairs.
If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly
I could see to write you a letter.