The mists lie along the iris-purple valleys;
The little wooden bridge,
Where the waterfall rings its silver bells,
Is a bow of darkness;
The dust of the highway is gray as ashes under our feet;
A cloud of night-birds
Dots the orange sky.
All day our paths have led us side by side
Along the steep hot highways.
It is cool evening now,
And the temple bells call you one way
And the silence calls me another.
We come to the white door-posts of your house,
We leave our dusty shoes beside the little pool among the iris leaves.
We sit upon woven mats and you give me tea to drink
From a cup of sea-green jade.
For hills and woods and streams unsung
I pipe above a rippled cove.
And here the weaver autumn hung
Between the hills a wind she wove
From sounds the hills remember yet
Of purple days and violet.
The hills stand up to trip the sky,
Sea-misted, and along the tops
Wing after wing goes summer by,
And many a little roadway stops
And starts, and struggles to the sea,
Cutting them up in filigree.
Twixt wind and silence Faughan flows,
In music broken over rocks,
Like mingled bells the poet knows
Ring in the fields of Eastern flocks.
The night was coming very fast;
It reached the gate as I ran past.
The pigeons had gone to the tower of the church
And all the hens were on their perch,
Up in the barn, and I thought I heard
A piece of a little purring word.
I stopped inside, waiting and staying,
To try to hear what the hens were saying.
They were asking something, that was plain,
Asking it over and over again.
One of them moved and turned around,
Her feathers made a ruffled sound,
A ruffled sound, like a bushful of birds,
And she said her little asking words.
She pushed her head close into her wing,
But nothing answered anything.
Let us walk in the white snow
In a soundless space;
With footsteps quiet and slow,
At a tranquil pace,
Under veils of white lace.
I shall go shod in silk,
And you in wool,
White as a white cow's milk,
More beautiful
Than the breast of a gull.
We shall walk through the still town
In a windless peace;
We shall step upon white down,
Upon silver fleece,
Upon softer than these.
We shall walk in velvet shoes:
As I was lying in my bed
I heard the church-bell ring;
Before one solemn word was said
A bird began to sing.
I heard a dog begin to bark
And a bold crowing cock;
The bell, between the cold and dark,
Tolled. It was five o'clock.
The church-bell tolled, and the bird sang,
A clear true voice he had;
The cock crew, and the church-bell rang,
I knew it had gone mad.
A hand reached down from the dark skies,
It took the bell-rope thong,
The bell cried "Look! Lift up your eyes!"
The clapper shook to song.
My valiant fight! For I call it valiant,
With my father’s beliefs from old Virginia:
Hating slavery, but no less war.
I, full of spirit, audacity, courage
Thrown into life here in Spoon River,
With its dominant forces drawn from
New England, Republicans, Calvinists, merchants, bankers,
Hating me, yet fearing my arm.
With wife and children heavy to carry—
Yet fruits of my very zest of life.
Stealing odd pleasures that cost me prestige,
And reaping evils I had not sown;
Foe of the church with its charnel dankness,
Friend of the human touch of the tavern;
Tangled with fates all alien to me,
Deserted by hands I called my own.
I was not beloved of the villagers,
But all because I spoke my mind,
And met those who transgressed against me
With plain remonstrance, hiding nor nurturing
Nor secret griefs nor grudges.
That act of the Spartan boy is greatly praised,
Who hid the wolf under his cloak,
Letting it devour him, uncomplainingly.
It is braver, I think, to snatch the wolf forth
And fight him openly, even in the street,
Amid dust and howls of pain.
The tongue may be an unruly member—
But silence poisons the soul.
Berate me who will—I am content.
Out of a cell into this darkened space—
The end at twenty-five!
My tongue could not speak what stirred within me,
And the village thought me a fool.
Yet at the start there was a clear vision,
A high and urgent purpose in my soul
Which drove me on trying to memorize
The Encyclopedia Britannica!
In the heart of a rose
Lies the heart of a maid ;
If you be not afraid
You will wear it. Who knows ?
In the pink of its bloom,
Lay your lips to her cheek ;
Since a rose cannot speak,
And you gain the perfume.
If the dews on the leaf
Are the tears from her eyes ;
If she withers and dies,
Why, you have the belief,
That a rose cannot speak,
Though the heart of a maid
In its bosom must fade.
And with fading must break.
After all and after all
When the song is sung
And swallowed up in silence
It were more real unsung....
After all and after all
When the lips have stirred
Such a little of the thought
Is transmuted in the word....
Suffer not my ears with hearing
Suffer not your thoughts with speech.
Let us feel into our meaning
And thus know the all of each.
Gently descending dark--
Curtain of silence
From heaven to earth;
The drama of day over,
Empty the seats of life,
Dead the twilight fire.
Curtains of black
Woven from threads of purple
By the hands of a star,
That lone soul weeping
Over the dead hours
Laid by mute time in the eternal's grave.
In the night of my soul
Not even a ray,
Nor a mourner present;
But a deep dark hollow
The moonlight and the leaves,
Bells, these.
With tongues of silence;
Chiming in silver, violet and green;
Ringing, rising, then falling on
The ground,
Set to weaving shadow-sounds
With the dark threads of sleep.
Like liquid gems pouring to a measure
Of perfume,
With shades of lavender tunes;
A dream-music of soundless sounds.
More than silence and sleep,
This bell melody
Of light, of air, and leaf,
Played by moon-bedimmed stars;