Avoid the reeking herd,
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.
The huddled warmth of crowds
Begets and fosters hate;
He keeps, above the clouds,
His cliff inviolate.
When flocks are folded warm,
And herds to shelter run,
He sails above the storm,
He stares into the sun.
If in the eagle's track
Your sinews cannot leap,
Avoid the lathered pack,
Turn from the steaming sheep.
The night builds her temple of rain :
In the forest a sobbing music
Played by the hands of darkness
On the scale of dark leaves.
No bird-song stirs the soul;
Nor the golden dawn-harmonies;
A cry, a shedding of tears,
A music of sable tonalities.
Truly, a temple of silence and sound,
A vibrant, and dim solitude,
A gray telling of black beads;
A prayer, a moan, a dim worship.
There is a lovely noise about your name,
Above the shoutings of the city clear,
More than a moment’s merriment, whose claim
Will greater grow with every mellowed year.
The people will not bear you down the street,
Dancing to the strong rhythm of your words,
The modern kings will throttle you to greet
The piping voice of artificial birds.
But the rare lonely spirits, even mine,
Who love the immortal music of all days,
Will see the glory of your trailing line,
The bedded beauty of your haunting lays.
Have me in the blue and the sun.
Have me on the open sea and the mountains.
When I go into the grass of the sea floor, I will go alone.
This is where I came from — the chlorine and the salt are blood and bones.
It is here the nostrils rush the air to the lungs. It is here oxygen clamors to be let in.
And here in the root grass of the sea floor I will go alone.
Love goes far. Here love ends.
Have me in the blue and the sun.
Cover me over
In dusk and dust and dreams.
Cover me over
And leave me alone.
Cover me over.
You tireless, great.
Hear me and cover me,
Bringers of dusk and dust and dreams.
What do we see here in the sand dunes of the white
moon alone with our thoughts, Bill,
Alone with our dreams, Bill, soft as the women tying
scarves around their heads dancing,
Alone with a picture and a picture coming one after the
other of all the dead,
The dead more than all these grains of sand one by one
piled here in the moon.
Piled against the sky-line taking shapes like the hand of
the wind wanted,
What do we see here, Bill, outside of what the wise men
beat their heads on,
Outside of what the poets cry for and the soldiers drive
on headlong and leave their skulls in the sun for —
what, Bill?
A LONE gray bird,
Dim-dipping, far-flying,
Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults
Of night and the sea
And the stars and storms.
Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers.
Out into the gloom it swings and batters.
Out into the wind and the rain and the vast,
Out into the pit of a great black world,
Where fogs are at battle, sky-driven, sea-blown.
Love of mist and rapture of flight.
Glories of chance and hazards of death
On its eager and palpitant wings.
Out into the deep of the great dark world.
Beyond the long borders where foam and drift
Of the sundering waves are lost and gone
There is great gain,
Of pride and pain:
Let me be proud to claim the highest for my own:
Let me bear pain, to fight my claim alone.
Fools drove him with goads and whips
Down to the sea where there were ships.
And he was forced at the risk of his neck
To find a refuge on a stranger's deck.
Then that ship sailed away
Far from the land that day,
He watched the sky, and mourned to be
In such a dread captivity.
But from a rift of flying cloud
Burst a tempest quick and loud;
A burning bolt struck the strange deck
Bringing the ship to sudden wreck.
So the poor slave swam free
Over a quick calmed sea:
On a new coast-line he was thrown,
And claimed a virgin island for his own.
The moon is cold over the sand-dunes.
And the clumps of sea-grasses flow and glitter ;
The thin chime of my watch tells the quarter after midnight ;
And still I hear nothing
But the windy beating of the sea.
The snow whispers about me.
And my wooden clogs
Leave holes behind me in the snow.
But no one will pass this way-
Seeking my footsteps.
And when the temple bell rings again
They will be covered and gone.
Three men entered the desert alone.
But one of them slept like a sack of stone
As the wagon toiled and plodded along,
And one of them sang a drinking song
He had heard at the bar of The Little Cyclone.
Then he too fell asleep at last,
While the third one felt his soul grow vast
As the circle of sand and alkali.
His soul extended and touched the sky.
His old life dropped as a dream that is past,
As the sand slipped off from the wagon wheel —
The shining sand from the band of steel,
While the far horizon widened and grew
Into something he dimly felt he knew,
And had always known, that had just come true.
His vision rested on ridges of sand,