Oblong, its jutted ends rounding into circles.
The old sunken basin lies with its flat, marble lip
An inch below the terrace tiles.
Over the stagnant water
Slide reflections :
The blue-green of coned yews ;
The purple and red of trailing fuchsias
Dripping out of marble urns ;
Bright squares of sky
Ribbed by the wake of a swimming beetle.
Through the blue-bronze water
Wavers the pale uncertainty of a shadow.
An arm flashes through the reflections,
A breast is outlined with leaves.
Outstretched in the quiet water
The statue of a Goddess slumbers.
Pine-Trees :
Black clouds slowly swaying
Over a white earth.
Hemlocks :
Coned green shadows
Through a falling veil.
Elm-Trees :
Stiff black threads
Lacing over silver.
Cedars :
Layered undulations
Roofing naked ground.
Almonds :
Flaring needles
Stabbing at a grey sky.
Weeping Cherries:
The pueblo rises under the sun-bronzed noon
As if hammered out of copper ;
The sky's metallic blue
Rings in the silence.
Nothing moves but the shapes
That strain without changing.
Still as
On windless nights
The moon-cast shadows are,
So still will be my heart when I
Am dead.
Music, thou queen of heaven, care-charming spell,
That strik'st a stillness into hell;
Thou that tam'st tigers, and fierce storms, that rise,
With thy soul-melting lullabies;
Fall down, down, down, from those thy chiming spheres
To charm our souls, as thou enchant'st our ears.
How sweet it is to sit and read the tales
Of mighty poets and to hear the while
Sweet music, which when the attention fails
Fills the dim pause--
A region desolate and wild.
Black, chafing water: and afloat,
And lonely as a truant child
In a waste wood, a single boat:
No mast, no sails are set thereon;
It moves, but never moveth on:
And welters like a human thing
Amid the wild waves weltering.
Behind, a buried vale doth sleep,
Far down the torrent cleaves its way:
In front the dumb rock rises steep,
A fretted wall of blue and grey;
Of shooting cliff and crumbled stone
With many a wild weed overgrown:
All else, black water: and afloat,
One rood from shore, that single boat.
The spring is coming by a many signs;
The trays are up, the hedges broken down,
That fenced the haystack, and the remnant shines
Like some old antique fragment weathered brown.
And where suns peep, in every sheltered place,
The little early buttercups unfold
A glittering star or two--till many trace
The edges of the blackthorn clumps in gold.
And then a little lamb bolts up behind
The hill and wags his tail to meet the yoe,
And then another, sheltered from the wind,
Lies all his length as dead--and lets me go
Close bye and never stirs but baking lies,
With legs stretched out as though he could not rise.
The first Day that I was a Life
I recollect it -- How still --
That last Day that I was a Life
I recollect it -- as well --
'Twas stiller -- though the first
Was still --
"Twas empty -- but the first
Was full --
This -- was my finallest Occasion --
But then
My tenderer Experiment
Toward Men --
"Which choose I"?
That -- I cannot say --
"Which choose They"?
Question Memory!