A jewel-block they’ll make of me tomorrow,
Pendant pearl from the yard-arm-end
Like the ear-drop I gave to Bristol Molly—
O, ’tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend.
Ay, Ay, all is up; and I must up too
Early in the morning, aloft from alow.
On an empty stomach now never it would do.
They’ll give me a nibble—bit o’ biscuit ere I go.
Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;
But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,
Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!
No pipe to those halyards.—But aren’t it all sham?
A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.
A hatchet to my hawser? all adrift to go?
The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?
But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;
So I’ll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
But—no! It is dead then I’ll be, come to think.—
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
But me they’ll lash in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream
fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?
Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair.
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.
Camoens
1
(Before Tasso)
RESTLESS, restless, craving rest,
Forever must I fan this fire,
Forever in flame on flame aspire?
Yea, for the god demands thy best.
The world with endless beauty teems,
And thought evokes new-worlds of dreams:
Then hunt the flying herds of themes.
And fan, yet fan thy fervid fire
Until the crucibled ore shall show
That fire can purge as well as glow
In ordered ardor nobly strong,
Flame to the height of ancient song.
2
(After Tasso)
Camoens in the hospital
Suggested by a bust of that poet
What now avails the pageant verse,
Trophies and arms with music borne?
Base is the world; and some rehearse
How noblest meet ignoble scorn.
Vain now thy ardor, vain thy fire,
Delirium mere, and mad unsound desire:
Fate’s knife hath ripped the chorded lyre.
Exhausted by the exacting lay,
Thou dost but fall a surer prey
To wile and guile ill understood;
While they who work them, fair in face,
Still keep their strength in prudent place,
And claim they worthier run life’s race,
Serving high God with useful good.
The Continents
FROM bright Stamboul Death crosses o’er;
Beneath the cypress evermore
His camp he pitches by the shore
Of Asia old.
Requiting this unsocial mood
Stamboul’s immyrtled multitude
Bless Allah and the sherbert good
And Europe hold.
Even so the cleaving Bosphorous parts
Life and Death.—Dissembling hearts!
Over the gulf the yearning starts
To meet—infold!
The Dust-Layers
ABREAST through town by Nile they go
With water-skins the dust to lay,
A soggy set in sorry row
Squeezing their skins in bag-pipe way.
With droning rhyme that times the twitch
They squirt the water, squirt and switch
In execrable play!
Osiris! what indignity,
In open eye of day,
Offered the arch majesty
Of Thotmes passed away;
The atoms of his pomp no prouder
Than to be blown about in powder,
Or made a muddy clay!
Falstaff’s Lament
Over Prince Hal Become Henry V
Yea, loved as a son—
Up early, up late with,
My promising one:
No use in good nurture,
None, lads, none!
Here on this settle
He wore the true crown,
King of good fellows,
And Fat Jack was one—
Now, Beadle of England
In formal array—
Best fellow alive
On a throne flung away!
Companions and cronies
Keep fast and lament;—
Come drawer, more sack here
To drown discontent;
For now intuitions
Shall wither to codes,
Pragmatical morals
Shall libel the gods.—
One I instructed,
Yea, talked to—alone:
Precept—example
Clean away thrown!
(Sorrow makes thirsty:
Sack, drawer, more sack!)
One that I prayed for,
I, Honest Jack!—
To bring down these gray hairs—
To cut his old pal!
But, I’ll be magnanimous—
Here’s to thee, Hal!
Fruit and Flower Painter
SHE dens in a garret
As void as a drum;
In lieu of plum-pudding—
She paints the plum!
No use in one’s grieving,
The shops you must suit:
Broken hearts are but potsherds—
Paint flowers and fruit!
How whistles her garret,
A seive for the snows:
She hums O fortuna
And—paints the rose!
December is howling,
But feign it a flute:
Help on the deceiving—
Paint flowers and fruit!
Give me the nerve
GIVE me the nerve
That never will swerve
Running out on life’s ledges of danger;
Mine, mine be the nerve
That in peril will serve
Since life is to safety a stranger.
When roaring below
The cataracts go
And tempests are over me scudding;
Give, give me the calm
That is better than balm
And the courage that keepeth new-budding.
Gold in the mountain
GOLD in the mountain
And gold in the glen,
And greed in the heart,
Heaven having no part,
And unsatisfied men.
Hearts-of-gold
TWERE pity, if true,
What the pewterer said—
Hearts-of-gold be few.
Howbeit, when snug in my bed
And the fire-light flickers and yellows,
I dream of the hearts-of-gold sped—
The Falernian fellows—
Hafiz and Horace
And Beranger—all
Dexterous tumblers eluding the Fall.
Fled? can be sped?
But the marygold’s morris
Is danced o’er your head;
But your memory mellows,
Embalmed and becharmed
Hearts-of-gold and good fellows!
Honor
WITH jeweled tusks and damask housings
Grandees, trumpets, banners, soldiers—
One flame from van to rear!
Bid by India’s King they travel
In solemn embassage to-day,
To meet the Diamond from Golconda
The Great Find of Cathay.
O the honor, O the homage!
But, methinks, ’t were nice,
Would they say but How-de-do?
To the Little Pearl of Price.
Immolated
CHILDREN of my happier prime,
When One yet lived with me, and threw
Her rainbow over life and time,
Even Hope, my bride, and mother to you!
O, nurtured in sweet pastoral air,
And fed on flowers and light, and dew
Of morning meadows—spare, Ah, spare
Reproach; spare, and upbraid me not
That, yielding scarse to reckless mood
But jealous of your future lot,
I sealed you in a fate subdued.
Have I not saved you from the drear
Theft and ignoring which need be
The triumph of the insincere
Unanimous Mediocrity?
Rest therefore, free from all despite,
Snugged in the arms of comfortable night.
In a nutshell
TAKE a reef, take a reef
In your wisdom: be brief.
Well then—well-a-day!
Wag the world how it may,
The knaves will be tricking
And fools still be kicking,
And Grief, the sad Thief
Will forever Joy’s pocket be picking!
In the Hall of Marbles
(Lines recalled from a destroyed poem)
IF genius, turned to sordid ends
Ye count to glory lost,
How with mankind that flouts the aims
Time’s Attic years engrossed?
Waxes the world so rich and old?
Richer and narrower, age’s way?
But, primal fervors all displaced,
Our arts but serve the clay.
This plaint the sibyls unconsoled renew:
Man fell from Eden, fell from Athens too.
In the jovial age of old
IN the jovial age of old
Named from gold,
Gold was none for Danæ’s shower;
While forever silvery fell
Down in dell
Bridal blossoms from love’s bower.
In the old Farm House
The Ghost
DEAD of night, dead of night,
Living souls are a’bed;
Dead of night, dead of night,
And I sit with the dead.
He laughs in white sheet,
And I, I laugh too.
Tis Shakspeare, good fellow—
And Falstaff in view.
In the Paupers’ Turnip-Field
CROW, in pulpit lone and tall,
Of yon charred hemlock grimly dead,
Why on me in preachment call—
Me, by nearer preachment led
Here in homily of my hoe.
The hoe, the hoe,
My heavy hoe
Which earthward bows me, to foreshow
A mattock heavier than the hoe.
Inscription
For the Dead
At Fredericksburgh
A DREADFUL glory lights an earnest end;
In jubilee the patriot ghosts ascend;
Transfigured at the rapturous height
Of their passionate feat of arms,
Death to the brave’s a starry night,—
Strewn their vale of death with palms.
Madam Mirror and
The Wise Virgins an answer
Madam Mirror
WITH wrecks in a garret I’m stranded,
Where, no longer returning a face,
I take to reflections the deeper
On memories far to retrace.
In me have all people confided,
The maiden her charms has displayed
And truths unrevealed and unuttered
To me have been freely betrayed.
Some tales I might tell of the toilet
Did not tenderness make me forget;
But the glance of proud beauty slow fading
It dies not away from me yet;
Nor the eyes, too long ceasing to shine,—
Soliciting,—well knowing that mine
Were too candid to flatter when met.
But pledged unto trueness forever,
My confessional close as the friar’s,
How sacred to me are the trusting.
Here nothing for scandal transpires.
But ah, what of all that is perished,
Nor less shall again be, again!
What pangs after parties of pleasure,
What smiles but disclosures of pain!
O, tears of the hopeless unloved,
O, start at old age drawing near—
And what shadows more tragical far
Like clouds on a lake have been here!
Though lone in a loft I must languish
Far from closet and parlor at strife,
Content I escape from the anguish
Of the Real and the Seeming in life.
The Wise Virgins to Madam Mirror
MADAM Mirror, believe we are sorry for you;
But ah, how console you or cheer!
We are young, we go skipping, but you
Are an old and forlorn garreteer!
Tis we view the world through an arbor,
The bride with the bridegroom appears;
But you, retrospecting through tunnels
See but widowers and widows on biers!
To us that is foreign—in no sense will pair
With cake, wine and diamonds, and blossoms in hair!
But age!—Ah, the crow will scarce venture
To tread near the eyes flashing bold;
He’s a craven; and youth is immortal;
’Tis the elderly only grow old!
But, Dame, for all misty recurrings
To beacons befogged in the past—
Less dismal they are, dame, than dubious;
Nor joy leaves us time to forecast.
Though the battered we hardly would banter,
And never will ridicule use,
Let us say that a twilight of inklings
Is worth scarse the Pope’s old shoes.
For the rest, the skeletons meeting glass eyes,
Let a parable serve, if by chance it applies.
A brace of green goggles they gabbled, old elves
Touching very queer spectacles they had descried;
But the queerest of all were the goggles themselves,
Rusty, fusty shagreen of the puckered fish-hide!
But you
, Madam Mirror, not here we type you,
Nor twit you for being a glass
With a druggish green blur and a horrible way
Of distorting all objects, alas!
Ourselves, so symmetric, our Cavaliers tell,
What, squint us to witches with broomsticks to sell!
O yes, we are giddy, we whirl in youth’s waltz,
But a fig for Reflections when crookedly false!
The Medallion
(In Villa Albani &c)
SINCE seriousness in many a face
Open or latent, you may trace—
The ground-expression, wherein close
All smiles at last; and ever still
The revelation of repose;
Which sums the life, and tells the mood
Of inmost self in solitude—
Then wherefore, World, of bards complain
Whose verse the years and fate imbue
With reveries where no glozings reign—
An even unelated strain
In candor grave, to nature due?
Merry Ditty of the Sad Man
LET us all take to singing
Who feel the life-thong;
Let us all take to singing,
And this be the song—
Nothing like singing