I and my kin shall pass ere long,
And ants shall ever be;
But better now the linnet’s song
Than their eternity.
What tho my people perish soon?
Awhile the dews we crush
Where nights of summer mould the moon
And laughters wake the thrush.
From yonder hill I spy on man
And marvel at his need,
Who fashions, in a season’s span,
A thousand fanes to Greed;
Perchance from each, his worship done,
He ventures forth repaid,
But grant thou me the spendthrift sun
And berries of the glade.
At noon great Caesar’s chariot past,
A poison on the air,
But drive he slow or drive he fast,
The journey’s end is Care—
Care, at whose throne all mortals stand
With tinsel crowns put by,
Too weak to rove the billowed land,
Too sad to watch the sky.
Mid ivied trunks I see her gleam,
The nymph, my forest-mate;
She wanders by the lyric stream,
To us articulate.
A golden house let Caesar build,
To hold his ghosts and gods—
For me the summer eves are stilled,
For me the flower nods.
THE VOICES
Last night the granite headland loomed
A Titan on the night,
About whose knees the billows boomed,
Enormous, baffled, white.
And now to morning’s throne of gold
Murmurs the chastened sea:
Its thunder and its whispers hold
The selfsame mystery.
A CHARACTER
Blunt as a child, since child he was at heart,
And sun-sincere, my friend to many seemed
Dull, rude, aggressive, tactless. Add to all
His bulk and hairiness and stormy laugh,
And one can find them some excuse for that.
’Twas seeming only. We, who found his soul
Thro friendship’s crystal, saw beyond the glass
The elusive seraph. In his mind were met
The faun, the cynic, the philosopher,
But first of all, the poet. Give to such
Apollo’s guise, and matters were not well.
Too glad to pose, ofttimes he held his peace
Before the jest that sought his heart; but let
The whim appeal, and all his mind took fire—
The shifted diamond’s instant shock of light.
Beauty to him (as wine’s ecstatic draught,
Richer than blood, and every drop a dream)
Was like a wind some hidden world put forth
To baffle, madden, lure—at times, betray,
Then win him back to worship with a breath
Of Edens never trodden. Yet he stood
No dupe to Nature in her harlotry,
Her guile, her blind injustice and the abrupt
Ferocities of chance, but swift to face
The unkempt fact, and swift no less to snatch
Its honey from illusion’s stinging hive—
No moth that beat upon Time’s enginery.
Yet loved he Nature well, as one might love
A half-tamed leopardess, for beauty’s grace
Alone. Within his enigmatic soul
Sorrow and Art made Love their servitor,
For he would have no master but himself.
To what best liken him? Some singer must
Have used the star-souled geode’s rind and heart,
Telling of such as he. Let me compare
His rugged aspect and auroral mind
To that wide shell our western ocean grants—
Without, all harsh and hueless, with, perhaps,
A group of barnacles or tattered weed;
Within, such splendor as would make one guess
That once a score of dawnings and a troop
Of royal sunsets had condensed their pomp
To rainbow lacquer which the ocean pow’rs
Had lavished, godlike, on the gorgeous bowl.