Evening.
Give over! All the valleys in sight
Fill, fill with the rising tide of night;
While the sunset with gold-dust bridges
The black-ravined ridges,
Whose mighty muscles curve in its light.
In our weary climb, while night dyes deep,
Down the broken and stony steep,
How our jaded bodies are shaken
By each step in half-blindness taken —
One's thoughts lie heaped like brutes asleep.
Open the door of the dismal hut,
Silence and darkness lone were shut
In it, as a tidal pool, until returning
Night drowns the land, — no ember's burning, —
One is too weary the food to cut.
Body and soul with every blow,
Wasted for ever, and who will know,
Where, past this mountained night of toiling,
Red life in its thousand veins is boiling,
Of chips scattered on the mountain's brow?
Home-woe
The wreckage of some name-forgotten barque,
Half-buried by the dolorous shore;
Whereto the living waters never more
Their urgent billows pour;
But the salt spray can reach and cark —
So lies my spirit, lonely and forlorn,
On Being's strange and perilous strand.
And rusted sword and fleshless hand
Point from the smothering sand;
And anchor chainless and out-worn.
But o'er what Deep, unconquered and uncharted,
And steering by what vanished star;
And where my dim-imagined consorts are,
Or hidden harbour far,
From whence my sails, unblessed, departed,
Can memory, nor still intuition teach.
And so I watch with alien eyes
This World's remote and unremembered skies;
While around me weary rise
The babblings of a foreign speech.