Why reclining, interrogating? Why myself and all drowsing?
What deepening twilight! Scum floating atop of the waters!
Who are they, as bats and night-dogs, askant in the Capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your
Arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? Are those the great Judges? Is that the
President?
Then I will sleep a while yet—for I see that these States sleep, for
reasons.
With gathering murk—with muttering thunder and lambent shoots, we all duly
awake, South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will
surely awake.
[Footnote 1: These were the three Presidentships of Polk; of Taylor, succeeded by Fillmore; and of Pierce;—1845 to 1857.]
TEARS.
Tears! tears! tears!
In the night, in solitude, tears;
On the white shore dripping, dripping, sucked in by the sand;
Tears—not a star shining—all dark and desolate;
Moist tears from the eyes of a muffled head:
—O who is that ghost?—that form in the dark, with tears?
What shapeless lump is that, bent, crouched there on the sand?
Streaming tears—sobbing tears—throes, choked with wild cries;
O storm, embodied, rising, careering, with swift steps along the beach;
O wild and dismal night-storm, with wind! O belching and desperate!
O shade, so sedate and decorous by day, with calm countenance and regulated
pace;
But away, at night, as you fly, none looking—O then the unloosened ocean
Of tears! tears! tears!
A SHIP.
1.
Aboard, at the ship's helm,
A young steersman, steering with care.
A bell through fog on a sea-coast dolefully ringing,
An ocean-bell—O a warning bell, rocked by the waves.
O you give good notice indeed, you bell by the sea-reefs ringing,
Ringing, ringing, to warn the ship from its wreck-place.
For, as on the alert, O steersman, you mind the bell's admonition,
The bows turn,—the freighted ship, tacking, speeds away under her grey
sails;
The beautiful and noble ship, with all her precious wealth, speeds away
gaily and safe.
2.