Songs, Merry and Sad [9]
The roaring storm's unguided strength,
Peace steals into my heart at length,
When, calm amid the shout and shock,
I hear, Nic-noc, nic-noc.
And all the winter long 't is I
Who bless its sheer monotony --
Its scorn of days, which cares no whit
For time, except to measure it:
The prosy, dozy, cosy clock,
Nic-noc, nic-noc, nic-noc!
Tear Stains
Tear-marks stain from page to page
This book my fathers left to me, --
So dull that nothing but its age
Were worth its freight across the sea.
But tear stains! When, by whom, and why?
Thus takes my fancy to its wings;
For grief is old, and one may cry
About so many things!
A Prayer
If many years should dim my inward sight,
Till, stirred with no emotion,
I might stand gazing at the fall of night
Across the gloaming ocean;
Till storm, and sun, and night, vast with her stars,
Would seem an oft-told story,
And the old sorrow of heroic wars
Be faded of its glory;
Till, hearing, while June's roses blew their musk,
The noise of field and city,
The human struggle, sinking tired at dusk,
I felt no thrill of pity;
Till dawn should come without her old desire,
And day brood o'er her stages, --
O let me die, too frail for nature's hire,
And rest a million ages.
She Being Young
The home of love is her blue eyes,
Wherein all joy, all beauty lies,
More sweet than hopes of paradise,
She being young.
Speak of her with a miser's praise;
She craves no golden speech; her ways
Wind through charmed nights and magic days,
She being young.
She is so far from pain and death,
So warm her cheek, so sweet her breath
Glad words are all the words she saith,
She being young.
Seeing her face, it seems not far
To Troy's heroic field of war,
To Troy and all great things that are,
She being young.
Paul Jones
A century of silent suns
Have set since he was laid on sleep,
And now they bear with booming guns
And streaming banners o'er the deep
A withered skin and clammy hair
Upon a frame of human bones:
Whose corse? We neither know nor care,
Content to name it John Paul Jones.
His dust were as another's dust;
His bones -- what boots it where they lie?
What matter where his sword is rust,
Or where, now dark, his eagle eye?
No foe need fear his arm again,
Nor love, nor praise can make him whole;
But o'er the farthest sons of men
Will brood the glory of his soul.
Careless though cenotaph or tomb
Shall tower his country's monument,
Let banners float and cannon boom,
A million-throated shout be spent,
Until his widowed sea shall laugh
With sunlight in her mantling foam,
While, to his tomb or cenotaph,
We bid our hero welcome home.
Twice exiled, let his ashes rest
At home, afar, or in the wave,
But keep his great heart with us, lest
Our nation's greatness find its grave;
And, while the vast deep listens by,
When armored wrong makes terms to right,
Keep on our lips his proud reply,
"Sir, I have but begun to fight!"
The Drudge
Repose upon her soulless face,
Dig the grave and leave her;
But breathe a prayer that, in his grace,
He who so loved this toiling race
To endless rest receive her.
Oh, can it be the gates ajar
Wait not her humble quest,
Whose life was but a patient war
Against the death that stalked from far
With neither haste nor rest;
To whom were sun and moon and cloud,
The streamlet's pebbly coil,
The transient, May-bound, feathered crowd,
The storm's frank fury, thunder-browed,
But witness of her toil;
Whose weary feet knew not the bliss
Of dance by jocund reed;
Who never dallied at a kiss!
If heaven refuses her, life is
A tragedy indeed!
The Wife
They locked him in a prison cell,
Murky and mean.
She kissed him there a wife's farewell
The bars between.
And when she turned to go, the crowd,
Thinking to see her shamed and bowed,
Saw her pass out as calm and proud
As any queen.
She passed a kinsman on the street,