To Certain Critics

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1. Could Man Be Drunk Forever Could man be drunk for ever With liquor, love, or fights, Lief should I rouse at morning And lief lie down of nights. But men at whiles are sober And think by fits and starts, And if they think, they fasten Their hands upon their hearts....
2. Paths I shall tread, another year, Ways I walked with Grief, Past the dry, ungarnered ear And the brittle leaf. I shall stand, a year apart, Wondering, and shy, Thinking, “Here she broke her heart; Here she pled to die.” I shall hear the pheasants call, And the raucous geese; Down these ways, another Fall, I […]...
3. Divine Device Would it be loss or gain To hapless human-kind If we could feel no pain Of body or of mind? Would it be for our good If we were calloused so, And God in mercy should End all our woe? I wonder and I doubt: It is my bright belief We should be poor without […]...
4. In Memoriam A. H. H.: 78. Again at Christmas did we weave Again at Christmas did we weave The holly round the Christmas hearth; The silent snow possess’d the earth, And calmly fell our Christmas-eve: The yule-log sparkled keen with frost, No wing of wind the region swept, But over all things brooding slept The quiet sense of something lost. As in the winters left behind, Again […]...
5. Cacoethes Scribendi If all the trees in all the woods were men; And each and every blade of grass a pen; If every leaf on every shrub and tree Turned to a sheet of foolscap; every sea Were changed to ink, and all earth’s living tribes Had nothing else to do but act as scribes, And for […]...
6. Good Friday O my chief good, How shall I measure out thy blood? How shall I count what thee befell, And each grief tell? Shall I thy woes Number according to thy foes? Or, since one star show’d thy first breath, Shall all thy death? Or shall each leaf, Which falls in Autumn, score a grief? Or […]...
7. The Room Through that window-all else being extinct Except itself and me-I saw the struggle Of darkness against darkness. Within the room It turned and turned, dived downward. Then I saw How order might-if chaos wished-become: And saw the darkness crush upon itself, Contracting powerfully; it was as if It killed itself, slowly: and with much pain. […]...
8. Dark Trinity Said I to Pain: “You would not dare Do ill to me.” Said Pain: “Poor fool! Why should I care Whom you may be? To clown and king alike I bring My meed of bane; Why should you shirk my chastening?” Said Pain. Said I to Grief: “No tears have I, Go on your way.” […]...
9. Nothing Gold Can Stay Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay....
10. A Match If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf, Our lives would grow together In sad or singing weather, Blown fields or flowerful closes, Green pasture or gray grief; If love were what the rose is, And I were like the leaf. If I were what the words are, And love […]...
11. To Germany You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, And no man claimed the conquest of your land. But gropers both through fields of thought confined We stumble and we do not understand. You only saw your future bigly planned, And we, the tapering paths of our own mind, And in each others dearest […]...
12. A Song From The Italian (LIMBERHAM: OR, THE KIND KEEPER) By a dismal cypress lying, Damon cried, all pale and dying, Kind is death that ends my pain, But cruel she I lov’d in vain. The mossy fountains Murmur my trouble, And hollow mountains My groans redouble: Ev’ry nymph mourns me, Thus while I languish; She only scorns me, Who […]...
13. REVERSIBILITY ANGEL of gaiety, have you tasted grief? Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite, And the vague terrors of the fearful night That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf? Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief? Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate? With hands clenched in the shade and tears of […]...
14. Psalm 107 part 2 Correction for sin, and release by prayer. From age to age exalt his name; God and his grace are still the same; He fills the hungry soul with food, And feeds the poor with every good. But if their hearts rebel and rise Against the God that rules the skies; If they reject his heav’nly […]...
15. Little Words When you are gone, there is nor bloom nor leaf, Nor singing sea at night, nor silver birds; And I can only stare, and shape my grief In little words. I cannot conjure loveliness, to drown The bitter woe that racks my cords apart. The weary pen that sets my sorrow down Feeds at my […]...
16. No Man can compass a Despair No Man can compass a Despair As round a Goalless Road No faster than a Mile at once The Traveller proceed Unconscious of the Width Unconscious that the Sun Be setting on His progress So accurate the One At estimating Pain Whose own has just begun His ignorance the Angel That pilot Him along...
17. Sonnet XLI: Why Do I Speak of Joy Love’s Lunacy Why do I speak of joy, or write of love, When my heart is the very den of horror, And in my soul the pains of Hell I prove, With all his torments and infernal terror? What should I say? What yet remains to do? My brain is dry with weeping all too […]...
18. I measure every Grief I meet I measure every Grief I meet With narrow, probing, Eyes I wonder if It weighs like Mine Or has an Easier size. I wonder if They bore it long Or did it just begin I could not tell the Date of Mine It feels so old a pain I wonder if it hurts to live […]...
19. My Book Before I drink myself to death, God, let me finish up my Book! At night, I fear, I fight for breath, And wake up whiter than a spook; And crawl off to a bistro near, And drink until my brain is clear. Rare Absinthe! Oh, it gives me strength To write and write; and so […]...
20. On Anothers Sorrow Can I see anothers woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see anothers grief, And not seek for kind relief. Can I see a falling tear. And not feel my sorrows share, Can a father see his child, Weep, nor be with sorrow fill’d. Can a mother sit and hear. An infant groan […]...
21. A Midnight Meditation HOW often have I said, “We may not grieve for the immortal dead.” And now, poor blenchèd heart, Thy ruddy hues all tremulous depart. Why be with fate at strife Because one passes on from death to life, Who may no more delay Rapt from our strange and pitiful dream away By one with ancient […]...
22. Dream Song 32: And where, friend Quo, lay you hiding And where, friend Quo, lay you hiding Across malignant half my years or so? One evil faery It was workt night, with amoroso pleasing Menace, the panes shake Where Lie-by-the-fire is waiting for his cream. A tiger by a torrent in rain, wind, Narrows fiend’s eyes for grief In an old ink-on-silk, Reminding me of […]...
23. The Leaf And The Tree When will you learn, myself, to be A dying leaf on a living tree? Budding, swelling, growing strong, Wearing green, but not for long, Drawing sustenance from air, That other leaves, and you not there, May bud, and at the autumn’s call Wearing russet, ready to fall? Has not this trunk a deed to do […]...
24. THE Complaint of a Lover SEest thou younder craggy Rock, Whose Head o’er-looks the swelling Main, Where never Shepherd fed his Flock, Or careful Peasant sow’d his Grain. No wholesome Herb grows on the same, Or Bird of Day will on it rest; ‘Tis Barren as the Hopeless Flame, That scortches my tormented Breast. Deep underneath a Cave does lie, […]...
25. Sardis (Revelations, iii. 1-6) “Write to Sardis,” saith the Lord, “And write what He declares, He whose Spirit, and whose word, Upholds the seven stars: All thy works and ways I search, Find thy zeal and love decay’d; Thou art call’d a living church, But thou art cold and dead. “Watch, remember, seek, and strive, Exert […]...
26. We knew not that we were to live We knew not that we were to live Nor when we are to die Our ignorance our cuirass is We wear Mortality As lightly as an Option Gown Till asked to take it off By his intrusion, God is known It is the same with Life...
27. Willard Fluke My wife lost her health, And dwindled until she weighed scarce ninety pounds. Then that woman, whom the men Styled Cleopatra, came along. And we we married ones All broke our vows, myself among the rest. Years passed and one by one Death claimed them all in some hideous form, And I was borne along […]...
28. Authorship You say that father write a lot of books, but what he write I don’t Understand. He was reading to you all the evening, but could you really Make out what he meant? What nice stores, mother, you can tell us! Why can’t father Write like that, I wonder? Did he never hear from his […]...
29. Transcience Nay, do not grieve tho’ life be full of sadness, Dawn will not veil her spleandor for your grief, Nor spring deny their bright, appointed beauty To lotus blossom and ashoka leaf. Nay, do not pine, tho’ life be dark with trouble, Time will not pause or tarry on his way; To-day that seems so […]...
30. Exaggeration WE overstate the ills of life, and take Imagination (given us to bring down The choirs of singing angels overshone By God’s clear glory) down our earth to rake The dismal snows instead, flake following flake, To cover all the corn; we walk upon The shadow of hills across a level thrown, And pant like […]...
31. The Wood Road If I were to walk this way Hand in hand with Grief, I should mark that maple-spray Coming into leaf. I should note how the old burrs Rot upon the ground. Yes, though Grief should know me hers While the world goes round, It could not if truth be said This was lost on me: […]...
32. Endurance HE bent above: so still her breath What air she breathed he could not say, Whether in worlds of life or death: So softly ebbed away, away, The life that had been light to him, So fled her beauty leaving dim The emptying chambers of his heart Thrilled only by the pang and smart, The […]...
33. End Of The World When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War, We used to take it for known that the human race Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore Of […]...
34. A Leader THOUGH your eyes with tears were blind, Pain upon the path you trod: Well we knew, the hosts behind, Voice and shining of a god. For your darkness was our day: Signal fires, your pains untold Lit us on our wandering way To the mystic heart of gold. Naught we knew of the high land, […]...
35. A Dead Friend I. Gone, O gentle heart and true, Friend of hopes foregone, Hopes and hopeful days with you Gone? Days of old that shone Saw what none shall see anew, When we gazed thereon. Soul as clear as sunlit dew, Why so soon pass on, Forth from all we loved and knew Gone? II. Friend of […]...
36. Introspection If you go deep Into the heart What do you find there? Fear, fear, Fear of the jaws of the rock, Fear of the teeth and splinters of iron that tear Flesh from the bone, and the moist Blood, running unfelt From the wound, and the hand Suddenly moist and red. If you go deep […]...
37. Sorrow SORROW, on wing through the world for ever, Here and there for awhile would borrow Rest, if rest might haply deliver Sorrow. One thought lies close in her heart gnawn thorough With pain, a weed in a dried-up river, A rust-red share in an empty furrow. Hearts that strain at her chain would sever The […]...
38. Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play Go, songs, for ended is our brief, sweet play; Go, children of swift joy and tardy sorrow: And some are sung, and that was yesterday, And some are unsung, and that may be tomorrow. Go forth; and if it be o’er stony way, Old joy can lend what newer grief must borrow: And it was […]...
39. O Sweetheart, Hear You O Sweetheart, hear you Your lover’s tale; A man shall have sorrow When friends him fail. For he shall know then Friends be untrue And a little ashes Their words come to. But one unto him Will softly move And softly woo him In ways of love. His hand is under Her smooth round breast; […]...
40. A Last Counsel COULD you not in silence borrow Strength to go from us ungrieving? All these hours of loving sorrow Only make more bitter leaving. You will go forth lonely, thinking Of the pain you leave behind you; From the golden sunlight shrinking For the earthly tears will blind you. Better, ah, if now we parted For […]...