Alone, remote, nor witting where I went,I found an altar builded in a dream —A fiery place, whereof there was a gleamSo swift, so searching, and so eloquentOf upward promise, that love’s murmur, blentWith sorrow’s warning, gave but a supremeUnending impulse to that human streamWhose flood was all for the flame’s fury bent. Alas! I […]

Come away! come away! there’s a frost along the marshes,And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;There’s a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodlandOf a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.There is nothing left but […]

Ye gods that have a home beyond the world,Ye that have eyes for all man’s agony,Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen, —Look with a just regard,And with an even grace,Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king,Here on a suffering world where men grow oldAnd wander like sad shadows till, […]

Look you, Dominie; look you, and listen!Look in my face, first; search every line there;Mark every feature, — chin, lip, and forehead!Look in my eyes, and tell me the lessonYou read there; measure my nose, and tell meWhere I am wanting! A man’s nose, Dominie,Is often the cast of his inward spirit;So mark mine well. […]

There is a drear and lonely tract of hellFrom all the common gloom removed afar:A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.I walked among them and I knew them well:Men I had slandered on life’s little starFor churls and sluggards; and I knew the scarUpon their brows […]

When we can all so excellently giveThe measure of love’s wisdom with a blow, —Why can we not in turn receive it so,And end this murmur for the life we live?And when we do so frantically striveTo win strange faith, why do we shun to knowThat in love’s elemental over-glowGod’s wholeness gleams with light superlative? […]

Blessed with a joy that only sheOf all alive shall ever know,She wears a proud humilityFor what it was that willed it so,–That her degree should be so greatAmong the favored of the LordThat she may scarcely bear the weightOf her bewildering reward. As one apart, immune, alone,Or featured for the shining ones,And like to […]

The man Flammonde, from God knows where,With firm address and foreign air,With news of nations in his talkAnd something royal in his walk,With glint of iron in his eyes,But never doubt, nor yet surprise,Appeared, and stayed, and held his headAs one by kings accredited. Erect, with his alert reposeAbout him, and about his clothes,He pictured […]

Now in a thought, now in a shadowed word,Now in a voice that thrills eternity,Ever there comes an onward phrase to meOf some transcendent music I have heard;No piteous thing by soft hands dulcimered,No trumpet crash of blood-sick victory,But a glad strain of some still symphonyThat no proud mortal touch has ever stirred. There is […]

I found a torrent falling in a glenWhere the sun’s light shone silvered and leaf-split;The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of itAll made a magic symphony; but whenI thought upon the coming of hard menTo cut those patriarchal trees away,And turn to gold the silver of that spray,I shuddered. Yet a gladness now […]

I Unity As eons of incalculable strifeAre in the vision of one moment caught,So are the common, concrete things of lifeDivinely shadowed on the walls of Thought. II Paraphrase We shriek to live, but no man ever livesTill he has rid the ghost of human breath;We dream to die, but no man ever diesTill he […]

I To get at the eternal strength of things,And fearlessly to make strong songs of it,Is, to my mind, the mission of that manThe world would call a poet. He may singBut roughly, and withal ungraciously;But if he touch to life the one right chordWherein God’s music slumbers, and awakeTo truth one drowsed ambition, he […]

She fears him, and will always askWhat fated her to choose him;She meets in his engaging maskAll reasons to refuse him;But what she meets and what she fearsAre less than are the downward years,Drawn slowly to the foamless weirsOf age, were she to lose him. Between a blurred sagacityThat once had power to sound him,And […]

You are a friend then, as I make it out,Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of usWill put an ass’s head in FairylandAs he would add a shilling to more shillings,All most harmonious,–and out of hisMiraculous inviolable increaseFills Ilion, Rome, or any town you likeOf olden time with timeless Englishmen;And I must wonder what you […]

(To Mrs. Edward MacDowell) No sound of any storm that shakesOld island walls with older seasComes here where now September makesAn island in a sea of trees. Between the sunlight and the shadeA man may learn till he forgetsThe roaring of a world remade,And all his ruins and regrets; And if he still remembers herePoor […]

Once there was a cabin here, and once there was a man;And something happened here before my memory began.Time has made the two of them the fuel of one flameAnd all we have of them is now a legend and a name. All I have to say is what an old man said to me,And […]

“Be calm? And was I frantic?You’ll have me laughing soon.I’m calm as this Atlantic,And quiet as the moon;I may have spoken fasterThan once, in other days;For I’ve no more a master,And now–‘Be calm,’ he says. “Fear not, fear no commotion,–I’ll be as rocks and sand;The moon and stars and oceanWill envy my command;No creature could […]

“Tell me what you’re doing over here, John Gorham,Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you’re not;Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlightAre a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot.”– “I’m over here to tell you what the moon alreadyMay have said […]

Think not, because I wonder where you fled,That I would lift a pin to see you there;You may, for me, be prowling anywhere,So long as you show not your little head:No dark and evil story of the deadWould leave you less pernicious or less fair–Not even Lilith, with her famous hair;And Lilith was the devil, […]

Long warned of many terrors more severeTo scorch him than hell’s engines could awaken,He scanned again, too far to be so near,The fearful seat no man had ever taken. So many other men with older eyesThan his to see with older sight behind themHad known so long their one way to be wise,–Was any other […]