Baccalaureate

A YEAR or two, and grey Euripides,

And Horace and a Lydia or so,

And Euclid and the brush of Angelo,

Darwin on man, Vergilius on bees,

The nose and Dialogues of Socrates,

Don Quixote, Hudibras and Trinculo,

How worlds are spawned and where the dead gods go,--

All shall be shard of broken memories.

And there shall linger other, magic things,--

The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,

The rotton harbor smell, the mystery

Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings,

The sunny Green, the old-world peace that clings

About the college yard, where endlessly

The dead go up and down. These things shall be

Enchantment of our heart's rememberings.

And these are more than memories of youth

Which earth's four winds of pain shall blow away;

These are earth's symbols of eternal truth,

Symbols of dream and imagery and flame,

Symbols of those same verities that play

Bright through the crumbling gold of a great name.

Archibald MacLeish

Two Poems from the War

OH, not the loss of the accomplished thing!

Not dumb farewells, nor long relinquishment

Of beauty had, and golden summer spent,

And savage glory of the fluttering

Torn banners of the rain, and frosty ring

Of moon-white winters, and the imminent

Long-lunging seas, and glowing students bent

To race on some smooth beach the gull's wing:

Not these, nor all we've been, nor all we've loved,

The pitiful familiar names, had moved

Our hearts to weep for them; but oh, the star

The future is! Eternity's too wan

To give again that undefeated, far,

All-possible irradiance of dawn.

                    *

Like moon-dark, like brown water you escape,

O laughing mouth, O sweet uplifted lips.

Within the peering brain old ghosts take shape;

You flame and wither as the white foam slips

Back from the broken wave: sometimes a start,

A gesture of the hands, a way you own

Of bending that smooth head above your heart,--

Then these are varied, then the dream is gone.

Oh, you are too much mine and flesh of me

To seal upon the brain, who in the blood

Are so intense a pulse, so swift a flood

Of beauty, such unceasing instancy.

Dear unimagined brow, unvisioned face,

All beauty has become your dwelling place.

Archibald MacLeish

An Eternity

THERE is no dusk to be,

There is no dawn that was,

Only there's now, and now,

And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of

Now in my heart, are now;

Days that I dream will bloom

White the peach bough.

Dying shall never be

Now in the windy grass;

Now under shooken leaves

Death never was.

Archibald MacLeish