 |
Poems
Alan Seeger
(1917)
Edited for the Web by Bob Blair
|
- THERE is a power whose inspiration fills
- Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought,
- Like airy dew ere any drop distils,
- Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught
- Unseen which interfused throughout the whole
- Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul.
- Now when, the drift of old desire renewing,
- Warm tides flow northward over valley and field,
- When half-forgotten sound and scent are wooing
- From their deep-chambered recesses long sealed
- Such memories as breathe once more
- Of childhood and the happy hues it wore,
- Now, with a fervor that has never been
- In years gone by, it stirs me to respond, -- -
- Not as a force whose fountains are within
- The faculties of the percipient mind,
- Subject with them to darkness and decay,
- But something absolute, something beyond,
- Oft met like tender orbs that seem to peer
- From pale horizons, luminous behind
- Some fringe of tinted cloud at close of day;
- And in this flood of the reviving year,
- When to the loiterer by sylvan streams,
- Deep in those cares that make Youth loveliest,
- Nature in every common aspect seems
- To comment on the burden in his breast -- -
- The joys he covets and the dreams he dreams -- -
- One then with all beneath the radiant skies
- That laughs with him or sighs,
- It courses through the lilac-scented air,
- A blessing on the fields, a wonder everywhere.
- Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses,
- Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea,
- Alone can flush the exalted consciousness
- With shafts of sensible divinity -- -
- Light of the World, essential loveliness:
- Him whom the Muse hath made thy votary
- Not from her paths and gentle precepture
- Shall vulgar ends engage, nor break the spell
- That taught him first to feel thy secret charms
- And o'er the earth, obedient to their lure,
- Their sweet surprise and endless miracle,
- To follow ever with insatiate arms.
- On summer afternoons,
- When from the blue horizon to the shore,
- Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's
- Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor,
- Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements
- Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence,
- When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill
- And autumn winds are still;
- To watch the East for some emerging sign,
- Wintry Capella or the Pleiades
- Or that great huntsman with the golden gear;
- Ravished in hours like these
- Before thy universal shrine
- To feel the invoked presence hovering near,
- He stands enthusiastic. Star-lit hours
- Spent on the roads of wandering solitude
- Have set their sober impress on his brow,
- And he, with harmonies of wind and wood
- And torrent and the tread of mountain showers,
- Has mingled many a dedicative vow
- That holds him, till thy last delight be known,
- Bound in thy service and in thine alone.
- I, too, among the visionary throng
- Who choose to follow where thy pathway leads,
- Have sold my patrimony for a song,
- And donned the simple, lowly pilgrim's weeds.
- From that first image of beloved walls,
- Deep-bowered in umbrage of ancestral trees,
- Where earliest thy sweet enchantment falls,
- Tingeing a child's fantastic reveries
- With radiance so fair it seems to be
- Of heavens just lost the lingering evidence
- From that first dawn of roseate infancy,
- So long beneath thy tender influence
- My breast has thrilled. As oft for one brief second
- The veil through which those infinite offers beckoned
- Has seemed to tremble, letting through
- Some swift intolerable view
- Of vistas past the sense of mortal seeing,
- So oft, as one whose stricken eyes might see
- In ferny dells the rustic deity,
- I stood, like him, possessed, and all my being,
- Flooded an instant with unwonted light,
- Quivered with cosmic passion; whether then
- On woody pass or glistening mountain-height
- I walked in fellowship with winds and clouds,
- Whether in cities and the throngs of men,
- A curious saunterer through friendly crowds,
- Enamored of the glance in passing eyes,
- Unuttered salutations, mute replies, -- -
- In every character where light of thine
- Has shed on earthly things the hue of things divine
- I sought eternal Loveliness, and seeking,
- If ever transport crossed my brow bespeaking
- Such fire as a prophetic heart might feel
- Where simple worship blends in fervent zeal,
- It was the faith that only love of thee
- Needed in human hearts for Earth to see
- Surpassed the vision poets have held dear
- Of joy diffused in most communion here;
- That whomsoe'er thy visitations warmed,
- Lover of thee in all thy rays informed,
- Needed no difficulter discipline
- To seek his right to happiness within
- Than, sensible of Nature's loveliness,
- To yield him to the generous impulses
- By such a sentiment evoked. The thought,
- Bright Spirit, whose illuminings I sought,
- That thou unto thy worshipper might be
- An all-sufficient law, abode with me,
- Importing something more than unsubstantial dreams
- To vigils by lone shores and walks by murmuring streams.
- Youth's flowers like childhood's fade and are forgot.
- Fame twines a tardy crown of yellowing leaves.
- How swift were disillusion, were it not
- That thou art steadfast where all else deceives!
- Solace and Inspiration, Power divine
- That by some mystic sympathy of thine,
- When least it waits and most hath need of thee,
- Can startle the dull spirit suddenly
- With grandeur welled from unsuspected springs, -- -
- Long as the light of fulgent evenings,
- When from warm showers the pearly shades disband
- And sunset opens o'er the humid land,
- Shows thy veiled immanence in orient skies, -- -
- Long as pale mist and opalescent dyes
- Hung on far isle or vanishing mountain-crest,
- Fields of remote enchantment can suggest
- So sweet to wander in it matters nought,
- They hold no place but in impassioned thought,
- Long as one draught from a clear sky may be
- A scented luxury;
- Be thou my worship, thou my sole desire,
- Thy paths my pilgrimage, my sense a lyre
- Aeolian for thine every breath to stir;
- Oft when her full-blown periods recur,
- To see the birth of day's transparent moon
- Far from cramped walls may fading afternoon
- Find me expectant on some rising lawn;
- Often depressed in dewy grass at dawn,
- Me, from sweet slumber underneath green boughs,
- Ere the stars flee may forest matins rouse,
- Afoot when the great sun in amber floods
- Pours horizontal through the steaming woods
- And windless fumes from early chimneys start
- And many a cock-crow cheers the traveller's heart
- Eager for aught the coming day afford
- In hills untopped and valleys unexplored.
- Give me the white road into the world's ends,
- Lover of roadside hazard, roadside friends,
- Loiterer oft by upland farms to gaze
- On ample prospects, lost in glimmering haze
- At noon, or where down odorous dales twilit,
- Filled with low thundering of the mountain stream,
- Over the plain where blue seas border it
- The torrid coast-towns gleam.
- I have fared too far to turn back now; my breast
- Burns with the lust for splendors unrevealed,
- Stars of midsummer, clouds out of the west,
- Pallid horizons, winds that valley and field
- Laden with joy, be ye my refuge still!
- What though distress and poverty assail!
- Though other voices chide, yours never will.
- The grace of a blue sky can never fail.
- Powers that my childhood with a spell so sweet,
- My youth with visions of such glory nursed,
- Ye have beheld, nor ever seen my feet
- On any venture set, but 'twas the thirst
- For Beauty willed them, yea, whatever be
- The faults I wanted wings to rise above;
- I am cheered yet to think how steadfastly
- I have been loyal to the love of Love!
- Alan Seeger

- I KNOW a village in a far-off land
- Where from a sunny, mountain-girdled plain
- With tinted walls a space on either hand
- And fed by many an olive-darkened lane
- The high-road mounts, and thence a silver band
- Through vineyard slopes above and rolling grain,
- Winds off to that dim corner of the skies
- Where behind sunset hills a stately city lies.
- Here, among trees whose overhanging shade
- Strews petals on the little droves below,
- Pattering townward in the morning weighed
- With greens from many an upland garden-row,
- Runs an old wall; long centuries have frayed
- Its scalloped edge, and passers to and fro
- Heard never from beyond its crumbling height
- Sweet laughter ring at noon or plaintive song at night.
- But here where little lizards bask and blink
- The tendrils of the trumpet-vine have run,
- At whose red bells the humming bird to drink
- Stops oft before his garden feast is done;
- And rose-geraniums, with that tender pink
- That cloud-banks borrow from the setting sun,
- Have covered part of this old wall, entwined
- With fair plumbago, blue as evening heavens behind.
- And crowning other parts the wild white rose
- Rivals the honey-suckle with the bees.
- Above the old abandoned orchard shows
- And all within beneath the dense-set trees,
- Tall and luxuriant the rank grass grows,
- That settled in its wavy depth one sees
- Grass melt in leaves, the mossy trunks between,
- Down fading avenues of implicated green;
- Wherein no lack of flowers the verdurous night
- With stars and pearly nebula o'erlay;
- Azalea-boughs half rosy and half white
- Shine through the green and clustering apple-spray,
- Such as the fairy-queen before her knight
- Waved in old story, luring him away
- Where round lost isles Hesperian billows break
- Or towers loom up beneath the clear, translucent lake;
- And under the deep grass blue hare-bells hide,
- And myrtle plots with dew-fall ever wet,
- Gay tiger-lilies flammulate and pied,
- Sometime on pathway borders neatly set,
- Now blossom through the brake on either side,
- Where heliotrope and weedy mignonette,
- With vines in bloom and flower-bearing trees,
- Mingle their incense all to swell the perfumed breeze,
- That sprung like Hermes from his natal cave
- In some blue rampart of the curving West,
- Comes up the valleys where green cornfields wave,
- Ravels the cloud about the mountain crest,
- Breathes on the lake till gentle ripples pave
- Its placid floor; at length a long-loved guest,
- He steals across this plot of pleasant ground,
- Waking the vocal leaves to a sweet vernal sound.
- Here many a day right gladly have I sped,
- Content amid the wavy plumes to lie,
- And through the woven branches overhead
- Watch the white, ever-wandering clouds go by,
- And soaring birds make their dissolving bed
- Far in the azure depths of summer sky,
- Or nearer that small huntsman of the air,
- The fly-catcher, dart nimbly from his leafy lair;
- Pillowed at ease to hear the merry tune
- Of mating warblers in the boughs above
- And shrill cicadas whom the hottest noon
- Keeps not from drowsy song; the mourning dove
- Pours down the murmuring grove his plaintive croon
- That like the voice of visionary love
- Oft have I risen to seek through this green maze
- (Even as my feet thread now the great world's garden-ways);
- And, parting tangled bushes as I passed
- Down beechen alleys beautiful and dim,
- Perhaps by some deep-shaded pool at last
- My feet would pause, where goldfish poise and swim,
- And snowy callas' velvet cups are massed
- Around the mossy, fern-encircled brim.
- Here, then, that magic summoning would cease,
- Or sound far off again among the orchard trees.
- And here where the blanched lilies of the vale
- And violets and yellow star-flowers teem,
- And pink and purple hyacinths exhale
- Their heavy fume, once more to drowse and dream
- My head would sink, from many an olden tale
- Drawing imagination's fervid theme,
- Or haply peopling this enchanting spot
- Only with fair creations of fantastic thought.
- For oft I think, in years long since gone by,
- That gentle hearts dwelt here and gentle hands
- Stored all this bowery bliss to beautify
- The paradise of some unsung romance;
- Here, safe from all except the loved one's eye,
- 'Tis sweet to think white limbs were wont to glance,
- Well pleased to wanton like the flowers and share
- Their simple loveliness with the enamored air.
- Thrice dear to them whose votive fingers decked
- The altars of First Love were these green ways, -- -
- These lawns and verdurous brakes forever flecked
- With the warm sunshine of midsummer days;
- Oft where the long straight allies intersect
- And marble seats surround the open space,
- Where a tiled pool and sculptured fountain stand,
- Hath Evening found them seated, silent, hand in hand.
- When twilight deepened, in the gathering shade
- Beneath that old titanic cypress row,
- Whose sombre vault and towering colonnade
- Dwarfed the enfolded forms that moved below,
- Oft with close steps these happy lovers strayed,
- Till down its darkening aisle the sunset glow
- Grew less and patterning the garden floor
- Faint flakes of filtering moonlight mantled more and more.
- And the strange tempest that a touch imparts
- Through the mid fibre of the molten frame,
- When the sweet flesh in early youth asserts
- Its heyday verve and little hints enflame,
- Disturbed them as they walked; from their full hearts
- Welled the soft word, and many a tender name
- Strove on their lips as breast to breast they strained
- And the deep joy they drank seemed never, never drained.
- Love's soul that is the depth of starry skies
- Set in the splendor of one upturned face
- To beam adorably through half-closed eyes;
- Love's body where the breadth of summer days
- And all the beauty earth and air comprise
- Come to the compass of an arm's embrace,
- To burn a moment on impassioned lips
- And yield intemperate joy to quivering finger-tips,
- They knew; and here where morning-glories cling
- Round carven forms of carefullest artifice,
- They made a bower where every outward thing
- Should comment on the cause of their own bliss;
- With flowers of liveliest hue encompassing
- That flower that the beloved body is -- -
- That rose that for the banquet of Love's bee
- Has budded all the aeons of past eternity.
- But their choice seat was where the garden wall,
- Crowning a little summit, far and near,
- Looks over tufted treetops onto all
- The pleasant outer country; rising here
- From rustling foliage where cuckoos call
- On summer evenings, stands a belvedere,
- Buff-hued, of antique plaster, overrun
- With flowering vines and weatherworn by rain and sun.
- Still round the turrets of this antique tower
- The bougainvillea hangs a crimson crown,
- Wistaria-vines and clematis in flower,
- Wreathing the lower surface further down,
- Hide the old plaster in a very shower
- Of motley blossoms like a broidered gown.
- Outside, ascending from the garden grove,
- A crumbling stairway winds to the one room above.
- And whoso mounts by this dismantled stair
- Finds the old pleasure-hall, long disarrayed,
- Brick-tiled and raftered, and the walls foursquare
- Ringed all about with a twofold arcade.
- Backward dense branches intercept the glare
- Of afternoon with eucalyptus shade;
- Eastward the level valley-plains expand,
- Sweet as a queen's survey of her own Fairyland.
- For through that frame the ivied arches make,
- Wide tracts of sunny midland charm the eye,
- Frequent with hamlet, grove, and lucent lake
- Where the blue hills' inverted contours lie;
- Far to the east where billowy mountains break
- In surf of snow against a sapphire sky,
- Huge thunderheads loom up behind the ranges,
- Changing from gold to pink as deepening sunset changes;
- And over plain and far sierra spread
- The fulgent rays of fading afternoon,
- Showing each utmost peak and watershed
- All clarified, each tassel and festoon
- Of floating cloud embroidered overhead,
- Like lotus-leaves on bluest waters strewn,
- Flushing with rose, while all breathes fresh and free
- In peace and amplitude and bland tranquillity.
- Dear were such evenings to this gentle pair;
- Love's tide that launched on with a blast too strong
- Sweeps toward the foaming reef, the hidden snare,
- Baffling with fond illusion's siren-song,
- Too faint, on idle shoals, to linger there
- Far from Youth's glowing dream, bore them along,
- With purple sail and steered by seraph hands
- To isles resplendent in the sunset of romance.
- And out of this old house a flowery fane,
- A bridal bower, a pearly pleasure-dome,
- They built, and furnished it with gold and grain,
- And bade all spirits of beauty hither come,
- And winged Love to enter with his train
- And bless their pillow, and in this his home
- Make them his priests as Hero was of yore
- In her sweet girlhood by the blue Dardanian shore.
- Tree-ferns, therefore, and potted palms they brought,
- Tripods and urns in rare and curious taste,
- Polychrome chests and cabinets inwrought
- With pearl and ivory etched and interlaced;
- Pendant brocades with massive braid were caught,
- And chain-slung, oriental lamps so placed
- To light the lounger on some low divan,
- Sunken in swelling down and silks from Hindustan.
- And there was spread, upon the ample floors,
- Work of the Levantine's laborious loom,
- Such as by Euxine or Ionian shores
- Carpets the dim seraglio's scented gloom.
- Each morn renewed, the garden's flowery stores
- Blushed in fair vases, ochre and peach-bloom,
- And little birds through wicker doors left wide
- Flew in to trill a space from the green world outside.
- And there was many a dainty attitude,
- Bronze and eburnean. All but disarrayed,
- Here in eternal doubt sweet Psyche stood
- Fain of the bath's delight, yet still afraid
- Lest aught in that palatial solitude
- Lurked of most menace to a helpless maid.
- Therefore forever faltering she stands,
- Nor yet the last loose fold slips rippling from her hands.
- Close by upon a beryl column, clad
- In the fresh flower of adolescent grace,
- They set the dear Bithynian shepherd lad,
- The nude Antinous. That gentle face,
- Forever beautiful, forever sad,
- Shows but one aspect, moon-like, to our gaze,
- Yet Fancy pictures how those lips could smile
- At revelries in Rome, and banquets on the Nile.
- And there were shapes of Beauty myriads more,
- Clustering their rosy bridal bed around,
- Whose scented breadth a silken fabric wore
- Broidered with peacock hues on creamiest ground,
- Fit to have graced the barge that Cydnus bore
- Or Venus' bed in her enchanted mound,
- While pillows swelled in stuffs of Orient dyes,
- All broidered with strange fruits and birds of Paradise.
- 'Twas such a bower as Youth has visions of,
- Thither with one fair spirit to retire,
- Lie upon rose-leaves, sleep and wake with Love
- And feast on kisses to the heart's desire;
- Where by a casement opening on a grove,
- Wide to the wood-winds and the sweet birds' choir,
- A girl might stand and gaze into green boughs,
- Like Credhe at the window of her golden house.
- Or most like Vivien, the enchanting fay,
- Where with her friend, in the strange tower they planned,
- She lies and dreams eternity away,
- Above the treetops in Broceliande,
- Sometimes at twilight when the woods are gray
- And wolf-packs howl far out across the lande,
- Waking to love, while up behind the trees
- The large midsummer moon lifts -- - even so loved these.
- For here, their pleasure was to come and sit
- Oft when the sun sloped midway to the west,
- Watching with sweet enjoyment interknit
- The long light slant across the green earth's breast,
- And clouds upon the ranges opposite,
- Rolled up into a gleaming thundercrest,
- Topple and break and fall in purple rain,
- And mist of summer showers trail out across the plain.
- Whereon the shafts of ardent light, far-flung
- Across the luminous azure overhead,
- Ofttimes in arcs of transient beauty hung
- The fragmentary rainbow's green and red.
- Joy it was here to love and to be young,
- To watch the sun sink to his western bed,
- And streaming back out of their flaming core
- The vesperal aurora's glorious banners soar.
- Tinging each altitude of heaven in turn,
- Those fiery rays would sweep. The cumuli
- That peeped above the mountain-tops would burn
- Carmine a space; the cirrus-whorls on high,
- More delicate than sprays of maiden fern,
- Streak with pale rose the peacock-breasted sky,
- Then blanch. As water-lilies fold at night,
- Sank back into themselves those plumes of fervid light.
- And they would watch the first faint stars appear,
- The blue East blend with the blue hills below,
- As lovers when their shuddering bliss draws near
- Into one pulse of fluid rapture grow.
- New fragrance on the freshening atmosphere
- Would steal with evening, and the sunset glow
- Draw deeper down into the wondrous west
- Round vales of Proserpine and islands of the blest.
- So dusk would come and mingle lake and shore,
- The snow-peaks fade to frosty opaline,
- To pearl the domed clouds the mountains bore,
- Where late the sun's effulgent fire had been -- -
- Showing as darkness deepened more and more
- The incandescent lightnings flare within,
- And Night that furls the lily in the glen
- And twines impatient arms would fall, and then -- - and then . . .
- Sometimes the peasant, coming late from town
- With empty panniers on his little drove
- Past the old lookout when the Northern Crown
- Glittered with Cygnus through the scented grove,
- Would hear soft noise of lute-strings wafted down
- And voices singing through the leaves above
- Those songs that well from the warm heart that woos
- At balconies in Merida or Vera Cruz.
- And he would pause under the garden wall,
- Caught in the spell of that voluptuous strain,
- With all the sultry South in it, and all
- Its importunity of love and pain;
- And he would wait till the last passionate fall
- Died on the night, and all was still again, -- -
- Then to his upland village wander home,
- Marvelling whence that flood of elfin song might come.
- O lyre that Love's white holy hands caress,
- Youth, from thy bosom welled their passionate lays -- -
- Sweet opportunity for happiness
- So brief, so passing beautiful -- - O days,
- When to the heart's divine indulgences
- All earth in smiling ministration pays -- -
- Thine was the source whose plenitude, past over,
- What prize shall rest to pluck, what secret to discover!
- The wake of color that follows her when May
- Walks on the hills loose-haired and daisy-crowned,
- The deep horizons of a summer's day,
- Fair cities, and the pleasures that abound
- Where music calls, and crowds in bright array
- Gather by night to find and to be found;
- What were these worth or all delightful things
- Without thine eyes to read their true interpretings!
- For thee the mountains open glorious gates,
- To thee white arms put out from orient skies,
- Earth, like a jewelled bride for one she waits,
- Decks but to be delicious in thine eyes,
- Thou guest of honor for one day, whose fetes
- Eternity has travailed to devise;
- Ah, grace them well in the brief hour they last!
- Another's turn prepares, another follows fast.
- Yet not without one fond memorial
- Let my sun set who found the world so fair!
- Frail verse, when Time the singer's coronal
- Has rent, and stripped the rose-leaves from his hair,
- Be thou my tablet on the temple wall!
- Among the pious testimonials there,
- Witness how sweetly on my heart as well
- The miracles of dawn and starry evening fell!
- Speak of one then who had the lust to feel,
- And, from the hues that far horizons take,
- And cloud and sunset, drank the wild appeal,
- Too deep to live for aught but life's sweet sake,
- Whose only motive was the will to kneel
- Where Beauty's purest benediction spake,
- Who only coveted what grove and field
- And sunshine and green Earth and tender arms could yield -- -
- A nympholept, through pleasant days and drear
- Seeking his faultless adolescent dream,
- A pilgrim down the paths that disappear
- In mist and rainbows on the world's extreme,
- A helpless voyager who all too near
- The mouth of Life's fair flower-bordered stream,
- Clutched at Love's single respite in his need
- More than the drowning swimmer clutches at a reed -- -
- That coming one whose feet in other days
- Shall bleed like mine for ever having, more
- Than any purpose, felt the need to praise
- And seek the angelic image to adore,
- In love with Love, its wonderful, sweet ways
- Counting what most makes life worth living for,
- That so some relic may be his to see
- How I loved these things too and they were dear to me.
- I sometimes think a conscious happiness
- Mantles through all the rose's sentient vine
- When summer winds with myriad calyces
- Of bloom its clambering height incarnadine;
- I sometimes think that cleaving lips, no less,
- And limbs that crowned desires at length entwine
- Are nerves through which that being drinks delight,
- Whose frame is the green Earth robed round with day and night.
- And such were theirs: the traveller without,
- Pausing at night under the orchard trees,
- Wondered and crossed himself in holy doubt,
- For through their song and in the murmuring breeze
- It seemed angelic choirs were all about
- Mingling in universal harmonies,
- As though, responsive to the chords they woke,
- All Nature into sweet epithalamium broke.
- And still they think a spirit haunts the place:
- 'Tis said, when Night has drawn her jewelled pall
- And through the branches twinkling fireflies trace
- Their mimic constellations, if it fall
- That one should see the moon rise through the lace
- Of blossomy boughs above the garden wall,
- That surely would he take great ill thereof
- And famish in a fit of unexpressive love.
- But this I know not, for what time the wain
- Was loosened and the lily's petal furled,
- Then I would rise, climb the old wall again,
- And pausing look forth on the sundown world,
- Scan the wide reaches of the wondrous plain,
- The hamlet sites where settling smoke lay curled,
- The poplar-bordered roads, and far away
- Fair snowpeaks colored with the sun's last ray.
- Waves of faint sound would pulsate from afar -- -
- Faint song and preludes of the summer night;
- Deep in the cloudless west the evening star
- Hung 'twixt the orange and the emerald light;
- From the dark vale where shades crepuscular
- Dimmed the old grove-girt belfry glimmering white,
- Throbbing, as gentlest breezes rose or fell,
- Came the sweet invocation of the evening bell.
- Alan Seeger

- THEIR strength had fed on this when Death's white arms
- Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew,
- Curling across the jungle's ferny floor,
- Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides,
- Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold
- That twinged blue lips into a mouthed curse,
- Not back to Seville and its sunny plains
- Winged their brief-biding dreams, but once again,
- Lords of a palace in Tenochtitlan,
- They guarded Montezuma's treasure-hoard.
- Gold, like some finny harvest of the sea,
- Poured out knee deep around the rifted floors,
- Shiny and sparkling, -- - arms and crowns and rings:
- Gold, sweet to toy with as beloved hair, -- -
- To plunge the lustful, crawling fingers down,
- Arms elbow deep, and draw them out again,
- And watch the glinting metal trickle off,
- Even as at night some fisherman, home bound
- With speckled cargo in his hollow keel
- Caught off Campeche or the Isle of Pines,
- Dips in his paddle, lifts it forth again,
- And laughs to see the luminous white drops
- Fall back in flakes of fire. . . . Gold was the dream
- That cheered that desperate enterprise. And now? . . .
- Victory waited on the arms of Spain,
- Fallen was the lovely city by the lake,
- The sunny Venice of the western world;
- There many corpses, rotting in the wind,
- Poked up stiff limbs, but in the leprous rags
- No jewel caught the sun, no tawny chain
- Gleamed, as the prying halberds raked them o'er.
- Pillage that ran red-handed through the streets
- Came railing home at evening empty-palmed;
- And they, on that sad night a twelvemonth gone,
- Who, ounce by ounce, dear as their own life's blood
- Retreating, cast the cumbrous load away:
- They, when brown foemen lopped the bridges down,
- Who tipped thonged chests into the stream below
- And over wealth that might have ransomed kings
- Passed on to safety; -- - cheated, guerdonless -- -
- Found (through their fingers the bright booty slipped)
- A city naked, of that golden dream
- Shorn in one moment like a sunset sky.
- Deep in a chamber that no cheerful ray
- Purged of damp air, where in unbroken night
- Black scorpions nested in the sooty beams,
- Helpless and manacled they led him down -- -
- Cuauhtemotzin -- - and other lords beside -- -
- All chieftains of the people, heroes all -- -
- And stripped their feathered robes and bound them there
- On short stone settles sloping to the head,
- But where the feet projected, underneath
- Heaped the red coals. Their swarthy fronts illumed,
- The bearded Spaniards, helmed and haubergeoned,
- Paced up and down beneath the lurid vault.
- Some kneeling fanned the glowing braziers; some
- Stood at the sufferers' heads and all the while
- Hissed in their ears: "The gold . . . the gold . . . the gold.
- Where have ye hidden it -- - the chested gold?
- Speak -- - and the torments cease!"
-
They answered not.
- Past those proud lips whose key their sovereign claimed
- No accent fell to chide or to betray,
- Only it chanced that bound beside the king
- Lay one whom Nature, more than other men
- Framing for delicate and perfumed ease,
- Not yet, along the happy ways of Youth,
- Had weaned from gentle usages so far
- To teach that fortitude that warriors feel
- And glory in the proof. He answered not,
- But writhing with intolerable pain,
- Convulsed in every limb, and all his face
- Wrought to distortion with the agony,
- Turned on his lord a look of wild appeal,
- The secret half atremble on his lips,
- Livid and quivering, that waited yet
- For leave -- - for leave to utter it -- - one sign -- -
- One word -- - one little word -- - to ease his pain.
- As one reclining in the banquet hall,
- Propped on an elbow, garlanded with flowers,
- Saw lust and greed and boisterous revelry
- Surge round him on the tides of wine, but he,
- Staunch in the ethic of an antique school -- -
- Stoic or Cynic or of Pyrrho's mind -- -
- With steady eyes surveyed the unbridled scene,
- Himself impassive, silent, self-contained:
- So sat the Indian prince, with brow unblanched,
- Amid the tortured and the torturers.
- He who had seen his hopes made desolate,
- His realm despoiled, his early crown deprived him,
- And watched while Pestilence and Famine piled
- His stricken people in their reeking doors,
- Whence glassy eyes looked out and lean brown arms
- Stretched up to greet him in one last farewell
- As back and forth he paced along the streets
- With words of hopeless comfort -- - what was this
- That one should weaken now? He weakened not.
- Whate'er was in his heart, he neither dealt
- In pity nor in scorn, but, turning round,
- Met that racked visage with his own unmoved,
- Bent on the sufferer his mild calm eyes,
- And while the pangs smote sharper, in a voice,
- As who would speak not all in gentleness
- Nor all disdain, said: "Yes! And am -- I- then
- Upon a bed of roses?"
- Stung with shame -- -
- Shame bitterer than his anguish -- - to betray
- Such cowardice before the man he loved,
- And merit such rebuke, the boy grew calm;
- And stilled his struggling limbs and moaning cries,
- And shook away his tears, and strove to smile,
- And turned his face against the wall -- - and died.
- Alan Seeger

- THERE was a boy -- - not above childish fears -- -
- With steps that faltered now and straining ears,
- Timid, irresolute, yet dauntless still,
- Who one bright dawn, when each remotest hill
- Stood sharp and clear in Heaven's unclouded blue
- And all Earth shimmered with fresh-beaded dew,
- Risen in the first beams of the gladdening sun,
- Walked up into the mountains. One by one
- Each towering trunk beneath his sturdy stride
- Fell back, and ever wider and more wide
- The boundless prospect opened. Long he strayed,
- From dawn till the last trace of slanting shade
- Had vanished from the canyons, and, dismayed
- At that far length to which his path had led,
- He paused -- - at such a height where overhead
- The clouds hung close, the air came thin and chill,
- And all was hushed and calm and very still,
- Save, from abysmal gorges, where the sound
- Of tumbling waters rose, and all around
- The pines, by those keen upper currents blown,
- Muttered in multitudinous monotone.
- Here, with the wind in lovely locks laid bare,
- With arms oft raised in dedicative prayer,
- Lost in mute rapture and adoring wonder,
- He stood, till the far noise of noontide thunder,
- Rolled down upon the muffled harmonies
- Of wind and waterfall and whispering trees,
- Made loneliness more lone. Some Panic fear
- Would seize him then, as they who seemed to hear
- In Tracian valleys or Thessalian woods
- The god's hallooing wake the leafy solitudes;
- I think it was the same: some piercing sense
- Of Deity's pervasive immanence,
- The Life that visible Nature doth indwell
- Grown great and near and all but palpable . . .
- He might not linger, but with winged strides
- Like one pursued, fled down the mountain-sides -- -
- Down the long ridge that edged the steep ravine,
- By glade and flowery lawn and upland green,
- And never paused nor felt assured again
- But where the grassy foothills opened. Then,
- While shadows lengthened on the plain below
- And the sun vanished and the sunset-glow
- Looked back upon the world with fervid eye
- Through the barred windows of the western sky,
- Homeward he fared, while many a look behind
- Showed the receding ranges dim-outlined,
- Highland and hollow where his path had lain,
- Veiled in deep purple of the mountain rain.
- Alan Seeger

- TO SEE the clouds his spirit yearned toward so
- Over new mountains piled and unploughed waves,
- Back of old-storied spires and architraves
- To watch Arcturus rise or Fomalhaut,
- And roused by street-cries in strange tongues when day
- Flooded with gold some domed metropolis,
- Between new towers to waken and new bliss
- Spread on his pillow in a wondrous way:
- These were his joys. Oft under bulging crates,
- Coming to market with his morning load,
- The peasant found him early on his road
- To greet the sunrise at the city-gates, -- -
- There where the meadows waken in its rays,
- Golden with mist, and the great roads commence,
- And backward, where the chimney-tops are dense,
- Cathedral-arches glimmer through the haze.
- White dunes that breaking show a strip of sea,
- A plowman and his team against the blue,
- Swiss pastures musical with cowbells, too,
- And poplar-lined canals in Picardie,
- And coast-towns where the vultures back and forth
- Sail in the clear depths of the tropic sky,
- And swallows in the sunset where they fly
- Over gray Gothic cities in the north,
- And the wine-cellar and the chorus there,
- The dance-hall and a face among the crowd, -- -
- Were all delights that made him sing aloud
- For joy to sojourn in a world so fair.
- Back of his footsteps as he journeyed fell
- Range after range; ahead blue hills emerged.
- Before him tireless to applaud it surged
- The sweet interminable spectacle.
- And like the west behind a sundown sea
- Shone the past joys his memory retraced,
- And bright as the blue east he always faced
- Beckoned the loves and joys that were to be.
- From every branch a blossom for his brow
- He gathered, singing down Life's flower-lined road,
- And youth impelled his spirit as he strode
- Like winged Victory on the galley's prow.
- That Loveliness whose being sun and star,
- Green Earth and dawn and amber evening robe,
- That lamp whereof the opalescent globe
- The season's emulative splendors are,
- That veiled divinity whose beams transpire
- From every pore of universal space,
- As the fair soul illumes the lovely face -- -
- That was his guest, his passion, his desire.
- His heart the love of Beauty held as hides
- One gem most pure a casket of pure gold.
- It was too rich a lesser thing to hold;
- It was not large enough for aught besides.
- Alan Seeger

- THE need to love that all the stars obey
- Entered my heart and banished all beside.
- Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;
- Faded the flowers that one time satisfied.
- Before the beauty of the west on fire,
- The moonlit hills from cloister-casements viewed,
- Cloud-like arose the image of desire,
- And cast out peace and maddened solitude.
- I sought the City and the hopes it held:
- With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled,
- As the thick roofs and walls close-paralleled
- Shut out the fair horizons of the world -- -
- A truant from the fields and rustic joy,
- In my changed thought that image even so
- Shut out the gods I worshipped as a boy
- And all the pure delights I used to know.
- Often the veil has trembled at some tide
- Of lovely reminiscence and revealed
- How much of beauty Nature holds beside
- Sweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield:
- Clouds, window-framed, beyond the huddled eaves
- When summer cumulates their golden chains,
- Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves,
- Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes,
- An organ-grinder's melancholy tune
- In rainy streets, or from an attic sill
- The blue skies of a windy afternoon
- Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill:
- And my soul once more would be wrapped entire
- In the pure peace and blessing of those years
- Before the fierce infection of Desire
- Had ravaged all the flesh. Through starting tears
- Shone that lost Paradise; but, if it did,
- Again ere long the prison-shades would fall
- That Youth condemns itself to walk amid,
- So narrow, but so beautiful withal.
- And I have followed Fame with less devotion,
- And kept no real ambition but to see
- Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean
- My dream of palpable divinity;
- And aught the world contends for to mine eye
- Seemed not so real a meaning of success
- As only once to clasp before I die
- My vision of embodied happiness.
- Alan Seeger

- OVER the radiant ridges borne out on the offshore wind,
- I have sailed as a butterfly sails whose priming wings unfurled
- Leave the familiar gardens and visited fields behind
- To follow a cloud in the east rose-flushed on the rim of the world.
- I have strayed from the trodden highway for walking with upturned eyes
- On the way of the wind in the treetops, and the drift of the tinted rack.
- For the will to be losing no wonder of sunny or starlit skies
- I have chosen the sod for my pillow and a threadbare coat for my back.
- Evening of ample horizons, opaline, delicate, pure,
- Shadow of clouds on green valleys, trailed over meadows and trees,
- Cities of ardent adventure where the harvests of Joy mature,
- Forests whose murmuring voices are amorous prophecies,
- World of romance and profusion, still round my journey spread
- The glamours, the glints, the enthralments, the nurture of one whose feet
- From hours unblessed by beauty nor lighted by love have fled
- As the shade of the tomb on his pathway and the scent of the winding-sheet.
- I never could rest from roving nor put from my heart this need
- To be seeing how lovably Nature in flower and face hath wrought, -- -
- In flower and meadow and mountain and heaven where the white clouds breed
- And the cunning of silken meshes where the heart's desire lies caught.
- Over the azure expanses, on the offshore breezes borne,
- I have sailed as a butterfly sails, nor recked where the impulse led,
- Sufficed with the sunshine and freedom, the warmth and the summer morn,
- The infinite glory surrounding, the infinite blue ahead.
- Alan Seeger

|