Short Poems

The fitful alternations of the rain,
When the chill wind, languid as with pain
Of its own heavy moisture, here and there
Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere.

My head is wild with weeping for a grief
Which is the shadow of a gentle mind.
I walk into the air (but no relief
To seek,--or haply, if I sought, to find;
It came unsought);--to wonder that a chief
Among men's spirits should be cold and blind.

My spirit like a charmed bark doth swim
Upon the liquid waves of thy sweet singing,
Far far away into the regions dim

Of rapture--as a boat, with swift sails winging
Its way adown some many-winding river,
Speeds through dark forests o'er the waters swinging . . .

O tan-faced prairie-boy,
Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift,
Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among the recruits,
You came, taciturn, with nothing to give — we but look'd on each other,
When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me.

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little ,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

" Peace upon earth!" was said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We've got as far as poison-gas.

When the maiden leaves off teasing,
Then the man may leave off pleasing:
Yea, 'tis sign,
Wet or fine,
She will love him without ceasing
With a love there's no appeasing.
Is it so?

You died, and made but little of it! —
Why then should I, when called to doff it,
Drop, and renounce this worm-holed raiment,
Shrink edgewise off from its grey claimant?
Rather say, when I am Time-outrun,
As you did: Take me, and have done,
Inexorable, insatiate one!

FRAGMENT OF AN ODE TO WINTER
--But hark! the Curfew tolls! and lo! the night
Mounts the black Coursers of the stormy North
Now down the pathway brown
I bend my pensive steps cetera desunt

Experiment escorts us last —
His pungent company
Will not allow an Axiom
An Opportunity