Classic Poem

Here, thing eternal, day begins not, ends not!
And the night stealing half-ushered in,
Steeps in the trembling wave her pillowed stars,
Or with pellucid silver tints the wake
Of the retiring moon, when from her couch
She half withdraws, like some faint nymph
Flushed by the hunter's horn, her bath profaned.
Time nowise here, her rapine wakes, nor save
The spray-voiced toad or bull-frog deep, whose music
Half-finished, e'er it folds the ear,
The weary question of the living bears.
Nor can you here, voluptuous worldling,
Flaunt your silken train, nor in your gay
And Cleopatra-barges bear away
The old simplicity that breathes in things.
Nought but the solitary fisher comes,
More like a weedy tuft than living man,
Lest he should lose his finny prey,
And half-concealed along the green copse side,
Or on the shore unmoving calmly spread,
Mimics the maple-stump and core of soil.
Strange fisherman! whose highest aim may soar
To whirl the pickerel on the grassy bank,—
With watery shoe unconscious of a leak,
Or hot rheumatic thrill or opulent gout
That rides the turtle-lord and shrieks his knell,—
Thou seem'st to own this world, and to despise
The lesser fry who dart about thy lines.
So that the brassy court-bell dinging clear,
Or whirr of engine-wheel, or news from wars,
Where o'er Crimea's fields the Tartar horde
Pours a red freshet on the Saxon steel,
Cannot distract thy cane-pole;—not old Greece
And all its pale, departing history,
Or that in later days they dream Rome was,
Or nearer conscious England, Shakspeare's tomb,
Thee worry;—so bite the fish, thy conquest.
Nor think his strange morality, a jest,
Superior beggar! who in Court or Church,
With braying tongue and curt suspicious eye
Demands romantic homage! think him not,
This ragged fisher, 'neath thy empty state.
What more hast thou, Life, Death, the Infinite,
Above unbounded Heaven, beneath old Earth,
And may be less repose of mind than he,
More aching emptiness, not more content,
And far more self-deception.
If it stood
So that the aspiring crowd, who with their pride,
Declare their thoughts are nice, and coax them down,
Lay o'er these fields long roads, proclaim club law,
And summon lesser virtues to their thrones,—
If these were all, if camp and church were all,
And broadcloth might decapitate green baize,
Then truly we were doomed, and life a dungeon.
With these clerks for bolts, into one slumber
All the social train softly might fall,
And creep supine beneath their awful knees,
Adore their wit, and pray the newspaper
To intermit one afternoon, next year, for sports.
But while the fisher dreams, or greasy gunner
Lank with ebon locks shies o'er the fences,
And cracks down the birds, game-law forgot,
And still upon the outskirts of the town,
A tawny tribe denudes the cranberry-bed,—
Or life remains, we still shall sign, that Time
Is not all sold like grains to the forestaller;—
Still that we, even as the Indian did,
Clasp palm to nature's palm, and pressure close
Deal with the infinite.
Thy estimate?
And wherefore is that thine, my moralist?
Or lays her eggs along the sandy shore
The painted Tortoise by thy section one,
Or on the naked oak long by the blow
Of splintering lightning leafless, does our bird
The white-crowned Osprey read thy paper code,
Sauce to his pouts?
And who shall scale the Heaven,
And with his microscopic eye
Discern, wherefore the Laurel pale adorns
The deep-set swamp fenced by declivities
And sombre woods, where the fierce Hen-hawk screams,
And Screech-owls rear from dusky egg the young?
Why not in trim parterres or shaven lawn,
Or the gay sunshine of the grassy meads?
Flowers of humanity! do ye too ope
Your soft attractions in the lonely shade,
Where the deep sphagnum coats a spongy soil,
And the old spruces hung with lichens gray,
Strive to outlast the annals of our race?
Thou didst not carve the flowers, Philosopher!
Thou, nor thy creed, thy saws, or reasoning forms,
Bred in the lazaar-house of Thought, and shade
Of tedious questions, dull and pale, fungi
Of the Understanding, mere type of Fruit.
O rather learn of the lone laurel, learn
To intermit unprofitable shows,
And harbor God's retirement in thy soul.