Classic Poem

I

First S TEPS

A COUNTRY village, night …
A child stealing from home
Along a lone plank sidewalk,
Where stars and the eyes of cattle
Stared through the darkness at him;
And where the whisper of trees
Was conscience—till he had reached
His father's store, and fallen
Sobbing, though triumphant,
Into his father's arms.

II

T HE U NSEEN

What was the meaning of it,
‘Total eclipse of the sun,’
Whispered about with terror?
A shadow fell on the apples
That scented the noonday orchard:
And the child, too, was lifted
To gaze through a smoked glass at it.
And though he only saw
The glass—not the moon's ghost
Haunting the sun's vastness—
Invisible awes swept him.

III

B IRTH

He swung, on the porch, in the rain,
At his grandmother's, near.
They had sent him there; for the doctor
Had said he would bring him a sister
From a secret hollow stump
Somewhere in the owl-kept woods.
They came for him, and showed him
A little red sightless thing
So new to the world that he fled—
Being too near, himself,
To the Nescience whence it came.

IV

F IRE

With stolen matches they did it,
He and his elder brother
And the boy in the house beyond them.
The hayloft door was open,
And climbing they kindled the hay,
For the peril of seeing it burn—
Kindled and beat it out
Each time—till sudden the air
Was a frenzy of flame about them.
How many a time since then
Has he played with the peril of fire!

V

T RAVEL

He went at last on a journey
With one of his father's drivers—
Miles and miles, high-seated
On a hogshead of tobacco.
All day the waggon bore them
By fields and boggy bottoms
To the market—the end of the world.
And the next day, returning,
Through saddened woods at twilight,
He heard the whippoorwill,
And knew the first lone longings
For things never to be.

VI

W OMAN

A travelling photographer,
Tenting, came to the village,
And with him, glad and golden,
His little daughter of four.
The boy, swept by a charm
As old as the garden of Eden,
Forgot the promised boon
Of the camera's image of him
For his image fondly shaped,
And henceforth to be sought,
In the shining eye of an Eve.

VII

C RIME

Election day—August,
The town thronged with the country,
And first-plucked water-melons
Red to the heart with ripeness—
Money to spend—and so
A saloon door flung open,
A rind flicked at a passer,
A curse, a blade flashing,
Then blood, the stain of the ages,
On stones that seemed to the boy
The altar of murdered Abel.

VIII

T HE G RAVE

From a negro hut glowing
With supper fire at twilight,
A mournful melody floated
To the boy, ‘I may be gone!
I too, O Lord, to-morrow,
In cold earth may be lying,
Down in a lonesome graveyard
O Lord … how long!’
The first sad witchery was it
Of death to the boy. … ‘How long!’

IX

C HURCH

He had only heard its bell,
A far sweet quaver, calling
Across the night or the morning;
Or seen its shuttered whiteness,
With legs of brick to stand on,
And bonneted with a cupulo—
Like the spinster of his dread.
They took him—and he heard …
And, years thereafter, hearkened.
But now he only worships
Outside it, like the bell.

X

S CHOOL

‘Two times two are four’ …
Did the grass and the trees know figures?
‘Three times four are twelve’ …
Had the brook to count its ripples?
He did not know: and yet
So wise to him were the words
It murmured, that all books
For many a Spring thereafter
Seemed but as prisons to punish
Eyes made for the hills and heavens.

XI

G LORY

A sorghum mill, grinding
To the back of the horse that turned it
The boy lifted, exultant—
A dream come true at last.
Grinding, grinding, grinding …
Till he tired of the height's loneness,
Of glory—that is only
The going around in a circle
Above the talk and the laughter.
Tired … and yet through the years
Has mounted his dream, to grind.

XII

T RANSPLANTED

He was to move to the city!
The garden fruits were gathered
And sold; house things uprooted.
The stage-coach, made of mud
And creaks, took the boy in it—
He little knew how far!
The train, a marvellous terror,
Swept the woods backward from it.
The boat, on the flood of the River,
Paused—and the boy walked forth
From its ark to an earth of strangeness.

XIII

N OSTALGIA

Houses, houses, houses!
And one, lonely among them,
His father's, reached in the twilight.
The boy wanted a barn
And cows tinkling the meadow;
But instead came clamour of fire-bells
And of fire-engines shrieking …
Then a new hungering knowledge
Of things irrevocable,
Whose name is Nevermore.

XIV

C ASTE

He sat on his gate gazing …
And the church steeple opposite
Was the highest thing in the world.
But the Sunday-arrayed children,
Who passed in snowy linen,
With ties and sashes flowing,
Laughed at his rustic dress.
He sat … and the curse of caste
That has shrivelled all church steeples
Shrunk his too—and sullied
All high wonder in him.

XV

P OETRY

A rainy day and the room
Of the Public School crowded.
Faces strange and alien
From lands of the Pole and Teuton.
A teacher pale and fragile.
The name of the ‘great’ Longfellow.
Then words, ‘The vine still clings
To the mouldering wall.’ Sadness:
And the poet in him aching
For the first time to be born.

XVI

C HILD -L OVE

At the corner she lived, the girl
Who had taken his part when laughter
At the village clothes he wore
Was tossed to him by the others.
Beautiful, lithe and free
She was, brave and ready
To follow him into perils.
And he gave her his heart—nor knows
To-day if the love of a child,
A youth, or a man, is divinest.

XVII

T RAGEDY

Summer days—and the day
For a picnic into the woods.
The tinkling mule-car took them,
The girl, joy-bright, beside him.
And all day he was her hero,
While daringly she followed—
Leaping, as they returned,
Once and again from the car,
Leaping—at last to fall
Beneath blind wheels—that taught him
How little love is to death.

XVIII

T HE B ROKEN H EART

They took her away in the hearse,
While he stood by, forgotten—
Yet nevermore to forget.
The water-plug on the corner,
That once was a seat of dreams,
Where he had waited for her,
Was left unclaimed to the others.
For now he had found the way
To the immemorial pools
Of healing—the heart's pools
Of Silence and Solitude.

XIX

G OD

He ran far in the moonlight,
Alone, gladly alone,
Playing at ‘Hare and Hounds’;
And after the hounds were baffled,
Turned, moon-quieted, home.
He sank on the grass and his gaze
Floated far up the steeple,
Up, then endlessly on—
Till sudden it touched Infinity,
Unfathomable—and God.