Starting on the frosty path at dawn,
mother now soaked from the heavy night's dew;
mother has come back after a day of selling
to the place where we lie asleep.

There is no jar of honey on the shelf,
only the gray dust piling,
while the children, too small to work
off the debts, lie stretching here, there.

No one to see, no one
to comprehend when she unties
the starlight she carries back on her forehead,
and shakes loose the moonlight
that clings to her sleeves.

Think of your conception, you'll soon forget
what Plato puffs you up with, all that
‘immortality’ and ‘divine life’ stuff.

Man, why dost thou think of Heaven? Nay
consider thine origins in common clay

's one way of putting it but not blunt enough.

Think of your father, sweating, drooling, drunk,
you, his spark of lust, his spurt of spunk.

No monarch's hand can stay the morning star
Of Liberty. Though, like a miner's lamp
Long years her light burned swart with dungeon damp,
Yet Liberty above the fallen czar
Now flames electric, etching vast and far
Her radiant image on the darkling camp
Of mazed Russia, healing the old cramp
Of tyranny and superstition's scar.
No gulf of earth or tide can stay the increase
Of freedom's lovers. Russia, not our meed
Of tears for your long anguish, nor indeed
Our happy tears for your divine release
Shall speak our love, but this: with souls alive

His hair is gray, and his wrinkled face
Is marked by the fingers of Time,
And his back is bent as he shovels and digs,
Or mixes the water and lime.
But there's an hour that comes each day
When care lifts her darkening veil,
And he sits in the shade of a near-by tree
To open his dinner pail.

It isn't the food he sees in it
Which brings the smile to his face;
It isn't the sandwiches, coffee or pie
That he takes from their regular place;
It isn't the dinner that makes his eyes
Grow dim for a moment and fail;

White sky, over the hemlocks bowed with snow,
Saw you not at the beginning of evening the antlered buck and his doe
Standing in the apple-orchard? I saw them. I saw them suddenly go,
Tails up, with long leaps lovely and slow,
Over the stone-wall into the wood of hemlocks bowed with snow.

Now lies he here, his wild blood scalding the snow.

How strange a thing is death, bringing to his knees, bringing to his antlers
The buck in the snow.
How strange a thing,—a mile away by now, it may be,
Under the heavy hemlocks that as the moments pass

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favourite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And oaths were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,—
Whether or not we find what we are seeking

Design , or chance, makes others wive;
But Nature did this match contrive;
Eve might as well have Adam fled,
As she denied her little bed
To him, for whom Heaven seemed to frame,
And measure out, this only dame.
Thrice happy is that humble pair,
Beneath the level of all care!
Over whose heads those arrows fly
Of sad distrust and jealousy;
Secured in as high extreme,
As if the world held none but them.
To him the fairest nymphs do show
Like moving mountains, topped with snow;
And every man a Polypheme
Does to his Galatea seem;

Little brown brother, oh! little brown brother,
Are you awake in the dark?
Here we lie cosily, close to each other:
Hark to the song of the lark—
“Waken!” the lark says, “waken and dress you;
Put on your green coats and gay,
Blue sky will shine on you, sunshine caress you—
Waken! 'tis morning—'tis May!”

Little brown brother, oh! little brown brother,
What kind of flower will you be?
I'll be a poppy—all white, like my mother;
Do be a poppy like me.
What! you're a sunflower? How I shall miss you
When you're grown golden and high!

At either hand, as far as eye can trace,
Lined with palatial dwellings, loom these heights,
Having old ocean's glory of tints and lights
To murmur mellow rhythms against their base:
Or yet from many a porch of stately grace
Clear down to where the extreme cliff's verge affrights,
Having, through golden days and balmy nights,
Lawn after lawn to outroll its velvet space!

Ah, cruelty of luxury! … Dark for me,
Remembering, musing, all your splendor frowns,
Even here below this brilliant dome of sky!
For pierced with untold pity, I can but see

There are some qualities — some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence — sea and shore —
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name's ‘No More.’
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)