1894


We've drunk to the Queen -- God bless her! --
We've drunk to our mothers' land;
We've drunk to our English brother,
(But he does not understand);
We've drunk to the wide creation,
And the Cross swings low for the mom,
Last toast, and of Obligation,
A health to the Native-born!

They change their skies above them,
But not their hearts that roam!
We learned from our wistful mothers
To call old England 'home';
We read of the English skylark,
Of the spring in the English lanes,

ROLL forth, my song, like the rushing river,
   That sweeps along to the mighty sea;
God will inspire me while I deliver
   My soul of thee!

Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
   Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
That once there was one whose veins ran lightning
   No eye beheld.

Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,
   How shone for him, through his griefs and gloom,
No star of all heaven sends to light our

Out of the darkness, fretted sometimes in its sleeping,
Jets of sparks in fountains of blue come leaping
To sight, revealing a secret, numberless secrets keeping.

Sometimes the darkness trapped within a wheel
Runs into speed like a dream, the blue of the steel
Showing the rocking darkness now a-reel.

And out of the invisible, streams of bright blue drops
Rain from the showery heavens, and bright blue crops
Surge from the under-dark to their ladder-tops.

And all the manifold blue and joyous eyes,

With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots' broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones.

The weight of cool, of imperceptible dust
That came from nothing and to nothing came
Is light within the earth and on the air.
The change that so renews itself is just.
The enormous, sundry platitude of death
Is for these bones, bees, trees, and leaves the same.

When the moon was horned the mother died,
And the child pulled at her hand and knee,
And he rubbed her cheek and loudly cried:
'O mother, arise, give bread to me!'
But the pine tree bent its head,
And the wind at the door-post said:
'O child, thy mother is dead !'
The sun set his loom to weave the day;
The frost bit sharp like a silent cur;
The child by her pillow paused in his play:
'Mother, build up the sweet fire of fir !'
But the fir tree shook its cones,
And loud cried the pitiful stones:

I have a dream -- a dreadful dream --
A dream that is never done.
I watch a man go out of his mind,
And he is My Mother's Son.

They pushed him into a Mental Home,
And that is like the grave:
For they do not let you sleep upstairs,
And you aren't allowed to shave.

And it was not disease or crime
Which got him landed there,
But because They laid on My Mother's Son
More than a man could bear.

What with noise, and fear of death,
Waking, and wounds and cold,
They filled the Cup for My Mother's Son

Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.

Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,
that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,
lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,
and need barter ourselves for nothing.

FAIR OTAHEITE , fondly blest
By him who long was doom'd to brave
The fury of the Polar wave,
That fiercely mounts the frozen rock
Where the harsh sea-bird rears her nest,
And learns the raging surge to mock--
There Night, that loves eternal storm,
Deep and lengthened darkness throws,
And untried danger's doubtful form
Its half-seen horror shews!
While Nature, with a look so wild,
Leans on the cliffs, in chaos pil'd,
That here the aw'd, astonish'd mind
Forgets, in that o'erwhelming hour,
When her rude hands the storms unbind

For Grace Bulmer Bowers


From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,

The sunset melts upon the Nile,
The stony desert glows,
Beneath heaven's universal smile,
One burning damask rose;
And like a Peri's pearly boat,
No longer than a span,
Look, faint on fiery sky afloat,
The Moon of Ramadân.

Our boat drifts idly with the Stream,
Our boatmen ship the oar;
Vistas of endless temples gleam
On either topaz shore;
And swimming over groves of Palm,
A crescent weak and wan,
There steals into the perfect calm
The Moon of Ramadân.

All nature seems to bask in peace