summer

This is the place that I love the best,
A little brown house, like a ground-bird's nest,
Hid among grasses, and vines, and trees,
Summer retreat of the birds and bees.

The tenderest light that ever was seen
Sifts through the vine-made window screen--
Sifts and quivers, and flits and falls
On home-made carpets and gray-hung walls.

All through June the west wind free
The breath of clover brings to me.
All through the languid July day
I catch the scent of new-mown hay.

484

My Garden—like the Beach—
Denotes there be—a Sea—
That's Summer—
Such as These—the Pearls
She fetches—such as Me

574

My first well Day—since many ill—
I asked to go abroad,
And take the Sunshine in my hands,
And see the things in Pod—

A 'blossom just when I went in
To take my Chance with pain—
Uncertain if myself, or He,
Should prove the strongest One.

The Summer deepened, while we strove—
She put some flowers away—
And Redder cheeked Ones—in their stead—
A fond—illusive way—

To cheat Herself, it seemed she tried—
As if before a child
To fade—Tomorrow—Rainbows held

My Loue in her Attyre doth shew her witt,
It doth so well become her:
For eu'ry season she hath dressings fitt,
For Winter, Spring, and Summer.
No Beautie shee doth misse,
When all her Robes are on:
But Beauties selfe shee is,
When all her Robes are gone.

I

Half of the fellow father as he doubles
His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,
Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
To-morrow's diver in her horny milk,
Bisected shadows on the thunder's bone
Bolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
Corrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,
The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,
For half of love was planted in the lost,
And the unplanted ghost.

I never had a title-deed
To my estate. But little heed
Eyes give to me, when I walk by
My fields, to see who occupy.
Some clumsy men who lease and hire
And cut my trees to feed their fire,
Own all the land that I possess,
And tax my tenants to distress.
And if I say I had been first,
And, reaping, left for them the worst,
That they were beggars at the hands
Of dwellers on my royal lands,
With idle laugh of passing scorn
As unto words of madness born,
They would reply

Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea--
call it a philosophy of life, if you will.Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.
Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom
or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought
for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,

Sing not to me a song of beauty bright,
Nor festive scenes of dazzling light;
Nor of gorgeous pageant in palace hall
Begemmed with many a coronal;
But sing to me my memory's care -
The misspent hours fled where - oh where?

Sing not to me of the battlefield,
Nor splintered lance nor of broken shield,
Not of gory plumes once freshly fair,
Not of banners rent nor pennon bare;
But sing to me my memory's care -
The misspent hours fled where - oh where?

Sing not to me of the sea-fight won,

My Loue in her Attyre doth shew her witt,
It doth so well become her:
For eu'ry season she hath dressings fitt,
For Winter, Spring, and Summer.
No Beautie shee doth misse,
When all her Robes are on:
But Beauties selfe shee is,
When all her Robes are gone.

[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two
days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]

Come to me only with playthings now. . .
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .

No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.