Amos Niven Wilder

“ Leaving the human stubble charred on every hand.
Far as the eye can see outside the village bounds
⁠The dead lie heaped in mounds
Awaiting burial like the slaughtered hordes
⁠Upon some vaster battle-field.
The refuse wagons make their daily rounds;
⁠The bodies rattle on the boards,—
Young forms yet apt for living's hurtless strife,
Lithe weapons still for eager souls to wield,
⁠And children's bodies swift to play,
Still unworn vestures strangers to decay ”

“ That generation unto generation still
⁠⁠Contrives to will.
Errors, obscenities and passions breed,
⁠With germs of violence rife,
As in a culture fitted to that end
⁠⁠In human life,
Nor need man to their breeding his impulsion lend. ”

“ By their sublime attractiveness they win
The world from its fatality of sin,
⁠And from the common lot
⁠Desiring no exemption,
Their blamelessness with mighty power is fraught
⁠When joined with pain,
⁠For so Redemption,
Redemption lifts its mighty cross again!
⁠So swerved
By love's vast leverage from its ancient grooves
And changeless cycles of eternal wars,
⁠The planet moves
To grander revolutions among softer stars
And skies unblasted by the beams of Mars,
To placid periods under milder rays,
Pacific seasons, august nights and days. ”

“ That pales the clouds, snow-laden, and blanches all the night,
As though in place of moon and stars some spectral satellite.
Cast glamor on the earth and floods of violet light.
The wraithlike landscape glimmers, valley, lake and hill,
Unutterably patient! Intolerably still! ”

“ With passions not of earth, all dimly sensed.
There saw we dæmons fighting in the sky
And battles in aerial mirage,
The feverish Véry lights proclaimed them by,
Their tramplings woke our panting, fierce barrage.
Their tide of battle, hither, thither driven,
Filled earth and sky with cataclysmic throes,
Our strife was but the mimicry of heaven's
And we the shadows of celestial foes. ”

“ And spurn the gods to whom peace bids me bow.
And I remember ancient loyalties
And ardent ships of hope that have been wrecked
On sordid shores, and brooding much on these,
Prospect grows pallid before retrospect,
And all the hallowed passions of the years,
And all ideal longings, and dear pain,
And dedicated griefs, and secret tears,
Sweep back to overpower me again.
... Yet all that we have loved is part of us,
And those great hours are builded in our lives,
That vanished dream is yet the heart of us
And through the present still for utterance strives. ”

“ The wind scampers ahead and back, jumps up at you and tugs at your clothes, for all the world like a terrier. Farm houses, fields, fences and poles vanish behind, while clouds and the distance race one up the road. The exercise sends the blood coursing through the veins, and the dizzy eyes behold the skies swirling and rushing as though composed of matter. Stop a minute and see the fields and skies whirling along while you steady yourself. ”

“ Leading men surely towards an unseen mark.
When shall we see their like on earth again,
Blown like the seed of some celestial flower
By tempests from the very skirts of Power
Across the interplanetary main;
Living and loving air and light and sod,
Finding in the dark universe a home,
Transfiguring all they touch where'er they roam,
And hearing close at hand the warm heartbeat of God? ”

“ The ancient rings lie ever at the core,
⁠And England's image sleeps in English blood.
A. N. Wilder.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1928.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1993, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 29 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”

“ We started as they bade us like the simples of the past,
And but for you who blazoned out the virtue in our cause
We also would have died the fools of avarice and caste.
You saved us from that holocaust renewed once more to greed,
You saved us from the blind and beastly grapple in the mists,
You called us to a battle on the heights, we saw you lead
The faithless and despairing hosts to the eternal lists ”

“ Of all the earth belong,—our dearth, our crime
He overlooked, and in an hour sublime
Led us out to the eternal battle-fields
Where through the ages His own sword He wields
To prove us worthy of our country's prime. ”

“ The wrinkles are left behind to multiply between the covers of text-books. Behind are the clenched teeth, the strained eyes, the nervous movement of the fingers through the moist hair, and all the other symptoms and concomitants of the Unnatural Process. Behind me is the Aristophanean laughter of a jaded Minerva from above the book-case; the madhouse laughter of Father Time on the mantel, where he spills gold that becomes dust and ashes ”

“ Transmuted imperfection into art
And built up glory from relinquished dreams
And made of clay memorial to stilled prayer,
Giving our silted graves power in the light,
Our dusted mouths voice in the upper air.
Yet every building shall be razed, nor shall
There rest one stone upon another placed
By our primeval days, for in the time
Of consummation such communities
Of worship, and such habitations
Shall rise, that all our most ethereal spires,
Our flame-transmuted monuments shall seem
But lead to gold or clay to alabaster ”

“ E'en the wild beasts forgo their lust for blood,
Fleeing in panic through a blazing wood. . . . .
Mysterious is the lot of common lives
⁠⁠Lost in the mass,
Anonymous as leaves or blades of grass
In the thick verdure of humanity,
And inexistent to the powers that be ”

“ We are but dreamers in the womb of time,⁠
Impinged on through the play of circumstance
By outer majesties, and in the dance
Of hours and life's illusory pantomime
Shadowed and brooded o'er by the sublime;
Blind fæti nourished through the world of chance,
Our matrix and our prison, we advance
From dream to dream as all flesh since its prime. ”

“ Wherein a holier race shall walk in peace,
Sharers, by faith acquired through our stress,
In treasuries of splendour past our guess,
In whose deep hearts our pain and joy shall live,
As in their airiest temples, their sublimest towers
There shall rest token of our humbler shafts
In line and curve inbuilt into their art,
Our hope and aim ingrown into their faiths. ”

“ There is no ebb in nature without answering flow.
⁠When summer's tide of green
⁠Retreats to depths unseen
And earth is bare beneath the usurping snow,
None doubt that from its unplumbed levels deep
⁠The tides of spring will creep
To submerge the world again in emerald seas.
So shall life's flood retire from its estuaries. ”

“ A marred lot from the potter's wheel is tossed;
Divining though a million lives are scrapped
And flung to rot like carrion on the plain,
Yet human life is islanded and lapped
In tides of quiet that transcend all pain. ”

“ Who feels not where the battle-work is grim
A cloud of witnesses, a tidal wave
Of earth's best passion brim along the front,
Weighing upon him and exalting him,
Leaving the world at ebb to make him brave. ”

“ From rifts and rents in nature's worn disguise,
The sackcloth vesture that God's splendour drapes
Crumbles to ashes, and before our eyes
The earth takes fire with beauty and its shapes
Glow in apocalypse that gains the skies. ”

“ To know that genii showed themselves those months
Often, scaling horizons, bent on tasks
Out of proportion to these times of peace,
And that great prodigies of ministrants
In aural loveliness would brood at night,
Extraordinary comforters, come down
To cope with like extraordinary pain. ”

“ O we who live must envious grow
To think on you—and you—and you—
We left back on that great plateau
Of passion and of faith, for to
That height again we may not climb
Who are descended into time. ”

“ The time-washed stones her inner impulse own,
The star-cleansed pinnacles are lucent grown
Touched to still, unconsuming fire by dint
Of time's slow conflagration that transmutes
To mist and flame the gross earth of the brutes. ”

“ Their newer ventures, sports, high-hearted games,
And comrade-covenants in new crusades,
And forays past the veil, and eager raids
Across forbidden borders, new surprise,
And new unguessed, cerulean ecstasies?
So some companion who has faced the trail
And topped the summits with his comrades oft,
But now condemned to halt within the vale,
Watches the gallant company aloft
Upon the towering hills pass out of sight
With mutual shout and dear encouragement,
And mourns their love eclipsed by new delight,
And longs to follow by the way they went. ”

“ That we should live when you have died?
Wherein less worthy or less true
That unto us it was denied
So great a gift as life to give?
Wherein more immature than you
That you could die and we must live? ”

“ It gives me pause to think the laws
Of death are of such adamant
That towers that win high heaven's applause
And pinnacles where angels chant
And stones that guard an age extant
Perish like sticks and straws. ”

“ The noisy years, in gestured prophecy.
So shall the centuries invade the years,
So shall the great Dead and Unborn be brought
To life to summon from the quick, their peers,
And weight our age with import past all thought. ”

“ United Love to man's extremest ill.
3.
O Thou Whom men call Father, Who dost taste
An infinite pain in infinite ways, and share
⁠Each pang we bear,
Pierced through with sorrow at the abysmal waste
⁠Wherewith the creature
Gropes his way on in age-long strife with nature,
⁠How shall these know of Thee
Whose years were circled with malignancy? ”

“ Stirring the old-gold of the leaves of fall
By pillared beeches, tarnished, blue, and tall,
And splashed with argent sunlight, where at last,
While this one weeps and that one sadly smiles,
They learn compassion for the atrocious past. ”

“ Cast by the Church upon the atrocious years;
Untamed and best beloved daughter of God,
Adorable in passion, grand in tears,
Sublime in victory! how God must long
To win you wholly who are so much His. ”

“ Against a threatening cosmos! crucified,
Hang naked and alone in careless scorn,
Though all the slaves of power sweep in rage
Against him; for unto his riven side
He summons champions from another bourne. ”

“ BURIED ABROAD.
Wide roll the waves between us and our dead
And silence muffles every questing cry,
A world of traffic thwarts each yearning sped,
Empires of sun and shadow sundering lie.
Islanded in a radiance of the past,
Sunk in the deepening flood-tide of the days,
Wrenched from our care, where they were anchored fast,
By the ancient harsh oblivion of the race ”

“ Chaos thrust forth his fingers o'er the land,
And as when seas encroach upon a strand,
Moved, an immeasurable flood of Night,
Across the spring, while men and beasts in flight
Avoided the dark terror close at hand ”

“ Outwearing strife, evoking gentler times.
The carillons above the wretched years,
Above the squalid roofs, the unearthly choir,
The choral hours showering high desire
On men's dull hearts, dark vision, and deaf ears. ”

“ Faints, and the lingering dead pause to mark how
The thoughts of many hearts shall be revealed,
Jealous of all their blood-bought testament.
The world's an amphitheatre; Versailles
'Twixt quick and dead dictates a century. ”

“ They cling about our hems tenaciously;
⁠Their cries unnerve our ardour.
⁠We needs must take account
That to earth's farthest cape man is his brother's warder.
Man has one soul and where aught human's ill
Its far contagion blasts each member still ”

“ A war of genii and a spectre strife,
Enveloped in an Æschylean shade.
·····
The dead are gone and we are left alive
And those incredible and awful days
Are now no more. Nay, e'en their memory
Grows faded, and the fates that gave us them
Seem jealous that we should retain so much
As of forbidden knowledge. ”