Bliss Carman

“ With a stein on the table and a cheer for everything.
For we're all frank-and-twenty
When the spring is in the air;
And we've faith and hope a-plenty,
And we've life and love to spare;
And it's birds of a feather
When we all get together,
With a stein on the table and a heart without a care.
For we know the world is glorious,
And the goal a golden thing,
And that God is not censorious
When his children have their fling;
And life slips its tether
When the boys get together,
With a stein on the table in the fellowship of spring. ”

“ Never too bold, and never afraid,
Never heart-whole, never heart-sick,
(These are the things I worship in Dick)
No fidget and no reformer, just
A calm observer of ought and must,
A lover of books, but a reader of man,
No cynic and no charlatan,
Who never defers and never demands,
But, smiling, takes the world in his hands,—
Seeing it good as when God first saw
And gave it the weight of his will for law.
And O the joy that is never won,
But follows and follows the journeying sun,
By marsh and tide, by meadow and stream,
A will-o'-the-wind, a light-o'-dream ”

“ These we know to have been jewels of a radiance so imperishable that the broken gleams of them still dazzle men’s eyes, whether shining from the two small brilliants and the handful of star-dust which alone remain to us, or reflected merely from the adoration of those poets of old time who were so fortunate as to witness their full glory.
For about two thousand five hundred years Sappho has held her place as not only the supreme poet of her sex, but the chief lyrist of all lyrists. Every one who reads acknowledges her fame, concedes her supremacy ”

“ The dream-folk of the gloaming come back to Malyn's door.
The dusk is long and gracious, and far up in the sky
You hear the chimney-swallows twitter and scurry by.
The hyacinths are lonesome and white in Malyn's room;
And out at sea the Snowflake is driving through the gloom.
The whitecaps froth and freshen; in squadrons of white surge
They thunder on to ruin, and smoke along the verge.
The lift is black above them, the sea is mirk below,
And down the world's wide border they perish as they go. ”

“ Till the last fine fleck of the world is finished,
And Freedom shall walk alone by the sea.
"Who is thy heart's lord, who is thy hero?
Bruce or Cæsar or Charlemagne,
Hannibal, Olaf, Alaric, Roland?
Dare as they dared and the deed's done again!
"Here where they come of the habit immortal,
By the open road to the land of the Name,
Splendor and homage and wealth await thee
Of builded cities and bruited fame.
85"Let loose the conquering toiler within thee;
Know the large rapture of deeds begun!
The joy of the hand that hews for beauty
Is the dearest solace beneath the sun." ”

“ Like priests that keep their sombre vigil round a shrine--
Like sombre priests that watch about a glorious shrine.
And then you stepped into the moonlight and laid bare
The wonder of your body to the night, and stood
With all the stars of heaven looking at you there,
As simply as a saint might bare her soul to God--
As simply as a saint might bathe in lakes of prayer--
Stood with the holy moonlight falling on you there
Until I thought that in a glory unaware
I had seen a soul stand forth and bare itself to God--
A saintly soul lay bare its innocence to God. ”

“ The violet haze of Indian summer, before its splendor begins to fade,
When scarlet has reached its breathless moment, and gold the hush
of its glory now,
That were a mightier craft than Titian's, the heart to lift and
the head to bow.
I should be lord of a world of rapture, master of magic and gladness,
too,—
The touch of wonder transcending science, the solace escaping from
line and hue;
I would reveal through tint and texture the very soul of this earth
of ours,
Forever yearning through boundless beauty to exalt the spirit with
all her powers. ”

“ The long sweet April wind may woo the world from grief,
And tell the old tales at my door;
The rainbirds in the rain may plead their far refrain,
In the glad young year at my door;
And in the quiet sun, the silly partridge brood
In the red pine dust by my door;
Yet my squinting runty dwarf, with his lewd ungodly laugh,
Cries “Wolf, wolf, wolf!” at my door.
39 I’m his master (and his slave, with his “Wolf, wolf, wolf!”)
As he squats in the sun at my door.
There morn and noon and night, with his cuddled low delight,
He watches for the wolf at my door. ”

“ Like the clasp and the cling of waters, and the reach and the effort is done,—
There is only the glory of living, exultant to be.
O goodly damp smell of the ground!
O rough sweet bark of the trees!
O clear sharp cracklings of sound!
O life that's a-thrill and a-bound
With the vigor of boyhood and morning, and the noontide's rapture of ease!
Was there ever a weary heart in the world?
A lag in the body's urge or a flag of the spirit's wings?
Did a man's heart ever break
For a lost hope's sake? ”

“ Break into song and blossoming.
But what makes that great goodness start
Within ourselves? When leaps the heart
With gladness, only then we know
Why lovely Nature travails so,—
Why art must persevere and pray
In her incomparable way.
In all the world the only worth
Is human happiness; its dearth
The darkest ill. Let joyance be,
And there is God's sufficiency,—
Such joy as only can abound
Where the heart's comrade has been found.
That was my thought. And then the sea
Broke in upon my revery
With clamorous beauty,—the superb
Eternal noun that takes no verb
But love. ”

“ The world the primal selfhood of its sires,
Its heroes and its lovers and its gods.
So shall Apollo flame in marble fires,
The mien of Zeus suffice before he nods,
So Gautama in ivory dream out
The calm of Time's untrammelled periods,
So Sigurd's lips be in themselves a shout.
Mould us our Shakespeare, sculptor, in the form
His comrades knew, rare Ben and all the rout
That found the taproom of the Mermaid warm
With wit and wine and fellowship, the face
Wherein the men he chummed with found a charm
To make them love him ”

“ Off the freshening sea to windward,
Is it a white tern I hear
Shrilling in the gusty weather
Where the far sea-line is clear?
[Pg 100]
What a morning for departure!
How your blue eyes melt and shine!
Will you watch us from the headland
Till we sink below the line?
I can see the wind already
Steer the scurf marks of the tide,
As we slip the wake of being
Down the sloping world and wide.
I can feel the vasty mountains
Heave and settle under me,
And the Doomkeel veer and shudder,
Crumbling on the hollow sea. ”

“ Conscious only as in a dream of the wet and the dark
And of a form that looms and fades indistinctly
Everywhere out of the night.
O love, how came I here?
Shall I wake at thy side and smile at my dream?
The dream that grips me so hard that I cannot wake nor stir!
O love! O my own love, found but to be lost!
My soul sends over the waters a wild inarticulate cry,
Like a gull's scream heard in the night.
The mist creeps closer. The beacon
Vanishes astern. The sea's monotonous noises
Lapse through the drizzle with a listless, subsiding cadence. ”

“ And white bone teeth and hideous grins, who race
From place to place;
They build great temples to their John-a-nod,
And fume and plod
To deck themselves with gold,
And paint themselves like chattels to be sold,
Then turn to mould.
Sometimes they seem almost as real as I;
I hear them sigh;
I see them bow with grief,
Or dance for joy like an aspen leaf;
But that is brief.
They have mad wars and phantom marriages;
5 Nor seem to guess
There are dimensions still,
Beyond thought’s reach, though not beyond love’s will,
For soul to fill. ”

“ The world shall come unto a council hall,
And in a place of peace pursue the quest
Of wisdom and the finding out of truth,
That there be no more discord upon earth,
But only knowledge, beauty, and good will."
And it was done according to Akbar's word.
There in the wilderness as by magic rose
Futtehpur Sikri, the victorious city,
Of marble and red sandstone among the trees,
A rose unfolding in the kindling dawn.
Palace and mosque and garden and serai,
Bazaars and baths and spacious pleasure grounds,
By favor of Allah to perfection sprang. ”

“ SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF: FOR THE UNVEILING OF MR. PARTRIDGE'S STATUE OF THE POET.
The body is no prison where we lie
Shut out from our true heritage of sun;
It is the wings wherewith the soul may fly.
Save through this flesh so scorned and spat upon,
No ray of light had reached the caverned mind,
No thrill of pleasure through the life had run,
No love of nature or of humankind,
Were it but love of self, had stirred the heart
To its first deed. Such freedom as we find,
We find but through its service, not apart. ”

“ THE MARRING OF MALYN I THE MERRYMAKERS
Among the wintry mountains beside the Northern sea
There is a merrymaking, as old as old can be.
Over the river reaches, over the wastes of snow,
Halting at every doorway, the white drifts come and go.
They scour upon the open, and mass along the wood,
The burliest invaders that ever man withstood.
[Pg 27]
With swoop and whirl and scurry, these riders of the drift
Will mount and wheel and column, and pass into the lift.
All night upon the marshes you hear their tread go by,
And all night long the streamers are dancing on the sky. ”

“ Thronging the twilight, wraith on wraith,
Unlock the door and let me go
To thy dark rival Death!
II O Heart, dear Heart, in this fair house
Why hast thou wearied and grown tired,
45 Between a morning and a night,
Of all thy soul desired?
Fond one, who cannot understand
Even these shadows on the floor,
Yet must be dreaming of dark loves
And joys beyond my door!
But I am beautiful past all
The timid tumult of thy mood,
And thou returning not must still
Be mine in solitude. ”