Edwina Stanton Babcock

“ And the curve and waft of a gull’s white wing was solace enough for me;
And I had signals from tall green grass and the light of sand on the beach,
But I heard the laughter of girls together,
Young and vibrant with sunlit weather,
Laughter of skyward reach.
And hurrying by with ardent paces,
I saw anticipance on their faces ...
Wisdom no age can teach. ”

“ Yet in these valleys on these sun-pooled moors,
Where turf roads wind to fountains of the sky,
I have seen Souls freed by the out-of-doors,
To find out here, their liberate ecstasy.
8
Perhaps these gemmy berries on the slope,
Perhaps these dryads of the circling hedge
Write runes of health and happiness and hope,
Or limn new truth in sand and rippled sedge.
For those who tread these wastes of Autumn’s reach
Find dream and vision on the wind-washed lea;
Thoughts broaden, there is fire in the speech,
Minds stir beyond their wonted sophistry. ”

“ Trees that shall say new things to listening souls.
O Unseen Gardener of the World-tree, boughs
Ripe with strange star-fruit dropping in the fields{28}
Of vast Space-gardens—give, Thou, me to learn
In simple ways, how, after this life’s dream
I may accept new growth, even to loss
Of this life-consciousness—to help Thy plan!
Become, for Thee, a dried-up flower cup,
A butterfly unwingéd, broken-plumed,
Even a blinded, helpless, light-killed moth—
So that I nourish forth new growing things
In the star branchéd garden of deep Time! ”

“ And the shore bites back;
When the night’s like a cave
Full of black things howling
And the hurricanes rave
With the whistle buoy yowling.
There’s a rusty trusty boat that never makes a port,
There’s a scrubby bold boat that never finds a lee,
The blunt little lightship,
The iron clad lightship,
The weather-wise lightship,
Anchored out at sea! ”

“ On his dim path the radiance has stirred,
Deep in a dream he shrines his knowledge; still
Keeping his thorny ways, intent he goes,
Knowing the Hidden that infinitely knows!
{26} BEACON LIGHTS.
When I am cowardly, sick of the fight,
Dumb for the right word, nerveless for deeds that dare,
Blaze up in my heart, square little Brant Point Light;
Light me a broad path starred with a burnished flare!
If I am tossing on a sea of doubt,
And have no harbor, no fair shore to know,
Sankaty, like an angel, spread your great wings out,
Headland and coastward light, give me your glow! ”

“ Who have no doubts, no clamorings and no fears,
But faithful to the clumsy guise they wear,
Walk patient down their plodding driven years.
While we in princedoms of our God’s own form,
Wistfully pause in their oblivioned light,
Longing to stay with uncouth beasts tonight;
For that their calm would keep our spirits warm
And soothe us back to the glad human norm.
Would gladly share with them their sacred things,{68}
Their freedom from our restless questionings,
So we won quietude from stress and storm.
Mingling our vigil with their Burden-Speech,
Their revery. ”

“ Walled with red berries of the alder bough;
Stark monkish trees slant on the windblown space,
And gulls dip to the bay or open meadow place.
3
This is a world gone wild with wine of life,
Tossed in bright cups on frost enholied air;
Here Autumn swings the west wind’s winnowing scythe,
Or amber shod strays down the coral flare. ”

“ The new-new beds, the cleanness and trimness and all,
I looked for the ghost in the mirror that shone in the hall;
I looked for her round the curve of the varnished stair,
I searched and called for her, wistfully, everywhere....
“And what will you do, dear ghost,” was my whispered cry,
“And where will you live your shadowed revery?
Where do ghosts go when no longer they have a home,
Do they pile their effects in a van and begin to roam? ”

“ Look now around you, free your too-white hands;
Comfort these hearts that burn. What must we do?
We have no Paul, no Moses, only you.
Then help us to be honest. From all lands,
Priests! Men! Arise! Acclaim! The new bread give;
The Bread by which we shall not die, but live! ”

“ No human light throws silver on their shore;
Their crystal Sea’s unmargined like the great
Love which they know, and rest in evermore.
I thought—no light can show the flowers they bear,
Their heaven-looks, the tender things they say ”

“ The branch of strange berries, its long bough trailed
On a wave that broke where the sunlight paled.
Red toppling balls on the white sea-crest
That heaved it up from the shining West,
And bore it straight to my sobbing breast.
The Branch of Strange Berries sailed forth to me
For the sign of Land and fecundity!
Shuddering, staggering as one dead,
I heard them.... “Land.... Land.... Land....” they said. ”

“ Dungeoned, thou Horror, in creative cells of desire,
Ringed in the widening rings of my aspirate fire—
I, your Creator, by steady implacable strife,
Shall give men and women a lovelier thing to call ‘Life.’”
{86} SIGNAL FIRES.
Everywhere we have sought Thee—questioned, wondered,
Everywhere marked Thy beauty and Thine hour;
Now if at last no sacrifice is brought Thee,
Dost Thou believe we doubt Thine awful Power? ”

“ That lop the boughs from off full-blooded trees.
Under the falling leaves the Gardener stands,
Unshocked to see the tulip and the rose,
Red haw, brown seed-pod, lily staff and leaf—
All lying dead, extinguished, passionless.
The Gardener smiles to see the adventurous bee
Lying cold-killed under a broken stalk;
Smiles on a battered moth with frosted wing.
He spreads black clods of compost on the beds,
Sifts ashes all around the roots of trees,
Lops off, cuts back, prunes, digs away and kills.
Knowing how, out of the ruin and wreck,
Pure glowing things will come ”

“ The clarity, the cleanness and the soul;
Here’s laying on of hands, here things reshape
Into the round equilibrated Whole.
Here all is light and line, this grey fence strings
Its silver loops in limpid meadow lights;
Or drops its bars to infinite wanderings
By glimmering swamps on brake-illumined nights. ”

“ The corn is stacked, the pumpkins’ on the roof,
Globule on grey their ponderous green and gold,
The laughing gull wantons its wild reproof,
The water’s blue is strangely laced with cold;
Vermilion berries coral the black-hedged pond,
Around the shore the chilly foam-patch quivers,
The sweet fern shrivels up its copper frond,
The owl flaps heavily, the farmland shivers. ”

“ The challenges to spirit skyward soar,
The core of stalwart things is hidden here;
The white shoals lift like new creative shore,
The Sound’s salt breath comes like a stirrup cup,
Till every wanderer takes his burden up. ”

“ The brooks have closed their waters like windows that gleam....
I am a lost dryad!{63}
And so I wander in smiling pride of my state,
Purer than woodland things that will have none of my pureness;
Wiser than human things that do not reck of my wisdom ”

“ We will not cowardly say Thou hast no feeling,
Will not believe Thou hidest back of the years;
Or hast no Word for rapturous revealing—
Art dumb like us; like us, art veiled in tears.
No. We believe ”

“ Walking the lonely beach
Listening for that hidden inner word
That they might teach.
All lonely men the centuries send down
To master human things
Must have been strengthened by this monotone
To evener ponderings. ”

“ And lead to things no Seeker ever saw.
We sing the Mind’s high dream, the imperious will,
That makes no music out of greedy strife
But seizes silver pipes, that sharp and shrill,
Call men to leap and seize on Very Life.... ”

“ Cleverly we re-paint them,
Cleverly decorate and give them quite new hinges,
And open them up and brick them in and hold them,
All that is good in them, away from ruin....{24}
Yet, all year long the old ideas are walking,
All year long the old ideas are talking,
Talking through our every act and glance,
In spite of all our efforts to be new and useful,
In spite of all our efforts, we go acting
By the rickety old ideas,
The shapeless, bulged ideas,
The mildewed, damp ideas
That have died. ”

“ For though you pause and double, turn again
And seem to curve and hesitate, your moods
Are human moods; tired women and worn men
Follow in dream your errant solitudes.
{96} 13
They come for shriving by the hedgerow things
Where life, obedient to great moving laws
Brilliantly dies, or in birth scatterings
Writes mystical trail with myriad seeds and spores;
Where the dried weeds with hoary tresses blown
Quiver in brittle faith and stand serene,
Where in a tidal sunshine, every cone
Smells of sea-tree-branch, balsam-broomed and clean.
14
Solitude on the moors and to one’s self—! ”

“ And pleasant sense as of home and things familiar.
I go wandering forever, alien and speechless,
Chance that broke the bark of the tree is formless and vanished;
Now the healed heart of my home no longer opens—
I am a lost dryad!
{64} PATTRAN.
Does the Moon love best
When the trees write fortunes on the West? ”

“ Believer in things I had not seen) .
Judge of me, God, that I never quailed,
But that as through hell and horror we sailed,
“Sail on.... Sail on....” I said.
Judge of me, God, who, when I cried
For sign, sent the carved stick overside,
And the Branch of Strange Berries that rode the tide.
And pardon my sins, for I was, I ween,
True to the Country I had not seen....
Then, Jesu ... judge of those whose speed
To those new fair shores was confident greed,
(Now that of courage there was no need) ;
Who called me “Master” and called me “Friend,”
When the bitter doubting was at an end.... ”

“ Yea, all around Cathedral Vast of sea
Blue vaults and green that cave the island’s tides
Curled toppling Uncials of Eternity
Illumining the beaches’ glistening sides;
New consecrate the sand’s communion shell
With every moonlight chrism and sunrise swell.{103}
Clean Island, cloistered ways unspoiled by man,
The thorn trees cloaked like prophets, and the reeds
Organ with murmurings of furtive Pan;
The spirits’ intense strange music, lost from creeds,
Lost far from love—lost in all modern places;
Lost from the reading by all human faces,
Isolate—dumb ”

“ To distance and to space and all things far.
A little narrow street enshrines her now,
But through the world her planet pathways are
Blazed with her name; the constellate gates un-pbar
To those who, following, her star-cairns know.
Woman, who walked with Science to mark the lights
Along dark ways, thy luminous steps are dim;
Rapt on ethereal roads of satellites:
Art gazing still through space beyond the brim
Of sparkling nebula meadows to the nights
Of some New Radiance o’er still farther Rim?
{16} PROPHECY MADE GOING “DOWN ALONG.”
Don’t tell, but I think there’s a miracle today ”

“ And they plained of the wearying wars of men,
Quivering.... “Give us our world again.
Give us the youth that shall clasp us close,
Give us the heart of the perfumed rose,
Life is our gift while the world is young ”

“ And lovers wander all the starry night.
We turned and faced each other and we said:
“The poets pour us wine—they do not give us bread.”
For these are singers of dear vanished things,
The things that once have been but may not be;
We sit with close shut lips; un-minstrelled, we ”

“ And the great black shoulder of the wood....
(Only these things I know,
Said the Old Mill very low.)
YOUTH
Then Old Mill, since no dream you grind me
A dream of my own I will surely find me!
But as Youth weaves and catches the threads
Of a hundred human joys and dreads,
Youth sees the Old Mill standing there,
High on the hill with the West aflare ...
And dark as it looms on the sky, it seems
The Old Mill steadily turns out dreams—.
“All’s well,” grinds the grave Old Mill;
“All’s well,” grinds the brave Old Mill ”

“ Whom we so fear. And as I looked
Closer upon him, lo! I felt
Myself unfearing. “Death,” I asked,
“Why is it that no man hath read,
Nor understood thee?” Then he gazed
With that dark glory of his eyes,
Answering: “If men could know
How I yearn toward them; if they saw
The things that I would show them; Yea,
Could trust, accept, come to me kind,
Like little children! It were well!
’Twere well, indeed, if this could be.
“I am afraid of Life,” said Death, and smiled at me.
{54} ON THE JETTY.
Still the old rage, O Sea? ”

“ That sail the winter hills where snowy trees are draped.
So I, whose muscles and whose blood are bound
To this faint-hearted scheme of life, do pray
Those that come after me, that they shall found
Some life that does not sever night and day;
So when God’s fleet sweeps up the midnight skies,
His starry ships will hail unsleeping eyes.
{71} THE BRANCH OF STRANGE BERRIES.
(An Old Man Tells a Story to Some Boys.) ”

“ At all events, she moved ... and her shadowy store
Of belongings exists for the world no more....
That house by the road, more correct, I think, than most,
Has lost its chief charm.... It no longer has a ghost.
{14} SONG OF SCARLET.
The black-alder berries are thick this year,
(It’s going to be cold) ;
Their scarlet trinkets, their necklaces bold
Hang on the shivering wind-swept year,
(It’s going to be cold) .
Now, the Commons are bare and the leaves whirl around,
(It’s going to be cold) ;
Like little brown sparrows flicked over the around
(It’s going to be cold) ”

“ Humble and full of swank
Level they rank
To us they all seem just
Handfuls of human dust
Even and blank.
And this I’ve come to hold
One may be quite an old
Aristocrat;
But when one comes to die
Things are Democracy
And that is that!
{114} CHRISTMAS EVE ON NANTUCKET. ”

“ Where Sankaty Light stands guard with its solemn flare?”
So he stood all night, on those dark hours of the earth,
Calling to men slogging by to heroic ends,
[A] Shouting: “Nantucket,” little grey town of his birth;
Palely he stood there, anxious as one who sends
S. O. S. scanning the night for friends.
“Nantucket!” he hailed—but the river of men rolled by,
Every eye set grim towards its Mecca of bloody drench ”