Is creation’s heart,

Wash with wine those eyes of thine

To know the hidden part.

Wine is translated wit,

Wine is the day of day,

Wine from the veiled secret

Tears the veil away.

* * *

Go out into Nature and plant trees

That when the southwind blows

You shall not be warm in your own limbs

But in ten thousand limbs & ten million leaves

Of your blossoming trees of orchard & forest

* * *

Pale Genius roves alone,

No scout can track his way,

None credits him till he have shown

His diamonds to the day.

Not his the feaster’s wine,

Nor land, nor gold, nor power,

By want & pain God screeneth him

Till his elected hour.

Go, speed the stars of Thought

On to their shining goals; –

The sower scatters broad his seed,

The wheat thou strew’ st be souls.

* * *

Burn your literary verses.

Give us rather the glib curses

Of the truckmen in the street,

Songs of the forecastle

To the caboose.

* * *

Intellect

Gravely broods apart on joy,

And truth to tell, amused by pain

* * *

The civil world will much forgive

To bards who from its maxims live

But if, grown bold, the poet dare

Bend his practice to his prayer,

And, following his mighty heart

Shame the time, & live apart,

Vae solis!

I found this, –

That of goods I could not miss

If I fell within the line,

Once a member, all was mine,

Houses, banquets, gardens, fountains,

Fortune’s delectable mountains;

But if I would walk alone,

Was neither cloak nor crumb my own

* * *

Mask thy wisdom with delight,

Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.

The lesson which the Muses say

Was sweet to hear & to obey.

He loved to round a verse, & play,

Without remoter hope, or fear,

Or purpose, than to please his ear.

And all the golden summer-time

Rung out the hours with happy rhyme.

Meantime every cunning word

Tribes & ages overheard:

Those idle catches told the laws

Holding nature to her Cause.

* * *

Roomy Eternity

Casts her schemes rarely,

And an aeon allows

For each quality and part

In the multitudinous

And many-chambered heart.

* * *

Terminus

For thought & not praise;

Thought is the wages

For which I sell days,

Will gladly sell ages,

And willing grow old,

Deaf, & dumb, & blind, & cold,

Melting matter into dreams,

Panoramas which I saw

And whatever glows or seems

Into substance into Law

* * *

More sweet than my refrain

Was the first drop of April rain

* * *

O Boston city lecture-hearing,

O unitarian God-fearing,

But more, I fear, bad men-revering;

Too civil by half, thine evil guest

Makes thee his byword & his jest,

And scorns the men that honeyed the pest,

Piso & Atticus, with the rest.

Thy fault is much civility,

Thy bane, respectability.

And thou hadst been as wise, & wiser,