* * *

Forbore the ant hill, shunned to tread,

In mercy, on one little head

* * *

Borrow Urania’s subtile wings

Chasing with words fast-flowing things:

Cling to the sacred fact, nor try

To plant thy shrivelled pedantry

On the shoulders of the sky.

* * *

The comrade or the book is good

That puts me in a working mood:

Unless to thought be added will,

Apollo is an imbecile.

What parts, what truth, what fancies shine!

– Ah! but I miss the just design.

* * *

Is the pace of nature slow?

Why not from strength to strength

From miracle to miracle

And not as now with retardation

As with sprained foot

* * *

Why honor the new men

Who never understood the old

* * *

Think not the gods receive thy prayer

In ear & heart, but find it there.

* * *

Inspired we must forget our books,

To see the landscape’s royal looks.

* * *

Upon a rock yet uncreate

Amid a Chaos inchoate

An uncreated being sate

Beneath him rock

Above him cloud

And the cloud was rock

And the rock was cloud

The rock then growing soft & warm

The cloud began to take a form

A form chaotic vast & vague

Which issued in the cosmic egg

Then the being uncreate

Upon the egg did incubate

And thus became an incubator

And of the egg did allegate

And thus became an alligator

And the incubate was potentate

But the alligator was potentator

LONGER POEMS

WOODNOTES I

1.

For this present, hard

Is the fortune of the bard,

Born out of time;

All his accomplishment,

From Nature’s utmost treasure spent,

Booteth not him.

When the pine tosses its cones

To the song of its waterfall tones,

He speeds to the woodland walks,

To birds and trees he talks:

Cæsar of his leafy Rome,

There the poet is at home.

He goes to the river-side, –

Not hook nor line hath he;

He stands in the meadows wide, –

Nor gun nor scythe to see;

With none has he to do,

And none seek him,

Nor men below,

Nor spirits dim.

Sure some god his eye enchants:

What he knows nobody wants.

In the wood he travels glad,

Without better fortune had,

Melancholy without bad.

Planter of celestial plants,

What he knows nobody wants;

What he knows he hides, not vaunts.

Knowledge this man prizes best

Seems fantastic to the rest:

Pondering shadows, colors, clouds,

Grass-buds, and caterpillar-shrouds,

Boughs on which the wild bees settle,

Tints that spot the violets’ petal,

Why Nature loves the number five,

And why the star-form she repeats:

Lover of all things alive,

Wonderer at all he meets,

Wonderer chiefly at himself, –

Who can tell him what he is?

Or how meet in human elf

Coming and past eternities?

2.

And such I knew, a forest seer,

A minstrel of the natural year,

Foreteller of the vernal ides,

Wise harbinger of spheres and tides,