To the self– same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood– red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes! – it writhes! – with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out – out are the lights – out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man’,
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
Ulalume – A Ballad
The skies they were ashen and sober,
The leaves they were crispéd and sere –
The leaves they were withering and sere:
It was night, in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir –
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul– haunted woodland of Weir.
Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul –
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriae rivers that roll –
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the Pole –
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the Boreal Pole.
Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere –
Our memories were treacherous and sere;
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!) –
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here) –
We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul– haunted woodland of Weir.
And now, as the night was senescent
And star– dials pointed to morn –
As the star– dials hinted of morn –
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn –
Astarte’s bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.
And I said: ‘She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs –
She revels in a region of sighs.
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion,
To point us the path to the skies –
To the Lethean peace of the skies –
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes –
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes.’
But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: ‘Sadly this star I mistrust –
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Ah, hasten! – ah, let us not linger:
Ah, fly! – let us fly! – for we must.’
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings till they trailed in the dust –
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust –
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.
I replied: ‘This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sibyllic splendor is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty to– night: –
See! – it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming.
And be sure it will lead us aright –
We surely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night.’
Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom –
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb –
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: ‘What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?’
She replied: ‘Ulalume – Ulalume! –
’T is the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’
Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crispéd and sere –
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: ‘It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed – I journeyed down here! –
That I brought a dread burden down here –
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber –
This misty mid region of Weir –
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul– haunted woodland of Weir.’
Said we, then – the two, then: ‘Ah, can it
Have been that the woodlandish ghouls –
The pitiful, the merciful ghouls –
To bar up our way and to ban it
From the secret that lies in these wolds –
From the thing that lies hidden in these wolds –
Have drawn up the spectre of a planet
From the limbo of lunary souls –
This sinfully scintillant planet
From the Hell of the planetary souls?’
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love –
I and my Annabel Lee –
With a love that the wingéd seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me: –
Yes! – that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we –
Of many far wiser than we –
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: –
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:
And so, all the night– tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea –
In her tomb by the side of the sea.
Oliver Wendell Holmes 1809–94
From Wind– Clouds and Star– Drifts
MANHOOD
I claim the right of knowing whom I serve,
Else is my service idle; He that asks
My homage asks it from a reasoning soul.
To crawl is not to worship; we have learned
A drill of eyelids, bended neck and knee,
Hanging our prayers on hinges, till we ape
The flexures of the many– jointed worm.
Asia has taught her Allahs and salaams
To the world’s children, – we have grown to men!
We who have rolled the sphere beneath our feet
To find a virgin forest, as we lay
The beams of our rude temple, first of all
Must frame its doorway high enough for man
To pass unstooping; knowing as we do
That He who shaped us last of living forms
Has long enough been served by creeping things,
Reptiles that left their footprints in the sand
Of old sea– margins that have turned to stone,
And men who learned their ritual; we demand
To know Him first, then trust Him and then love
When we have found Him worthy of our love,
Tried by our own poor hearts and not before;
He must be truer than the truest friend,
He must be tenderer than a woman’s love,
A father better than the best of sires;
Kinder than she who bore us, though we sin
Oftener than did the brother we are told
We – poor ill– tempered mortals – must forgive,
Though seven times sinning threescore times and ten.
This is the new world’s gospel: Be ye men!
Try well the legends of the children’s time;
Ye are the chosen people, God has led
Your steps across the desert of the deep
As now across the desert of the shore;
Mountains are cleft before you as the sea
Before the wandering tribe of Israel’s sons;
Still onward rolls the thunderous caravan,
Its coming printed on the western sky,
A cloud by day, by night a pillared flame;
Your prophets are a hundred unto one
Of them of old who cried, ‘Thus saith the Lord’;
They told of cities that should fall in heaps,
But yours of mightier cities that shall rise
Where yet the lonely fishers spread their nets,
Where hides the fox and hoots the midnight owl;
The tree of knowledge in your garden grows
Not single, but at every humble door;
Its branches lend you their immortal food,
That fills you with the sense of what ye are,
No servants of an altar hewed and carved
From senseless stone by craft of human hands,
Rabbi, or dervish, brahmin, bishop, bonze,
But masters of the charm with which they work
To keep your hands from that forbidden tree!
Ye that have tasted that divinest fruit,
Look on this world of yours with opened eyes!
Ye are as gods! Nay, makers of your gods, –
Each day ye break an image in your shrine
And plant a fairer image where it stood:
Where is the Moloch of your fathers’ creed,
Whose fires of torment burned for span– long babes?
Fit object for a tender mother’s love!
Why not? It was a bargain duly made
For these same infants through the surety’s act
Intrusted with their all for earth and heaven,
By Him who chose their guardian, knowing well
His fitness for the task, – this, even this,
Was the true doctrine only yesterday
As thoughts are reckoned, – and to– day you hear
In words that sound as if from human tongues
Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past
That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth
As would the saurians of the age of slime,
Awaking from their stony sepulchers
And wallowing hateful in the eye of day!
Henry David Thoreau 1817–62
Great God, I ask Thee for No Meaner Pelf
Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high,
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,
And my life practice more than my tongue saith;
That my low conduct may not show,
Nor my relenting lines,
That I thy purpose did not know,
Or overrated thy designs.
I am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoots,
The law
By which I’m fixed.
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Doth make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup.
Some tender buds were left upon my stem
In mimicry of life,
But ah! the children will not know,
Till time has withered them,
The woe
With which they’re rife.
But now I see I was not plucked for naught,
And after in life’s vase
Of glass set while I might survive,
But by a kind hand brought
Alive
To a strange place.
That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,
And by another year,
Such as God knows, with freer air,
More fruits and fairer flowers
Will bear,
While I droop here.
James Russell Lowell 1819–91
From A Fable for Critics
EMERSON
‘There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on,
Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,
Is some of it pr– No, ’tis not even prose;
I’m speaking of metres; some poems have welled
From those rare depths of soul that have ne’er been excelled;
They’re not epics, but that doesn’t matter a pin,
In creating, the only hard thing’s to begin;
A grass– blade’s no easier to make than an oak;
If you’ve once found the way, you’ve achieved the grand stroke;
; In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter,
But thrown in a heap with a crash and a clatter;
Now it is not one thing nor another alone
Makes a poem, but rather the general tone,
The something pervading, uniting the whole,
The before unconceived, unconceivable soul,
So that just in removing this trifle or that, you
Take away, as it were, a chief limb of the statue;
Roots, wood, bark, and leaves singly perfect may be,
But, clapt hodge– podge together, they don’t make a tree.
‘But, to come back to Emerson (whom, by the way,
I believe we left waiting), – his is, we may say,
A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range
Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange;
He seems, to my thinking (although I’m afraid
The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),
A Plotinus– Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist
And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek– by– jowl coexist;
All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got
To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what;
For though he builds glorious temples, ’tis odd
He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.
’Tis refreshing to old– fashioned people like me
To meet such a primitive Pagan as he,
In whose mind all creation is duly respected
As parts of himself – just a little projected;
And who’s willing to worship the stars and the sun,
A convert to – nothing but Emerson.
So perfect a balance there is in his head,
That he talks of things sometimes as if they were dead;
Life, nature, love, God, and affairs of that sort,
He looks at as merely ideas; in short,
As if they were fossils stuck round in a cabinet,
Of such vast extent that our earth’s a mere dab in it;
Composed just as he is inclined to conjecture her,
Namely, one part pure earth, ninety– nine parts pure lecturer;
You are filled with delight at his clear demonstration,
Each figure, word, gesture, just fits the occasion,
With the quiet precision of science he’ll sort ’em,
But you can’t help suspecting the whole a post mortem.
There are persons, mole– blind to the soul’s make and style,
Who insist on a likeness ’twixt him and Carlyle;
To compare him with Plato would be vastly fairer,
Carlyle’s the more burly, but E. is the rarer;
He sees fewer objects, but clearlier, truelier,
If C.’s as original, E.’s more peculiar;
The Penguin Book of American Verse Page 10