The Penguin Book of American Verse

  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;