Ships in Harbour

Excerpt

WOODEN SHIPS

They are remembering forests where they grew,—
The midnight quiet, and the giant dance;
And all the murmuring summers that they knew
Are haunting still their altered circumstance.
Leaves they have lost, and robins in the nest,
Tug of the goodly earth denied to ships,
These, and the rooted certainties, and rest,—
To gain a watery girdle at the hips.
Only the wind that follows ever aft,
They greet not as a stranger on their ways;
But this old friend, with whom they drank and laughed,
Sits in the stern and talks of other days
When they had held high bacchanalias still,
Or dreamed among the stars on some tall hill.

Loosed from her secret moorings,
The thin and silver moon,
Floats wide above these oceans
Of yellow afternoon,—
Who slipped her fragile cables,
And blew to sea too soon.
She bears no bales—but wonder,
Not anything of note:
How should she, being merely
A slender petal-boat?...
But rated in the shipping:
The dearest tramp afloat.

A GARDEN WALL

The Roman wall was not more grave than this,
That has no league at all with great affairs,
That knows no ruder hands than clematis,
No louder blasts than blowing April airs.
Yet, with a grey solemnity it broods,
Above the walk where simple folk go past,
And in its crannies keeps their transient moods,
Holding their careless words unto the last.
The rains of summer, and the creeping vine
That season after season clings in trust,
And shivered poppies red as Roman wine,—
These things at last will haunt its crumbled dust—
Not dreams of empires shattered where they lie,
But children's laughter, birds, and bits of sky.

They stirred uneasily, drew close their capes,
And whispered each to each in awed surprise,
Seeing this figure brood along the shapes,
World tragedies thick-crowding through his eyes.
On either side the ghostly groups drew back
In huddled knots, yielding him way and room,
Their foolish mouths agape and fallen slack,
Their bloodless fingers pointing through the gloom.
Still lonely and magnificent in guilt,
Splendid in scorn, rapt in a cloudy dream,
He paused at last upon the Stygian silt,
And raised calm eyes above the angry stream....
Hand in his breast, he stood till Charon came,
While Hades hummed with gossip of his name.

SYMBOLS

Beautiful words, like butterflies, blow by,
With what swift colours on their fragile wings!—
Some that are less articulate than a sigh,
Some that were names of ancient, lovely things.
What delicate careerings of escape,
When they would pass beyond the baffled reach,
To leave a haunting shadow and a shape,—
Eluding still the careful traps of speech.
And I who watch and listen, lie in wait,
Seeing the cloudy cavalcades blow past,—
Happy if some bright vagrant, soon or late,
May venture near the snares of sound, at last—
Most fortunate captor if, from time to time,
One may be taken, trembling, in a rhyme.

Sensing these sweet renewals through the earth,
Where seed and soil most happily conspire
To furnish forth gay rituals of mirth,
Of shaken leaves and pointed blooms of fire,—
I wonder then that thoughtful man, alone,
Walks darkly and all puzzled with a doubt,
Bewildered, and in truth, half-fearful grown
Of wild, wild earth and April's joyous rout.
When we are dust again with soil and seed,
With happy earth through many a happy Spring,
We yet may learn that joy was all our need,—
That man's long thought is but a broken wing,
Of less account, as things may come to pass,
Than Spring's first robin breasting through the grass.

MARY SETS THE TABLE

She brings such gay and shining things to pass,
With delicate, deft fingers that are learned
In ways of silverware and cup and glass,
Arrayed in ordered patterns, trimly turned;—
And never guesses how this subtle ease
Is older than the oldest tale we tell,
This gift that guides her through such tricks as these,——
And my delight in watching her, as well....