Voices of Unseen Spirits

From "Taliesin: a Masque"

Here falls no light of sun nor stars;
No stir nor striving here intrudes;
No moan nor merry-making mars
The quiet of these solitudes.

Submerged in sleep, the passive soul

Is one with all the things that seem; Night blurs in one confusèd whole Alike the dreamer and the dream.

O dwellers in the busy town!

For dreams you smile, for dreams you weep. Come out, and lay your burdens down!

Come out; there is no God but Sleep.

Sleep, and renounce the vital day;
For evil is the child of life.
Let be the will to live, and pray

To find forgetfulness of strife.

Beneath the thicket of these leaves

No light discriminates each from each.
No Self that wrongs, no Self that grieves
Hath longer deed nor creed nor speech.

Sleep on the mighty Mother's breast!
Sleep, and no more be separate!
Then, one with Nature's ageless rest,
There shall be no more sin to hate.

Faith and Fate

To horse, my dear, and out into the night!
Stirrup and saddle and away, away!
Into the darkness, into the affright,
Into the unknown on our trackless way!
Past bridge and town missiled with flying feet,
Into the wilderness our riding thrills;

The gallop echoes through the startled street,
And shrieks like laughter in the demoned hills;
Things come to meet us with fantastic frown,
And hurry past with maniac despair;
Death from the stars looks ominously down—
Ho, ho, the dauntless riding that we dare!

East, to the dawn, or west or south or north!
Loose rein upon the neck of Fate and forth!

An Ode in Time of Hesitation

(After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted negro regiment, the 54th Massachusetts.)

I

Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made

To thrill the heedless passer's heart with awe,
And set here in the city's talk and trade
To the good memory of Robert Shaw,
This bright March morn I stand,

And hear the distant spring come up the land;
Knowing that what I hear is not unheard.
Of this boy soldier and his negro band,
For all their gaze is fixed so stern ahead,
For all the fatal rhythm of their tread.

The land they died to save from death and shame
Trembles and waits, hearing the spring's great name,
And by her pangs these resolute ghosts are stirred.

II

Through street and mall the tides of people go
Heedless; the trees upon the Common show
No hint of green; but to my listening heart
The still earth doth impart

Assurance of her jubilant emprise,

And it is clear to my long-searching eyes
That love at last has might upon the skies.
The ice is runneled on the little pond;
A telltale patter drips from off the trees;
The air is touched with southland spiceries,
As if but yesterday it tossed the frond
Of pendent mosses where the live-oaks grow
Beyond Virginia and the Carolines,

Or had its will among the fruits and vines
Of aromatic isles asleep beyond

Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

III

Soon shall the Cape Ann children shout in glee,
Spying the arbutus, spring's dear recluse;
Hill lads at dawn shall hearken the wild goose
Go honking northward over Tennessee;
West from Oswego to Sault Sainte-Marie,
And on to where the Pictured Rocks are hung,
And yonder where, gigantic, willful, young,
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates,
With restless violent hands and casual tongue
Moulding her mighty fates,

The Lakes shall robe them in ethereal sheen;
And like a larger sea, the vital green

Of springing wheat shall vastly be outflung
Over Dakota and the prairie states.
By desert people immemorial

On Arizonan mesas shall be done

Dim rites unto the thunder and the sun;
Nor shall the primal gods lack sacrifice
More splendid, when the white Sierras call
Unto the Rockies straightway to arise

And dance before the unveiled ark of the year,
Sounding their windy cedars as for shawms,
Unrolling rivers clear

For flutter of broad phylacteries;

While Shasta signals to Alaskan seas

That watch old sluggish glaciers downward creep,
To fling their icebergs thundering from the steep,
And Mariposa through the purple calms
Gazes at far Hawaii crowned with palms

Where East and West are met,

A rich seal on the ocean's bosom set

To say that East and West are twain,

With different loss and gain:

The Lord hath sundered them; let them be sundered yet.

IV

Alas! what sounds are these that come

Sullenly over the Pacific seas,

Sounds of ignoble battle, striking dumb
The season's half-awakened ecstasies?

Must I be humble, then,

Now when my heart hath need of pride?

Wild love falls on me from these sculptured men;