Sidney Lanier

Into the woods my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent. Into the woods my Master came,

For ever wave, for ever float and shine Before my yearning eyes, oh! dream of mine Wherein I dreamed that time was like a vine,

As Love will carve dear names upon a tree, Symbol of gravure on his heart to be, So thought I thine with loving text to set

Down mildest shores of milk-white sand, By cape and fair Floridian bay, Twixt billowy pines - a surf asleep on land -

From cold Norse caves or buccaneer Southern seas Oft come repenting tempests here to die; Bewailing old-time wrecks and robberies,

By Sidney and Clifford Lanier. O wish that's vainer than the plash Of these wave-whimsies on the shore:

Once, at night, in the manor wood My Love and I long silent stood, Amazed that any heavens could

"Hey, rose, just born Twin to a thorn; Was't so with you, O Love and Scorn?

Sail fast, sail fast, Ark of my hopes, Ark of my dreams; Sweep lordly o'er the drowned Past,

Young palmer sun, that to these shining sands Pourest thy pilgrim's tale, discoursing still Thy silver passages of sacred lands,

I. O Age that half believ'st thou half believ'st, Half doubt'st the substance of thine own half doubt,

Look off, dear Love, across the sallow sands, And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea, How long they kiss in sight of all the lands.

Als du im Saal mit deiner himmlischen Kunst Beethoven zeigst, und seinem Willen nach Mit den zehn Fingern fuehrst der Leute Gunst,

My crippled sense fares bow'd along His uncompanioned way, And wronged by death pays life with wrong

He's fast asleep. See how, O Wife, Night's finger on the lip of life Bids whist the tongue, so prattle-rife,

My soul is sailing through the sea, But the Past is heavy and hindereth me. The Past hath crusted cumbrous shells

Inscribed to the Memory of John Keats. Dear uplands, Chester's favorable fields, My large unjealous Loves, many yet one -

O Hunger, Hunger, I will harness thee And make thee harrow all my spirit's glebe. Of old the blind bard Herve sang so sweet

To-day the woods are trembling through and through With shimmering forms, that flash before my view, Then melt in green as dawn-stars melt in blue.

What heartache - ne'er a hill! Inexorable, vapid, vague and chill The drear sand-levels drain my spirit low.

"To heal his heart of long-time pain One day Prince Love for to travel was fain With Ministers Mind and Sense.

I. The storm that snapped our fate's one ship in twain Hath blown my half o' the wreck from thine apart.

Life swelleth in a whitening wave, And dasheth thee and me apart. I sweep out seaward: -    be thou brave.

Sail on, sail on, fair cousin Cloud: Oh loiter hither from the sea. Still-eyed and shadow-brow'd,

Written for the Art Autograph during the Irish Famine, 1880. Heartsome Ireland, winsome Ireland, Charmer of the sun and sea,

That air same Jones, which lived in Jones, He had this pint about him: He'd swear with a hundred sighs and groans,

"So pulse, and pulse, thou rhythmic-hearted Noon That liest, large-limbed, curved along the hills, In languid palpitation, half a-swoon

In the South lies a lonesome, hungry Land; He huddles his rags with a cripple's hand; He mutters, prone on the barren sand,

Across the brook of Time man leaping goes On stepping-stones of epochs, that uprise Fixed, memorable, midst broad shallow flows

"If life were caught by a clarionet, And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed, Should thrill its joy and trill its fret,

Were silver pink, and had a soul, Which soul were shy, which shyness might A visible influence be, and roll

So one in heart and thought, I trow, That thou might'st press the strings and I might draw the bow And both would meet in music sweet,

Over the monstrous shambling sea, Over the Caliban sea, Bright Ariel-cloud, thou lingerest:

Written for the "Martha Washington Court Journal". Down cold snow-stretches of our bitter time, When windy shams and the rain-mocking sleet

In the heart of the Hills of Life, I know Two springs that with unbroken flow Forever pour their lucent streams

The innocent, sweet Day is dead. Dark Night hath slain her in her bed. O, Moors are as fierce to kill as to wed!

Fair is the wedded reign of Night and Day. Each rules a half of earth with different sway, Exchanging kingdoms, East and West, alway.

A rose of perfect red, embossed With silver sheens of crystal frost, Yet warm, nor life nor fragrance lost.

I was drivin' my two-mule waggin, With a lot o' truck for sale, Towards Macon, to git some baggin'

Through seas of dreams and seas of phantasies, Through seas of solitudes and vacancies, And through my Self, the deepest of the seas,

Read on the Fourth Commemoration Day, February, 1880. How tall among her sisters, and how fair, - How grave beyond her youth, yet debonair

The storm hath blown thee a lover, sweet, And laid him kneeling at thy feet. But, - guerdon rich for favor rare!

Fine-tissued as her finger-tips, and white As all her thoughts; in shape like shields of prize, As if before young Violet's dreaming eyes

Through all that year-scarred agony of height, Unblest of bough or bloom, to where expands His wandy circlet with his bladed bands

Of fret, of dark, of thorn, of chill, Complain no more; for these, O heart, Direct the random of the will

Dear Mother-Earth Of Titan birth, Yon hills are your large breasts, and often I

Frowning, the owl in the oak complained him Sore, that the song of the robin restrained him Wrongly of slumber, rudely of rest.

Land of the willful gospel, thou worst and thou best; Tall Adam of lands, new-made of the dust of the West; Thou wroughtest alone in the Garden of God, unblest

"Opinion, let me alone: I am not thine. Prim Creed, with categoric point, forbear To feature me my Lord by rule and line.

Sometimes in morning sunlights by the river Where in the early fall long grasses wave, Light winds from over the moorland sink and shiver

I. - Red. Would that my songs might be What roses make by day and night -

The hound was cuffed, the hound was kicked, O' the ears was cropped, o' the tail was nicked, (All.)    Oo-hoo-o, howled the hound.

May the maiden, Violet-laden Out of the violet sea,

The sun has kissed the violet sea, And burned the violet to a rose. O Sea! wouldst thou not better be

Light rain-drops fall and wrinkle the sea, Then vanish, and die utterly. One would not know that rain-drops fell

Time, hurry my Love to me: Haste, haste! Lov'st not good company? Here's but a heart-break sandy waste

From the German of Herder. All faintly through my soul to-day, As from a bell that far away

Well: Death is a huge omnivorous Toad Grim squatting on a twilight road. He catcheth all that Circumstance

Oft seems the Time a market-town Where many merchant-spirits meet Who up and down and up and down

My soul is like the oar that momently Dies in a desperate stress beneath the wave, Then glitters out again and sweeps the sea:

In my sleep I was fain of their fellowship, fain Of the live-oak, the marsh, and the main. The little green leaves would not let me alone in my sleep;

The robin laughed in the orange-tree: "Ho, windy North, a fig for thee: While breasts are red and wings are bold

I knowed a man, which he lived in Jones, Which Jones is a county of red hills and stones, And he lived pretty much by gittin' of loans,

What time I paced, at pleasant morn, A deep and dewy wood, I heard a mellow hunting-horn

At midnight, death's and truth's unlocking time, When far within the spirit's hearing rolls The great soft rumble of the course of things -

If haply thou, O Desdemona Morn, Shouldst call along the curving sphere, "Remain, Dear Night, sweet Moor; nay, leave me not in scorn!"

"Order A. P. Hill to prepare for battle." "Tell Major Hawks to advance the Commissary train." "Let us cross the river and rest in the shade."

By the Eldest Grandson. A rainbow span of fifty years, Painted upon a cloud of tears,

A Story of Christmas Eve. Strange that the termagant winds should scold The Christmas Eve so bitterly!

Swift, through some trap mine eyes have never found, Dim-panelled in the painted scene of Sleep, Thou, giant Harlequin of Dreams, dost leap

Chapter I. Once on a time, a Dawn, all red and bright Leapt on the conquered ramparts of the Night,

Glooms of the live-oaks, beautiful-braided and woven With intricate shades of the vines that myriad-cloven Clamber the forks of the multiform boughs, -

Superb and sole, upon a plumed spray That o'er the general leafage boldly grew, He summ'd the woods in song; or typic drew

From the German of Heine. In the far North stands a Pine-tree, lone, Upon a wintry height;

By Sidney and Clifford Lanier. You, Dinah! Come and set me whar de ribber-roads does meet. De Lord, HE made dese black-jack roots to twis' into a seat.

Our hearths are gone out and our hearts are broken, And but the ghosts of homes to us remain, And ghastly eyes and hollow sighs give token

It was three slim does and a ten-tined buck in the bracken lay; And all of a sudden the sinister smell of a man, Awaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran

"Thou Ship of Earth, with Death, and Birth, and Life, and Sex aboard, And fires of Desires burning hotly in the hold, I fear thee, O! I fear thee, for I hear the tongue and sword

Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain,

Death, thou'rt a cordial old and rare: Look how compounded, with what care! Time got his wrinkles reaping thee

"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead! The Time needs heart - 'tis tired of head: We're all for love," the violins said.

Joust First. I. Bright shone the lists, blue bent the skies,

Ploughman, whose gnarly hand yet kindly wheeled Thy plough to ring this solitary tree With clover, whose round plat, reserved a-field,

O marriage-bells, your clamor tells Two weddings in one breath. SHE marries whom her love compels:

I asked my heart to say Some word whose worth my love's devoir might pay Upon my Lady's natal day.

The Day was dying; his breath Wavered away in a hectic gleam; And I said, if Life's a dream, and Death

To range, deep-wrapt, along a heavenly height, O'erseeing all that man but undersees; To loiter down lone alleys of delight,

In o'er-strict calyx lingering, Lay music's bud too long unblown, Till thou, Beethoven, breathed the spring:

Look where a three-point star shall weave his beam Into the slumb'rous tissue of some stream, Till his bright self o'er his bright copy seem

Presenting a portrait-bust of the author. Since you, rare friend! have tied my living tongue With thanks more large than man e'er said or sung,

(Killed at Surrey C. H., October, 1866.) .    .    .    .    . Dear friend, forgive a wild lament

If spicy-fringed pinks that blush and pale With passions of perfume, - if violets blue That hint of heaven with odor more than hue, -

Oft as I hear thee, wrapt in heavenly art, The massive message of Beethoven tell With thy ten fingers to the people's heart

Died of a cat, May, 1878. I. Trillets of humor, - shrewdest whistle-wit, -

"I saw a sky of stars that rolled in grime. All glory twinkled through some sweat of fight, From each tall chimney of the roaring time

A white face, drooping, on a bending neck: A tube-rose that with heavy petal curves Her stem: a foam-bell on a wave that swerves

"Spring-germs, spring-germs, I charge you by your life, go back to death. This glebe is sick, this wind is foul of breath.

By Sidney and Clifford Lanier. Not long ago a certain Georgia cotton-planter, driven to desperation by awaking each morning to find that the grass had quite outgrown the cotton overnight, and was likely to choke it, in defiance of his lazy freedmen's hoes and ploughs, set the whole State in a laugh by exclaiming to a group of fellow-sufferers: "It's all stuff about Cincinnatus leaving the plough to go into politics FOR PATRIOTISM; he was just a-runnin' from grass!"

Trim set in ancient sward, his manful bole Upbore his frontage largely toward the sky. We could not dream but that he had a soul:

Thou God, whose high, eternal Love Is the only blue sky of our life, Clear all the Heaven that bends above