The last of afternoons, the evening hours, for many a year hisregular custom,
In his great arm chair by the window seated,
(Sometimes, indeed, through half the day,)
Watching the coming, going of the vessels, he mutters to himself —
And now the close of all:
One struggling outbound brig, one day, baffled for long — cross-tides
and much wrong going,
At last at nightfall strikes the breeze aright, her whole luck veering,
And swiftly bending round the cape, the darkness proudly entering,
cleaving, as he watches,
“She’s free — she’s on her destination” — these the last words — when
Jenny came, he sat there dead,
Dutch Kossabone, Old Salt, related on my mother’s side, far back.
The Dead Tenor
As down the stage again,
With Spanish hat and plumes, and gait inimitable,
Back from the fading lessons of the past, I’d call, I’d tell and own,
How much from thee! the revelation of the singing voice from thee!
(So firm — so liquid-soft — again that tremulous, manly timbre!
The perfect singing voice — deepest of all to me the lesson — trial
and test of all:)
How through those strains distill’d — how the rapt ears, the soul of
me, absorbing
Fernando’s heart, Manrico’s passionate call, Ernani’s, sweet Gennaro’s,
I fold thenceforth, or seek to fold, within my chants transmuting,
Freedom’s and Love’s and Faith’s unloos’d cantabile,
(As perfume’s, color’s, sunlight’s correlation:)
From these, for these, with these, a hurried line, dead tenor,
A wafted autumn leaf, dropt in the closing grave, the shovel’d earth,
To memory of thee.
Continuities
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form — no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space — ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold — the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.
Yonnondio
A song, a poem of itself — the word itself a dirge,
Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night,
To me such misty, strange tableaux the syllables calling up;
Yonnondio — I see, far in the west or north, a limitless ravine, with
plains and mountains dark,
I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men, and warriors,
As flitting by like clouds of ghosts, they pass and are gone in the
twilight,
(Race of the woods, the landscapes free, and the falls!
No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:)
Yonnondio! Yonnondio! — unlimn’d they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fades — the cities, farms, factories fade;
A muffled sonorous sound, a wailing word is borne through the air
for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.
Life
Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man;
(Have former armies fail’d? then we send fresh armies — and fresh again;)
Ever the grappled mystery of all earth’s ages old or new;
Ever the eager eyes, hurrahs, the welcome-clapping hands, the loud
applause;
Ever the soul dissatisfied, curious, unconvinced at last;
Struggling to-day the same — battling the same.
Going Somewhere
My science-friend, my noblest woman-friend,
(Now buried in an English grave — and this a memory-leaf for her dear sake,)
Ended our talk — ”The sum, concluding all we know of old or modern
learning, intuitions deep,
“Of all Geologies — Histories — of all Astronomy — of Evolution,
Metaphysics all,
“Is, that we all are onward, onward, speeding slowly, surely bettering,
