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O Father
Abram, I can never rest,
Here in thy bosom in the
whitest heaven,
Where love blooms on through
days without an even;
For up through all the paradises
seven,
There comes a cry from some fierce, anguished breast.
|
5 |
A cry that comes from out of hell’s dark night,
A piercing cry of one in
agony,
That reaches me here in
heaven white and high;
A call of anguish that doth
never die;
Like dream-waked infant wailing for the light.
|
10 |
O Father Abram, heaven is love and peace,
And God is good; eternity
is rest.
Sweet would it be to lie
upon thy breast
And know no thought but
loving to be blest—
Save for that cry that never more will cease.
|
15 |
It comes to me above the angel-lyres,
The chanting praises of
the Cherubim; [Page 25]
It comes between my upward
gaze and Him,
All-blessed Christ,—a
voice from the vague dim,
“O Lazarus, come and ease me of these
fires.”
|
20 |
“O Lazarus, I have called thee all these
years,
It is so long for
me to reach to thee,
Across the ages
of this mighty sea,
That loometh dark,
dense, like eternity;
Which I have bridged by anguished prayers and tears.
|
25 |
“Which I have bridged by knowledge of
God’s love,
That even penetrates
this anguished glare;
A gleaming ray,
a tremulous star-built stair,
A road by which
love-hungered souls may fare
Past hate and doubt, to heaven and God above.”
|
30 |
So calleth it ever upward unto me.
It creepeth in through heaven’s
golden doors;
It echoes all along the
sapphire floors;
Like smoke of sacrifice,
it soars and soars;
It fills the vastness of eternity.
|
35 |
Until my sense of love is waned and dimmed,
The music-rounded spheres
do clash and jar:
No more those spirit-calls
from star to star,
The harmonies that float
and melt afar,
The belts of light by which all heaven is rimmed.
[Page 26]
|
40 |
No more I hear the beat of heavenly wings,
The seraph chanting in my
rest-tuned ear;
I only know a cry, a prayer,
a tear,
That rises from the depths
up to me here;
A soul that to me suppliant leans and clings.
|
45 |
O, Father Abram, thou must bid me go
Into the spaces of the deep
abyss;
Where far from us and our
God-given bliss,
Do dwell those souls that
have done Christ amiss;
For through my rest I hear that upward woe.
|
50 |
I hear it crying through the heavenly night,
When curvéd, hung
in space, the million moons
Lean planet-ward, and infinite
space attunes
Itself to silence, as from
drear gray dunes
A cry is heard along the shuddering light,
|
55 |
Of wild dusk-bird, a sad, heart-curdling cry,
So comes to me that call
from out hell’s coasts;
I see an infinite shore
with gaping ghosts;
This is no heaven, with
all its shining hosts;
This is no heaven until that hell doth die.
|
60 |
So spake the soul of Lazarus, and from thence,
Like new-fledged bird from
its sun-jewelled nest,
Drunk with the music of
the young year’s quest; [Page 27]
He sank out into heaven’s
gloried breast,
Spaceward turned, toward darkness dim, immense.
|
65 |
Hellward he moved like radiant star shot out
From heaven’s blue
with rain of gold at even,
When Orion’s train
and that mysterious seven
Move on in mystic range
from heaven to heaven,
Hellward he sank, followed by radiant rout.
|
70 |
The liquid floor of heaven bore him up,
With unseen arms, as in
his feathery flight
He floated down toward the
infinite night;
But each way downward, on
the left and right,
He saw each moon of heaven like a cup
|
75 |
Of liquid, misty fire that shone afar
From sentinel towers of
heaven’s battlements;
But onward, winged by love’s
desire intense,
And sank, space-swallowed,
into the immense,
While with him ever widened heaven’s bar.
|
80 |
’Tis ages now long-gone since he went out,
Christ-urged, love-driven,
across the jasper walls,
But hellward still he ever
floats and falls,
And ever nearer come those
anguished calls;
And far behind he hears a glorious shout. [Page
28]
|
85 |
—————
|
|
|
|
Storm-beaten
cliff, thou mighty cape of thunder;
Rock-Titan of the north, whose feet the waves beat
under;
Cloud-reared, mist-veiled, to all the world a wonder,
Shut out in thy wild solitude asunder,
O Thunder Cape, thou mighty
cape of storms.
|
5 |
About thy base, like woe that naught assuages,
Throughout the years the wild lake raves and rages;
One after one, time closes up weird pages;
But firm thou standest, unchanged, through the ages,
O Thunder Cape, thou awful
cape of storms.
|
10 |
Upon thy ragged front, the storm’s black anger,
Like eagle clings, amid the elements’ clangor;
About thee feels the lake’s soft sensuous
languor;
But dead alike to loving and to anger,
Thou towerest bleak, O mighty
cape of storms.
|
15 |
Year in, year out, the summer rain’s soft
beating,
Thy front hath known, the winter’s snow and
sleeting;
But unto each thou givest contemptuous greeting.
These hurt thee not through seasons fast and fleeting;
O proud, imperious, rock-ribbed
cape of storms. [Page 29]
|
20 |
In August nights, when on thy under beaches,
The lake to caverns time-weird legends teaches;
And moon-pearled waves to shadowed shores send speeches.
Far into heaven thine awful darkness reaches,
O’ershadowing night;
thou ghostly cape of storms.
|
25 |
In wild October, when the lake is booming
Its madness at thee, and the north is dooming
The season to fiercest hate, still unconsuming,
Over the strife, thine awful front is looming;
Like death in life, thou
awful cape of storms.
|
30 |
Across thy rest the wild bee’s noonday humming,
And sound of martial hosts to battle drumming,
Are one to thee—no date knows thine incoming;
The earliest years belong to thy life’s summing,
O ancient rock, thou aged
cape of storms.
|
35 |
O thou so old, within thy sage discerning,
What sorrows, hates, what dead past loves still-burning,
Couldst thou relate, thine ancient pages turning;
O thou, who seemest ever new lores learning,
O unforgetting, wondrous
cape of storms.
|
40 |
O tell me what wild past lies here enchanted;
What borders thou dost guard, what regions haunted?
What type of man a little era flaunted, [Page
30]
Then passed and slept? O tell me thou undaunted,
Thou aged as eld, O mighty
cape of storms.
|
45 |
O speak, if thou canst speak, what cities sleeping,
What busy streets, what laughing and what weeping,
What vanished deeds and hopes like dust up-heaping,
Hast thou long held within thy silent keeping?
O wise old cape, thou rugged
cape of storms.
|
50 |
These all have passed, as all that’s living
passes;
Our thoughts they wither as the centuries’
grasses,
That bloom and rot in bleak, wild lake morasses:
But still thou loomest where Superior glasses
Himself in surge and sleep,
O cape of storms.
|
55 |
And thou wilt stay when we and all our dreaming
Lie low in dust. The age’s last moon-beaming
Will shed on thy wild front its final gleaming;
For last of all that’s real and all that’s
seeming,
Thou still wilt linger,
mighty cape of storms. [Page 31]
|
60 |
—————
|
|
|
|
Out
in a world of death, far to the northward lying,
Under the sun and the moon,
under the dusk and the day;
Under the glimmer of stars and the purple of sunsets
dying,
Wan and waste and white,
stretch the great lakes away.
Never a bud of spring, never a laugh of summer,
|
5 |
Never
a dream of love, never a song of bird;
But only the silence and white, the shores that
grow chiller and dumber,
Wherever the ice-winds sob, and the griefs of winter
are heard.
Crags that are black and wet out of the gray lake
looming,
Under the sunset’s
flush, and the pallid, faint glimmer of dawn;
|
10 |
Shadowy,
ghost-like shores, where midnight surfs are booming
Thunders of wintry woe over
the spaces wan.
Lands that loom like spectres, whited regions of
winter,
Wastes of desolate woods,
deserts of water and shore;
A world of winter and death, within these regions
who enter,
|
15 |
Lost
to summer and life, go to return no more. [Page
32]
Moons that glimmer above, waters that lie
white under,
Miles and miles of lake
far out under the night;
Foaming crests of waves, surfs that shoreward thunder,
Shadowy shapes that flee,
haunting the spaces white.
|
20 |
Lonely hidden bays, moon-lit, ice-rimmed, winding,
Fringed by forests and crags,
haunted by shadowy shores;
Hushed from the outward strife, where the mighty
surf is grinding
Death and hate on the rocks,
as sandward and landward it roars.
|
|
—————
|
|
|
|
Alone
I pause in morning dream
Upon the border of the stream,
Where all the summer melts away,
In mists of wood and sky and bay;
And voices of the morning wake
|
5 |
In whispers
from the distant lake.
With dews down fallen from the night,
The alders scintillate in light.
Reflected in the river pool, [Page 33]
The woods bend restful, sweet and cool.
|
10 |
And
hidden in their heart away,
A thrush sends forth his roundelay,
Echo’d in the airs above,
Filling all heaven and earth with love.
Above me in the darkling wood,
|
15 |
Through
dusks of morning solitude,
Drifting in many a watery moon,
The river chants a sleepy tune.
Far out in front, in shining curves,
Where, sun-cuirassed, his soft tide swerves,
|
20 |
And
all the dreams of morning brood,
His shores wind, mirroring in his flood.
With half-shut eyes I muse and see
This morning picture dreamily.
Then throbbeth up within my heart
|
25 |
(Which
seemeth nature’s counterpart),
A wish to stay and dream for aye,
The morning by this river-bay,
To stay forever and forget
The new desire and old regret,
|
30 |
The
doubt, the sorrow, and the curse,
The passions that our spirits nurse;
Never to dream in morning’s fires [Page
34]
The ghosts of vanished, dead desires;
Never to read in kindling skies
|
35 |
The
sadness of reproachful eyes:
Refined, removed of all earth’s dross,
Its strife, its sorrow, and its loss,
To be a little child for aye,
Mist-cradled in this river-bay.
|
40 |
The dream is sweet but all too soon,
Is lost its vision, hushed its rune;
For up along the river-wall
I hear my comrades gaily call:
The dream is broken, life, reclaims,
|
45 |
To darker
fancies, sterner aims.
I leave my restful river bay,
And worldward once more wend my way. [Page
35]
|
|
—————
|
|
|
|
There
are crags that loom like specters
Half under the sun and the
mist;
There are beaches that gleam and glisten,
There are ears that open to listen
And lips held up to be kissed.
|
5 |
There are miles and miles of waters
That throb like a woman’s
breast,
With a glad harmonious motion
Like happiness caught at
rest,
As if a heart beat under
|
10 |
In
love with its own glad rest;
Beating and beating forever,
Outward to east and to west.
There are forests that kneel forever,
Robed in the dreamiest haze
|
15 |
That
God sends down in the summer
To mantle the gold of its
days,
Kneeling and leaning forever
In winding and sinuous bays.
There are birds that like smoke drift over,
|
20 |
With
a strange and bodeful cry, [Page 36]
Into the dream and the distance
Of the marshes that southward
lie,
With their lonely lagoons and rivers,
Far under the reeling sky.
|
25 |
—————
|
|
How Spring Came to the Lake Region.
|
|
No passionate
cry came over the desolate places,
No answering call from iron-bound
land to land;
But dawns and sunsets fell on mute, dead faces,
And noon and night, death
crept from strand to strand.
Till love breathed out across the wasted reaches,
|
5 |
And
dipped in rosy dawns from desolate deeps;
And woke with mystic songs the sullen beaches,
And flamed to life the pale,
mute, death-like sleeps.
Then the warm south, with amorous breath inblowing,
Breathed o’er breast
of wrinkled lake and mere;
|
10 |
And
faces white from scorn of the north’s snowing,
Now rosier grew to greet
the kindling year. [Page 37]
|
|
—————
|
|
|
|
The
lake comes throbbing in with voice of pain
Across these flats, athwart
the sunset’s glow.
I see her face, I know her voice again,
Her lips, her breath, O
God, as long ago.
To live the sweet past over I would fain,
|
5 |
As
lives the day in the red sunset’s fire,
That all these wild, wan marshlands now would stain,
With the dawn’s memories,
loves and flushed desire.
I call her back across the vanished years,
Nor vain—a white-armed
phantom fills her place;
|
10 |
Its
eyes the wind-blown sunset fires, its tears
This rain of spray that
blows about my face. [Page 38]
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