A Group of Poems Read online

  Snow Dust

  The way a crow

  Shook down on me The dust of snow

  From a hemlock tree Has given my heart

  A change of mood And saved some part

  Of a day I had rued.

  The Onset

  Always the same when on a fated night

  At last the gathered snow lets down as white

  As maybe in dark woods and with a song It shall not make again all winter long Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,

  I almost stumble looking up and round,

  As one who overtaken by the end Gives up his errand and lets death descend Upon him where he is, with nothing done

  To evil, no important triumph won

  More than if life had never been begun.

  Yet all the precedent is on my side:

  I know that winter death has never tried

  The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap In long storms an undrifted four feet deep As measured against maple, birch, and oak;

  It cannot check the Peeper's silver croak;

  And I shall see the snow all go down hill In water of a slender April rill That flashes tail through last year's withered brake

  And dead weeds like a disappearing snake.

  Nothing will be left white but here a birch And there a clump of houses with a church.

  A Star in a Stone-Boat

  Never tell me that not one star of all

  That slip from heaven at night and softly fall

  Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

  Some laborer found one faded and stone cold,

  And saving that its weight suggested gold,

  And tugged it from his first too certain hold,

  He noticed nothing in it to remark.

  He was not used to handling stars thrown dark

  And lifeless from an interrupted arc.

  He did not recognize in that smooth coal

  The one thing palpable besides the soul

  To penetrate the air in which we roll.

  He did not see how like a flying thing

  It brooded ant-eggs, and had one large wing,

  One not so large for flying in a ring,

  And a long Bird of Paradise's tail,

  (Though these when not in use to fly and trail

  It drew back in its body like a snail);

  Nor know that he might move it from the spot--

  The harm was done: from having been star shot

  The very nature of the soil was hot

  And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,

  Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain

  Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.

  He moved it roughly with an iron bar,

  He loaded an old stone-boat with the star

  And not, as you might think, a flying car,

  Such as even poets would admit perforce

  More practical than Pegasus the horse

  If it could put a star back in its course.

  He dragged it through the ploughed ground at a pace

  But faintly reminiscent of the race

  Of jostling rock in interstellar space.

  It went for building-stone, and I as though

  Commanded in a dream forever go

  To right the wrong that this should have been so.

  Yet ask where else it could have gone as well,

  I do not know--I cannot stop to tell:

  He might have left it lying where it fell.

  From following walls I never lift my eye

  Except at night to places in the sky

  Where showers of charted meteors let fly.

  Some may know what they seek in school and church,

  And why they seek it there; for what I search

  I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;

  Sure that though not a star of death and birth,

  So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth

  To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth,--

  Though not, I say, a star of death and sin,

  It yet has poles, and only needs a spin

  To show its worldly nature and begin

  To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm

  And run off in strange tangents with my arm

  As fish do with the line in first alarm.

  Such as it is, it promises the prize

  Of the one world complete in any size

  That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

  Misgiving

  All crying, "We will go with you, O Wind,"

  The foliage follow him, leaf and stem, But a sleep oppresses them as they go,

  And they end by bidding him stay with them. Since ever they flung abroad in spring,

  The leaves have promised themselves this flight, Who now would fain seek sheltering wall,

  Or thicket, or hollow place for the night. And now they answer the summoning blast

  With an ever vaguer and vaguer stir, Or, at utmost, a little reluctant whirl

  That drops them no further than where they were. I only hope that when I am free,

  As they are free, to go in quest Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life,

  It may not seem better to me to rest.

 

 

  A Group of Poems [lit], A Group of Poems

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