WAPENTAKE

TO ALFRED TENNYSON

Poet!  I come to touch thy lance with mine;
  Not as a knight, who on the listed field
  Of tourney touched his adversary’s shield
  In token of defiance, but in sign
Of homage to the mastery, which is thine,
  In English song; nor will I keep concealed,
  And voiceless as a rivulet frost-congealed,
  My admiration for thy verse divine. 
Not of the howling dervishes of song,
  Who craze the brain with their delirious dance,
  Art thou, O sweet historian of the heart! 
Therefore to thee the laurel-leaves belong,
  To thee our love and our allegiance,
  For thy allegiance to the poet’s art.

THE BROKEN OAR
Once upon Iceland’s solitary strand
  A poet wandered with his book and pen,
  Seeking some final word, some sweet Amen,
  Wherewith to close the volume in his hand. 
The billows rolled and plunged upon the sand,
  The circling sea-gulls swept beyond his ken,
  And from the parting cloud-rack now and then
  Flashed the red sunset over sea and land. 
Then by the billows at his feet was tossed
  A broken oar; and carved thereon he read,
  “Oft was I weary, when I toiled at thee”;
And like a man, who findeth what was lost,
  He wrote the words, then lifted up his head,
  And flung his useless pen into the sea.

THE CROSS OF SNOW

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
  A gentle face—­the face of one long dead—­
  Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
  The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light. 
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
  Never through martyrdom of fire was led
  To its repose; nor can in books be read
  The legend of a life more benedight. 
There is a mountain in the distant West
  That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
  Displays a cross of snow upon its side. 
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
  These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
  And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

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BIRDS OF PASSAGE

FLIGHT THE FOURTH

CHARLES SUMNER

  Garlands upon his grave,
  And flowers upon his hearse,
And to the tender heart and brave
  The tribute of this verse.

  His was the troubled life,
  The conflict and the pain,
The grief, the bitterness of strife,
  The honor without stain.

  Like Winkelried, he took
  Into his manly breast
The sheaf of hostile spears, and broke
  A path for the oppressed.

  Then from the fatal field
  Upon a nation’s heart
Borne like a warrior on his shield!—­
  So should the brave depart.