American literature -- Massachusetts; American poetry -- 20th century
As they who go away
In flush of youth
May come quite worn and gray
And bringing naught but ruth—
So, when the strife shall cease,
And when she comes at last,
When all the armies vast
Shall at her feet
Kneel down to greet
Thrice welcome Peace,
This world will be so changed
(So many dear ones dead,
So many friends estranged,
So many blessings fled,
So many wonted ways forever barred,
So many coming days forever marred)
That then
She truly comes not back again—
She, the Peace we knew.
Yet how we long for her!
How ardently we yearn
For her return!
SYLVESTER BAXTER
TWO MOODS FROM THE HILL
I.
YOUTH
I love to watch the world from here, for all
The numberless living portraits that are drawn
Upon the mind. Far over is the sea,
Fronting the sand, a few great yellow dunes,
A salt marsh stumbling after, rank and green,
With brackish gullies wandering in between,
All this from the hill.
And more: a clump of dwarfed and twisted cedars,
Sentinels over the marsh, and bright with the sun
A field of daises wandering in the wind
As though a hidden serpent glided through,
A broken wall, a new-plowed field, and then
The dusty road and the abodes of men
Surrounding the hill.
How small the enclosure is wherein there lives
Each phase and passion of life, the distant sail
Dips in the limpid bosom of the sea,
From that far place to where in state the turf
Raises a throne for me upon the hill,
Each little love and lust of a living thing
Can thus be compassed in a rainbow ring
And seen from the hill.
II.
AGE
Why did I build my cottage on a hill
Facing the sea?
Why did I plan each terraced lawn to slope
Down to the deep blue billowy breast of hope,
Surging and sweeping,
laughing and leaping,
Tumbling its garments of foam upon the shore,
Rustling the sands that know my step no more,
I should have found a valley, deep and still,
To shelter me.
There flows the river, and it seems asleep
So far away,
Yet I remember whip of wave and roar
Of wind that rose and smote against the oar,
Smote and retreated,
Proud but defeated,
While I rejoiced and rowed into the brine,
Drawing on wet and heavy-straining line
The great cod quivering from the deep
As counterplay.
What is the solace of these hills and vales
That rise and fall?
What is there glorious in the greenwood glen,
Or twittering thrush or wing of darting wren?
Give me the gusty,
Raucous and rusty
Call of the sea gull in the echoing sky,
The wild shriek of the winds that cannot die,
Give me the life that follows the bending sails,
Or none at all!
ERNEST BENSHIMOL
A BANQUET
ONE MEMORY FROM SOCRATES
After the song the love, and after the love the play,
Flute girl and pretty boy blowing
Bubbles of sparkling
Wine into darkling
Beards of a former austerity, stern even now, but fast growing
Foolish, with less of a stately
Reserve that held them sedately.
Oh Zeus, what a sight! With the wine dripping off it,
The grin of an ass on a bald-pated prophet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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