Ebb-Tide
A sodden reach of wide and wind-swept lea,
A sky of shattered steel that palls the sight,
And one long shaft of sun that seems to write
Vast letters slowly on a slate of sea;
The dreary wail of gulls that skim the crest
Of sullen breakers sliding in to land,
A world grown empty, full of vague unrest,
And shadow-shapes that stride across the sand!
The gray beach widens. Foot by foot appear
Strange forms of wreckage creeping from the waves,
Like ghosts that steal in silence from their graves
To watch beside the death-bed of the year;
Poor shattered shapes of ships that once stood out
Full-freighted to the far horizon’s sweep
To music of the cheery sailor-shout
Of men who sought the wonders of the deep!
Poor shattered ships! Their gallant cruising o’er,
Their cargoes coral-crusted, leagues below,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1899)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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At Twilight
Was it so long? It seems so brief a while
Since this still hour between the day and dark
Was ligntened by a little fellow’s smile;
Since we were wont to mark
The sunset’s crimson dim to gold, to gray,
Content to know that, though he loved to roam
Care-free among the comrades of his play,
Twilight would lead him home.
A year ago! The well-remembered hail
Of happy-hearted children on the green
We hear to-night, and see the sunset pale,
The distant hills between:
But when the busy feet shall homeward turn,
When little wearied heads shall seek for rest,
Where shall you find the weight for which you yearn,
Ah, tender mother-breast?
Dear lips, that in the twilight hushed and dim
Lulled him with murmured fantasies of song;
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1898)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Atlantis
The light of suns unseen, through depths of sea descending,
Within her street awakes the ghost of noon
To bide its little hour and die unheeded, blending
Into her night that knows nor stars nor moon.
The hurrying feet of storms that trample o’er the surges
Arouse no echo in these silent deeps;
No thunder thrills her peace, no sword of lightning scourges
The dim, dead calm where lost Atlantis sleeps.
Long leagues above her courts the stately days advancing
Kindle new dawns and see new sunsets dim;
And, white and weary-eyed, the old stars, backward glancing,
Reluctant pause upon the ocean’s rim.
But she, of dawns and dusks forgotten and forgetful,
Broods in her depths with slumber-weighted eyes;
For all her splendid past unanxious, unregretful,
She waits the call that bids her wake and rise.
No mortal voice she hears. The strong young ships, full-freighted,
With hopes of men, with women’s sighs and tears,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1899)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Pompeii
The giant slept, and pigmies at his feet,
Like children moulding monuments of snow,
Piled stone on stone, mapped market-place and street,
And saw their temples column-girdled grow:
And, slowly as the gradual glaciers grope
Their way resistless, so Pompeii crept,
Year by long year, across the shelving slope
Toward the sea:—and still the giant slept.
Belted with gardens, where the shivered glass
Of falling fountains broke the pools’ repose,
As they had been asleep upon the grass,
A myriad villas stretched themselves and rose:
And down her streets, grown long and longer still,
Grooving the new-laid stones, the chariots swept,
And of a sudden burst upon the hill
Vast amphitheatres. Still the giant slept.
With liquid comment of the wooing doves,
With wanton flowers, sun-conjured from the loam,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1900)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Ad Finem Fideles
Far out, far out they lie. Like stricken women weeping,
Eternal vigil keeping with slow and silent tread—
Soft-shod as are the fairies, the winds patrol the prairies,
The sentinels of God about the pale and patient dead!
Above them, as they slumber in graves that none may number.
Dawns grow to day, days dim to dusk, and dusks in darkness pass;
Unheeded springs are born, unheeded summers brighten,
And winters wake to whiten the wilderness of grass.
Slow stride appointed years across their bivouac places,
With stern, devoted faces they lie, as when they lay,
In long battalions dreaming, till dawn, to eastward gleaming,
Awoke the clarion greeting of the bugles to the day.
The still and stealthy speeding of the pilgrim days unheeding,
At rest upon the roadway that their feet unfaltering trod,
The faithful unto death abide, with trust unshaken,
The morn when they shall waken to the reveille of God.
The faithful unto death! Their sleeping-places over
The torn and trampled clover to braver beauty blows;
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1898)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Narcissus
Since the great, glad greeting of dawn from the eastern hills
Triumphant ran with a shout to the woods below,
With the song in his ears of the clearly clamoring rills
He has lain, like a man of snow,
Slender and straight as the joyous immortals are made,
Born of woman, but born with the grace of a god.
Unheeded airs, caressingly cool, have played
With his hair, and the nymphs have trod
Close to his side, and have kissed him, waiting to flee—
But Narcissus, what recketh he?
In the pool where the lithe fish flashes and slips
From his covert to snap at the careless, fluttering flies,
Narcissus has seen the curve of his drooping lips,
And, like mirrored miniature heavens, his shining eyes.
And a flush like a dew-dipped rose has dyed the pool,
He has laid his cheek to the ripples cool;
Brow touches brow, lips lips, and his eyes of violet roam
Down through the crystal depths. In the darkening dome
The stars shine forth from their faint, far ways,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1896)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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The Singular Sangfroid Of Baby Bunting
Batholomew Benjamin Bunting
Had only three passions in life,
And one of the trio was hunting,
The others his babe and his wife.
And always, so rigid his habits,
He frolicked at home until two,
And then started hunting for rabbits,
And hunted till fall of the dew.
Belinda Bellonia Bunting,
Thus widowed for half of the day,
Her duty maternal confronting,
With baby would patiently play.
When thus was her energy wasted,
A patented food she'd dispense.
(She had bought it the day that they pasted
The posters all over her fence.)
But Bonaparte Buckingham Bunting,
The infant thus blindly adored,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl
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The Débutante
To-day dawned not upon the earth as other days have done:
A throng of little virgin clouds stood waiting for the sun,
Till the herald-winds aligned them, and they blushed, and stood aside,
As the marshals of the morning flung the eastern portals wide.
So Nature lit her playhouse for the play that May begins,
And the twigs of honeysuckle sawed like little violins:
In the dawn there dwelt a whisper of a presence that was new,
For the slender Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!
As yet I could not see her, and the stage was wide and bare;
As yet the Winter's chorus echoed faintly on the air
With a dying wail of tempest, and of dry and tortured trees,
But a promise of new music lent enchantment to the breeze.
In the scene's secluded corners lay the snow-drifts, still secure;
But the murmur of their melting sang another overture
Than the brooks of brown November, and I listened, and I knew
That blue-eyed Spring was at the wing, and waiting for her cue!
The world was all attention, and the hemlocks stood, a-row,
Ushers, never changing costume through the Seasons’ wonder-show,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1902)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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The White Republic
Of Pilgrim eyes previsioned and Puritan lips foretold,
Dowered with wealth of woodland and glory of virgin gold,
Awoke the White Republic, the gift of the Lord Most High,
As broad and free as the borders be of her own wide western sky!
Mother of loyal daughters, whose girdle and guard are these—
Their leagues of inland waters and bulwarks of splendid seas,
Each to the other plighted till the end of time they stand,
Palmetto to pine united and prairie to pasture-land.
She hath store of grain ungarnered and harvests her sons have sown,
She is jewelled with mines unminted whose measure no man hath known,
And the light of her eyes is steady, and her onward march is free,
For it knows no rest, but is like the quest of her rivers that seek the sea.
Upward and on she presses with a zeal no check may rein,
With a strength no shock may shatter while her seasons wake and wane;
Nerved of her stirring stories of the deeds and the deaths of men,
She wins for greater glories till the lapse of human ken.
Her breath is sweet of the southland and the fragile jasmine blows,
On her brow is the excellent whiteness of still Sierra snows,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1897)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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The Children
A moment since, I paced almost alone
This wonderful wide way, of all her streets
The one wherein the pulse of Paris beats
Most gaily. Like some sweep of beachway, blown
Empty by west-born winds, the tapering line
Of path and drive swelled up the rising ground
Toward the Arch, deserted, and I found
The most majestic mile in Europe mine!
Was it some word I did not comprehend,
Some sign too subtle for my grosser sense,
That in an instant brought, I know not whence,
This throng that fills the path from end to end?
Or was it that the wizard April sun
Bent and tapped lightly at the myriad doors
Wherefrom this tide of laughter daily pours?
I know but this:—a miracle was done!
The children! All the world’s a garden grown,
Thrilled with a rush of inter-rippling words
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1901)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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