The Spirit of Mid-Ocean
The hesitant sun stands still, with the arch of a day complete,
And fingers the yielding latch on the door of his sequent dawn,
And the slender poplars shiver and gather about their feet
Their long, limp skirts of shadow that lay on the eastward lawn.
Then the night, the blue-black night, breathes on the mirror of heaven,
Blurs to the ghost of gray the reflected blue of the sea,
And the soul of her stirs on the calm, a sudden impalpable leaven,
Troubling inanimate twilight with hints of a storm to be.
White on the gathering dusk, a gull swings in to the west,
Touching the ominous ocean with the tips of tentative wings,
And the bell of a distant buoy, a dot on a sluggish crest,
Bays in reverberant bass monition of threatening things!
Then, like a wraith that stands in the presence of them that sleep,
Pacing the pinguid sea as a ghost on a slated floor,
Uncloaking her shining shoulders from the robe of the jealous deep,
The Spirit of Grave Mid-Ocean steps silently in to shore.
And her strong hands hold the keys to the depths that none may plumb,
And the bond of God with His sea her ears alone have heard;
But her stern lips guard the secret, loyal, unfaltering, dumb,
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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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Whom the World Calls Idle
He is brother-born to the wind. Its song, in his heart implanted,
Stirs and wakes when the morning breaks and the wide horizon burns;
He is brother-born to the sea, and visions of isles enchanted
Slowly rise to his dreaming eyes from the furrow his labor turns.
Child of fate, be it soon or late that his heart he learns to know,
Not his to say if he roam or stay when the summons bids him go:
Brother-born to the wind of morn, he must share its endless quest
Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest!
The stretch of the open road, the challenge of heights unmounted,
The distant cry of the beasts that lie at the mouth of some latent lair,
The sweep of the pathless plain and the speeding of miles uncounted,
When the rangers ride, with a star for guide, in the face of the battling air—
These are his whose fortune is, like the tireless tide’s, to roam,
Brother-born to the wind of morn, with the whole wide world for home:
Child of the soil, he must turn from toil to the dim and dreamt-of West,
Who once hath heard the sovereign word of the gods of Great Unrest!
Song of the stately pines to the winds of northward high lands,
Song of the palms across the calms that sleep on the long lagoon,
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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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When the Great Gray Ships Come In
To eastward ringing, to westward winging, o’er mapless miles of sea,
On winds and tides the gospel rides that the furthermost isles are free,
And the furthermost isles make answer, harbor, and height, and hill,
Breaker and beach cry, each to each, “’Tis the Mother who calls! Be still!”
Mother! new-found, beloved, and strong to hold from harm,
Stretching to these across the seas the shield of her sovereign arm,
Who summoned the guns of her sailor sons, who bade her navies roam,
Who calls again to the leagues of main, and who calls them this time home!
And the great gray ships are silent, and the weary watchers rest;
The black cloud dies in the August skies, and deep in the golden west
Invisible hands are limning a glory of crimson bars,
And far above is the wonder of a myriad wakened stars!
Peace! As the tidings silence the strenuous cannonade,
Peace at last! is the bugle blast the length of the long blockade,
And eyes of vigil weary are lit with the glad release,
From ship to ship and from lip to lip it is “Peace! Thank God for peace.”
Ah, in the sweet hereafter Columbia still shall show
The sons of these who swept the seas how she bade them rise and go,—
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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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Haven-Mother
By ways I know not of they come, wind-swept along the miles,
From the palm-encircled beaches of the jewelled southern isles,
Through stress of gales that shred their sails and split their straining spars,
Through nights of calm unbroken and the wonder of the stars:
And, sliding to their moorings where the harbor beacons shine,
They drop their sullen anchors for a moment, and are mine.
Of their questing grown a-weary, for a moment they abide,
Standing mutely and majestic, where the ripple of the tide
With its lazy lips is lapping in the shadows at their side.
Of the wind and waves beleaguered, and assailed of berg and floe,
To the ends of sea undaunted, these, my errant children, go;
Seeking out the northern waters, it is theirs a way to win
Through the grinding of the ice-pack, threading slowly out and in,
Where the castles of the Frost King in their pride and pallor rise,
Thrusting tower and buttress upward to the steely Arctic skies:
And a deep auroral glory from the white horizon grows,
Mounting swift towards the zenith and reflected on the snows,
Till each pinnacled escarpment turns to amethyst and rose.
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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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How Fair Cinderella Disposed Of Her Shoe
The vainest girls in forty states
Were Gwendolyn and Gladys Gates;
They warbled slightly off the air,
Romantic German songs,
And each of them upon her hair
Employed the curling tongs,
And each with ardor most intense
Her buxom figure laced,
Until her wilful want of sense
Procured a woeful waist:
For bound to marry titled mates
Were Gwendolyn and Gladys Gates.
Yet, truth to tell, the swains were few
Of Gwendolyn (and Gladys, too).
So morning, afternoon, and night
Upon their sister they
Were wont to vent their selfish spite,
And in the rudest way:
For though her name was Leonore,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl
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Harlequin
The world lay brown and barren at the closing of the year,
Where the rushes shook and shuddered on the borders of the mere,
And the troubled tide ran shoreward, where the estuaries twined
Through the wide and empty marsh toward the sullen hills behind:
And the smoke-engirdled city sulked beneath the leaden skies,
With the rain-tears slowly sliding from her million window eyes,
And the fog-ghost limped and lingered past the buildings clad in grime,
Till the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime!
Then we heard the winds of winter on their brazen trumpets blow
The summons for the ballet of the nimble-footed snow,
And the flakes, all silver-spangled, through the mazy measures wound,
Till each finished out his figure, and took station on the ground.
And the drifts, in shining armor, and with gem-encrusted shields,
Spread their wide-deployed battalions on the drill-ground of the fields,
Till the hillside shone and shimmered with the armies of the rime,
As the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime !
He spread a crystal carpet on the rush-encircled pond,
And looped about with ermine all the hemlock-trees beyond:
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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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Rex Captivus
Americans if ye be, who stand surrounding my prison,
Has the sight of me, caged and cowed, no hint of the past to say,
Of the days when ye chose me symbol of Freedom the New-arisen?
Free ye found me, and King ye crowned me,
And what is your King to-day?
Shackled for fools to laugh at, shorn of defence and defiance,
Tainted and reeking with filth in this barred, unspeakable slough,
Behold the sign of a creed divine, the bird of your faith’s reliance!
Polluted and shamed, the King ye acclaimed
Recalls your allegiance now !
Born to be Prince of the Air, and the great Sun’s peer and brother,
Who alone might meet his eye in the infinite heights of blue,
Butt of the vulgar and lewd, in the ruck of my pen I smother:
Yet King! Ye have said it! Is my discredit
Not greater disgrace for you?
Men—if ye still be men, not blind, unreasoning cattle—
See what the work of your hands hath made of the work of God!
These tabid things were once such wings as flash on your flags in battle,
And benisons put on every foot
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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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The Fog
The fog slunk down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow,
Southwardly shifting, far inshore, so never a man might know
How the sea it trod with feet soft-shod, watching the distance dim.
Where the fishing-fleet to the eastward beat, white dots on the ocean’s rim.
Feeling the sands with its furtive hands, fingering cape and cove.
Where the sweet salt smells of the nearer swells up the sloping hillside rove;
Where the whimpering sea-gulls swoop and soar, and the great king-herons go,
The fog slunk down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow!
Then a stillness fell on crag and cliff, on beach and breaker fell,
As the sea-breeze brought on its final whiff the note of a distant bell,
One faint, far sound, and the fog unwound its mantle across the lea.
Joined hand in hand with a wind from land, and the twain went out to sea.
And the wind that rose spoke soft, of those who watch on the cliffs at dawn,
And the fog’s white lips, of sinking ships where the tortured tempests spawn,
As, each to each, they told once more such things as fishers know,
When the fog slinks down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow !
Oh, the wan, white hours go limping by, when that pall comes in between
The great, blue bell of the cloudless sky and the ocean’s romping green!
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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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Phœbus Apollo
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, who are shorn of contempt and pride,
Humbled and crushed in a world gone wrong since the smoke on thine altars died;
Hear us, Lord of the morning, King of the Eastern Flame,
Dawn on our doubts and darkness and the night of our later shame!
There are strange gods come among us, of passion, and scorn, and greed;
They are throned in our stately cities, our sons at their altars bleed:
The smoke of their thousand battles hath blinded thy children’s eyes,
And our hearts are sick for a ruler that answers us not with lies,
Sick for thy light unblemished, great fruit of Latona’s pain—
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, and come to thine own again!
Our eyes, of earth grown weary, through the backward ages peer,
Till, wooed by our eager craving, the scent of thy birth grows clear
And across the calm Ægean, gray-green in the early morn,
We hear the cry of the circling swans that salute the god new-born—
The challenge of mighty Python, the song of thy shafts that go
Straight to the heart of the monster, sped from the loosened bow.
Again through the vale of Tempe a magical music rings
The songs of the marching muses, the ripple of fingered strings!
But this is our dreaming only; we wait for a stronger strain:
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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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Derelict
In younger days, of idleness grown sick,
On this low bank I saw, as in a dream,
The fingers of the leaning willows prick
Long dimples in the slow, reluctant stream.
Watching the pilgrim leaves forsake the stem,
Impatient of the dull familiar cove,
And idle down the tide, I longed like them,
Untrammelled, homeless, free of heart, to rove.
I mind me that of these I noted one
That at the bend a wayward eddy turned
And drifted back, its journey just begun,
The secret of the wider stream unlearned.
It seemed a poor reward for one so bold,
Checked at the start, and beaten back, to find
So stale a death. I did not know, of old,
What seemed so hard could be in truth so kind!
I little thought that on a larger stream
I, too, one day should drift away at will
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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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