Journey 2 Being

ON this wondrous sea,

Sailing silently,

Knowest thou the shore

Ho! pilot, ho!

Where no breakers roar,

Where the storm is o’er?

In the silent west

Many sails at rest,

Their anchors fast;

Thither I pilot thee,—

Land, ho! Eternity!

Ashore at last!

’T was just this time last year I died.

I know I heard the corn,

When I was carried by the farms,—

It had the tassels on.

I thought how yellow it would look

When Richard went to mill;

And then I wanted to get out,

But something held my will.

I thought just how red apples wedged

The stubble’s joints between;

And carts went stooping round the fields

To take the pumpkins in.

I wondered which would miss me least,

And when Thanksgiving came,

If father ’d multiply the plates

To make an even sum.

And if my stocking hung too high,

Would it blur the Christmas glee,

That not a Santa Claus could reach

The altitude of me?

But this sort grieved myself, and so

I thought how it would be

When just this time, some perfect year,

Themselves should come to me.

A LONG, long sleep, a famous sleep

That makes no show for dawn

By stretch of limb or stir of lid,—

An independent one.

Was ever idleness like this?

Within a hut of stone

To bask the centuries away

Nor once look up for noon?

FAR from love the Heavenly Father

Leads the chosen child;

Oftener through realm of briar

Than the meadow mild,

Oftener by the claw of dragon

Than the hand of friend,

Guides the little one predestined

To the native land.

A TOAD can die of light!

Death is the common right

Of toads and men,—

Of earl and midge

The privilege.

Why swagger then?

The gnat’s supremacy

Is large as thine.

ALL overgrown by cunning moss,

All interspersed with weed,

The little cage of “Currer Bell”,

In quiet Haworth laid.

This bird, observing others,

When frosts too sharp became,

Retire to other latitudes,

Quietly did the same.

But differed in returning;

Since Yorkshire hills are green,

Yet not in all the nests I meet

Can nightingale be seen.

Gathered from any wanderings,

Gethsemane can tell

Through what transporting anguish

She reached the asphodel!

Soft falls the sounds of Eden

Upon her puzzled ear;

Oh, what an afternoon for heaven,

When Brontë entered there!

A CLOCK stopped—not the mantel’s;

Geneva’s farthest skill

Can’t put the puppet bowing

That just now dangled still.

An awe came on the trinket!

The figures hunched with pain,

Then quivered out of decimals

Into degreeless noon.

It will not stir for doctors,

This pendulum of snow;

The shopman importunes it,

While cool, concernless No

Nods from the gilded pointers,

Nods from the seconds slim,

Decades of arrogance between

The dial life and him.

WE thirst at first,—’t is Nature’s act;

And later, when we die,

A little water supplicate

Of fingers going by.

It intimates the finer want,

Whose adequate supply

Is that great water in the west

Termed immortality.

WATER is taught by thirst;

Land, by the oceans passed;

Transport, by throe;

Peace, by its battles told;

Love, by memorial mould;

Birds, by the snow.

IT struck me every day

The lightning was as new

As if the cloud that instant slit

And let the fire through.

It burned me in the night,

It blistered in my dream;

It sickened fresh upon my sight

With every morning’s beam.

I thought that storm was brief,—

The maddest, quickest by;

But Nature lost the date of this,

And left it in the sky.