Sands at Seventy
MANNAHATTA
MY city's fit and noble name resumed,
Choice aboriginal name, with marvellous beauty, meaning,
A rocky
founded island — shores where ever
gayly dash the coming, going, hurrying sea waves.
1888 1888-9
PAUMANOK
SEA-BEAUTY! stretch'd and basking!
One side thy inland ocean laving, broad, with copious
commerce,
steamers, sails,
And one the Atlantic's wind caressing, fierce or gentle
— mighty hulls dark-gliding in the
distance.
Isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water — healthy
air and soil!
Isle of the salty shore and breeze
and brine!
1888 1888-9
FROM MONTAUK POINT
I STAND as on some mighty eagle's beak,
Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and
sky,)
The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance.
The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps —
that
inbound urge and urge of waves,
Seeking the shores forever.
1888 1888-9
TO THOSE WHO'VE FAIL'D
To those who've fail'd, in aspiration vast,
To unnam'd soldiers fallen in front on the lead,
To calm, devoted
engineers — to over-ardent
travelers — to pilots on their ships,
To many a lofty song and picture without
recognition
— I'd rear a laurel-cover'd monument,
High, high above the rest — To all cut off
before their
time,
Possess'd by some strange spirit of fire,
Quench'd by an early death.
1888 1888-9
A CAROL CLOSING SIXTY-NINE
A CAROL closing sixty-nine — a résumé
— a repetition,
My lines in joy and hope continuing on the same,
Of
ye, O God, Life, Nature, Freedom, Poetry;
Of you, my Land — your rivers, prairies,
States — you, mottled
Flag I love,
Your aggregate retain'd entire — Of north,
south, east and west, your items all;
Of me myself
— the jocund heart yet beating
in my breast,
The body wreck'd, old, poor and paralyzed —
the strange
inertia falling pall-like round me,
The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct,
The undiminish'd
faith — the groups of loving friends.
1888 1888-9
THE BRAVEST SOLDIERS
BRAVE, brave were the soldiers (high named to-day) who
lived through the fight;
But the bravest press'd
to the front and fell, unnamed,
unknown.
1888 1888-9
A FONT OF TYPE
THIS latent mine — these unlaunch'd voices —
passionate powers,
Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic
leer, or prayer devout,
(Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,)
These ocean waves arousable
to fury and to death,
Or sooth'd to ease and sheeny sun and sleep,
Within the pallid slivers slumbering.
1888 1888-9
AS I SIT WRITING HERE
As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,
Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities,
Ungracious
glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering
ennui,
May filter in my daily songs.
1888 1888-9