10 Best Famous Horizons Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Horizons poems. This is a select list of the best famous Horizons poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Horizons poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of horizons poems.

• All Famous Horizons Poems

 I

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past—they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power— 
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not—what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows—Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow?—What are they?
Creations of the mind?—The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep—for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

II

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity, the last
As 'twere the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and corn-fields, and the abodes of men
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs: the hill
Was crowned with a peculiar diadem
Of trees, in circular array, so fixed,
Not by the sport of nature, but of man:
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing—the one on all that was beneath
Fair as herself—but the boy gazed on her;
And both were young, and one was beautiful:
And both were young—yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, no being, but in hers:
She was his voice; he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words; she was his sight,
For his eye followed hers, and saw with hers,
Which coloured all his objects;—he had ceased
To live within himself: she was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all; upon a tone,
A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously—his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.
But she in these fond feelings had no share:
Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
Even as a brother—but no more; 'twas much,
For brotherless she was, save in the name
Her infant friendship had bestowed on him;
Herself the solitary scion left
Of a time-honoured race.—It was a name
Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not—and why?
Time taught him a deep answer—when she loved
Another; even now she loved another,
And on the summit of that hill she stood
Looking afar if yet her lover's steed
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew.

III

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
There was an ancient mansion, and before
Its walls there was a steed caparisoned:
Within an antique Oratory stood
The Boy of whom I spake;—he was alone,
And pale, and pacing to and fro: anon
He sate him down, and seized a pen, and traced
Words which I could not guess of; then he leaned
His bowed head on his hands and shook, as 'twere
With a convulsion—then rose again,
And with his teeth and quivering hands did tear
What he had written, but he shed no tears.
And he did calm himself, and fix his brow
Into a kind of quiet: as he paused,
The Lady of his love re-entered there;
She was serene and smiling then, and yet
She knew she was by him beloved; she knew— 
For quickly comes such knowledge—that his heart
Was darkened with her shadow, and she saw
That he was wretched, but she saw not all.
He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp
He took her hand; a moment o'er his face
A tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps
Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,
For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne'er repassed that hoary threshold more.

IV

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Boy was sprung to manhood: in the wilds
Of fiery climes he made himself a home,
And his Soul drank their sunbeams; he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects; he was not
Himself like what he had been; on the sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer;
There was a mass of many images
Crowded like waves upon me, but he was
A part of all; and in the last he lay
Reposing from the noontide sultriness,
Couched among fallen columns, in the shade
Of ruined walls that had survived the names
Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds
Were fastened near a fountain; and a man,
Glad in a flowing garb, did watch the while,
While many of his tribe slumbered around:
And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in heaven.

V

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Lady of his love was wed with One
Who did not love her better: in her home,
A thousand leagues from his,—her native home,
She dwelt, begirt with growing Infancy,
Daughters and sons of Beauty,—but behold!
Upon her face there was a tint of grief,
The settled shadow of an inward strife,
And an unquiet drooping of the eye,
As if its lid were charged with unshed tears.
What could her grief be?—she had all she loved,
And he who had so loved her was not there
To trouble with bad hopes, or evil wish,
Or ill-repressed affliction, her pure thoughts.
What could her grief be?—she had loved him not,
Nor given him cause to deem himself beloved,
Nor could he be a part of that which preyed
Upon her mind—a spectre of the past.

VI

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was returned.—I saw him stand
Before an altar—with a gentle bride;
Her face was fair, but was not that which made
The Starlight of his Boyhood;—as he stood
Even at the altar, o'er his brow there came
The selfsame aspect and the quivering shock
That in the antique Oratory shook
His bosom in its solitude; and then— 
As in that hour—a moment o'er his face
The tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced—and then it faded as it came,
And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke
The fitting vows, but heard not his own words,
And all things reeled around him; he could see
Not that which was, nor that which should have been— 
But the old mansion, and the accustomed hall,
And the remembered chambers, and the place,
The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade,
All things pertaining to that place and hour,
And her who was his destiny, came back
And thrust themselves between him and the light;
What business had they there at such a time?

VII

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Lady of his love;—Oh! she was changed,
As by the sickness of the soul; her mind
Had wandered from its dwelling, and her eyes,
They had not their own lustre, but the look
Which is not of the earth; she was become
The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts
Were combinations of disjointed things;
And forms impalpable and unperceived
Of others' sight familiar were to hers.
And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise
Have a far deeper madness, and the glance
Of melancholy is a fearful gift;
What is it but the telescope of truth?
Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real!

VIII

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Wanderer was alone as heretofore,
The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him; he was a mark
For blight and desolation, compassed round
With Hatred and Contention; Pain was mixed
In all which was served up to him, until,
Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,
He fed on poisons, and they had no power,
But were a kind of nutriment; he lived
Through that which had been death to many men,
And made him friends of mountains; with the stars
And the quick Spirit of the Universe
He held his dialogues: and they did teach
To him the magic of their mysteries;
To him the book of Night was opened wide,
And voices from the deep abyss revealed
A marvel and a secret.—Be it so.

IX

My dream is past; it had no further change.
It was of a strange order, that the doom
Of these two creatures should be thus traced out
Almost like a reality—the one
To end in madness—both in misery.

A light exists in spring
   Not present on the year
At any other period.
   When March is scarcely here

A color stands abroad
   On solitary hills
That science cannot overtake,
   But human nature feels.

It waits upon the lawn;
   It shows the furthest tree
Upon the furthest slope we know;
   It almost speaks to me.

Then, as horizons step,
   Or noons report away,
Without the formula of sound,
   It passes, and we stay:

A quality of loss
   Affecting our content,
As trade had suddenly encroached
   Upon a sacrament.

 'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
 in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
 where wave pretends to drench real sky.' 

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
 or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
 is our life's whole nemesis. 

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
 about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
 implacably from twelve to one. 

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
 and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
 who insists his playmates run. 

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
 like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
 should inflame the sleeping town. 

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
 caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
 playing his prodigal charades. 

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
 blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
 graves all carol in reply. 

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
 brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
 while footlights flare and houselights dim. 

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
 the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
 joins his enemies' recruits. 

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
 there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
 an insight like the flight of birds: 

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
 some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
 cycling phoenix never stops. 

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
 and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
 away our rationed days and weeks. 

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
 in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
 the simple sum of heart plus heart.

 1
A SONG of the good green grass! 
A song no more of the city streets; 
A song of farms—a song of the soil of fields. 

A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; 
A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.

2
For the lands, and for these passionate days, and for myself, 
Now I awhile return to thee, O soil of Autumn fields, 
Reclining on thy breast, giving myself to thee, 
Answering the pulses of thy sane and equable heart, 
Tuning a verse for thee.

O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice! 
O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths! 
O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb! 
A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee. 

3
Ever upon this stage,
Is acted God’s calm, annual drama, 
Gorgeous processions, songs of birds, 
Sunrise, that fullest feeds and freshens most the soul, 
The heaving sea, the waves upon the shore, the musical, strong waves, 
The woods, the stalwart trees, the slender, tapering trees,
The flowers, the grass, the lilliput, countless armies of the grass, 
The heat, the showers, the measureless pasturages, 
The scenery of the snows, the winds’ free orchestra, 
The stretching, light-hung roof of clouds—the clear cerulean, and the bulging,
 silvery
 fringes, 
The high dilating stars, the placid, beckoning stars,
The moving flocks and herds, the plains and emerald meadows, 
The shows of all the varied lands, and all the growths and products. 

4
Fecund America! To-day, 
Thou art all over set in births and joys! 
Thou groan’st with riches! thy wealth clothes thee as with a swathing garment!
Thou laughest loud with ache of great possessions! 
A myriad-twining life, like interlacing vines, binds all thy vast demesne! 
As some huge ship, freighted to water’s edge, thou ridest into port! 
As rain falls from the heaven, and vapors rise from earth, so have the precious values
 fallen
 upon thee, and risen out of thee! 
Thou envy of the globe! thou miracle!
Thou, bathed, choked, swimming in plenty! 
Thou lucky Mistress of the tranquil barns! 
Thou Prairie Dame that sittest in the middle, and lookest out upon thy world, and lookest
 East,
 and lookest West! 
Dispensatress, that by a word givest a thousand miles—that giv’st a million
 farms,
 and missest nothing! 
Thou All-Acceptress—thou Hospitable—(thou only art hospitable, as God is
 hospitable.)

5
When late I sang, sad was my voice; 
Sad were the shows around me, with deafening noises of hatred, and smoke of conflict; 
In the midst of the armies, the Heroes, I stood, 
Or pass’d with slow step through the wounded and dying. 

But now I sing not War,
Nor the measur’d march of soldiers, nor the tents of camps, 
Nor the regiments hastily coming up, deploying in line of battle. 

No more the dead and wounded; 
No more the sad, unnatural shows of War. 

Ask’d room those flush’d immortal ranks? the first forth-stepping armies?
Ask room, alas, the ghastly ranks—the armies dread that follow’d. 

6
(Pass—pass, ye proud brigades! 
So handsome, dress’d in blue—with your tramping, sinewy legs; 
With your shoulders young and strong—with your knapsacks and your muskets; 
—How elate I stood and watch’d you, where, starting off, you march’d!

Pass;—then rattle, drums, again! 
Scream, you steamers on the river, out of whistles loud and shrill, your salutes! 
For an army heaves in sight—O another gathering army! 
Swarming, trailing on the rear—O you dread, accruing army! 
O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea! with your fever!
O my land’s maimed darlings! with the plenteous bloody bandage and the crutch! 
Lo! your pallid army follow’d!) 

7
But on these days of brightness, 
On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and lanes, the high-piled
 farm-wagons, and
 the fruits and barns, 
Shall the dead intrude?

Ah, the dead to me mar not—they fit well in Nature; 
They fit very well in the landscape, under the trees and grass, 
And along the edge of the sky, in the horizon’s far margin. 

Nor do I forget you, departed; 
Nor in winter or summer, my lost ones;
But most, in the open air, as now, when my soul is rapt and at peace—like pleasing
 phantoms, 
Your dear memories, rising, glide silently by me. 

8
I saw the day, the return of the Heroes; 
(Yet the Heroes never surpass’d, shall never return; 
Them, that day, I saw not.)

I saw the interminable Corps—I saw the processions of armies, 
I saw them approaching, defiling by, with divisions, 
Streaming northward, their work done, camping awhile in clusters of mighty camps. 

No holiday soldiers!—youthful, yet veterans; 
Worn, swart, handsome, strong, of the stock of homestead and workshop,
Harden’d of many a long campaign and sweaty march, 
Inured on many a hard-fought, bloody field. 

9
A pause—the armies wait; 
A million flush’d, embattled conquerors wait; 
The world, too, waits—then, soft as breaking night, and sure as dawn,
They melt—they disappear. 

Exult, indeed, O lands! victorious lands! 
Not there your victory, on those red, shuddering fields; 
But here and hence your victory. 

Melt, melt away, ye armies! disperse, ye blue-clad soldiers!
Resolve ye back again—give up, for good, your deadly arms; 
Other the arms, the fields henceforth for you, or South or North, or East or West, 
With saner wars—sweet wars—life-giving wars. 

10
Loud, O my throat, and clear, O soul! 
The season of thanks, and the voice of full-yielding;
The chant of joy and power for boundless fertility. 

All till’d and untill’d fields expand before me; 
I see the true arenas of my race—or first, or last, 
Man’s innocent and strong arenas. 

I see the Heroes at other toils;
I see, well-wielded in their hands, the better weapons. 

11
I see where America, Mother of All, 
Well-pleased, with full-spanning eye, gazes forth, dwells long, 
And counts the varied gathering of the products. 

Busy the far, the sunlit panorama;
Prairie, orchard, and yellow grain of the North, 
Cotton and rice of the South, and Louisianian cane; 
Open, unseeded fallows, rich fields of clover and timothy, 
Kine and horses feeding, and droves of sheep and swine, 
And many a stately river flowing, and many a jocund brook,
And healthy uplands with their herby-perfumed breezes, 
And the good green grass—that delicate miracle, the ever-recurring grass. 

12
Toil on, Heroes! harvest the products! 
Not alone on those warlike fields, the Mother of All, 
With dilated form and lambent eyes, watch’d you.

Toil on, Heroes! toil well! Handle the weapons well! 
The Mother of All—yet here, as ever, she watches you. 

Well-pleased, America, thou beholdest, 
Over the fields of the West, those crawling monsters, 
The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements:
Beholdest, moving in every direction, imbued as with life, the revolving hay-rakes, 
The steam-power reaping-machines, and the horse-power machines, 
The engines, thrashers of grain, and cleaners of grain, well separating the straw—the
 nimble work of the patent pitch-fork; 
Beholdest the newer saw-mill, the southern cotton-gin, and the rice-cleanser. 

Beneath thy look, O Maternal,
With these, and else, and with their own strong hands, the Heroes harvest. 

All gather, and all harvest; 
(Yet but for thee, O Powerful! not a scythe might swing, as now, in security; 
Not a maize-stalk dangle, as now, its silken tassels in peace.) 

13
Under Thee only they harvest—even but a wisp of hay, under thy great face, only;
Harvest the wheat of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin—every barbed spear, under thee; 
Harvest the maize of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee—each ear in its light-green
 sheath, 
Gather the hay to its myriad mows, in the odorous, tranquil barns, 
Oats to their bins—the white potato, the buckwheat of Michigan, to theirs; 
Gather the cotton in Mississippi or Alabama—dig and hoard the golden, the sweet
 potato of
 Georgia and the Carolinas,
Clip the wool of California or Pennsylvania, 
Cut the flax in the Middle States, or hemp, or tobacco in the Borders, 
Pick the pea and the bean, or pull apples from the trees, or bunches of grapes from the
 vines, 
Or aught that ripens in all These States, or North or South, 
Under the beaming sun, and under Thee.

 A hush is over all the teeming lists,
And there is pause, a breath-space in the strife;
A spirit brave has passed beyond the mists
And vapors that obscure the sun of life.
And Ethiopia, with bosom torn,
Laments the passing of her noblest born.

She weeps for him a mother's burning tears--
She loved him with a mother's deepest love
He was her champion thro' direful years,
And held her weal all other ends above.
When Bondage held her bleeding in the dust,
He raised her up and whispered, 'Hope and Trust.'

For her his voice, a fearless clarion, rung
That broke in warning on the ears of men;
For her the strong bow of his pow'r he strung
And sent his arrows to the very den
Where grim Oppression held his bloody place
And gloated o'er the mis'ries of a race.

And he was no soft-tongued apologist;
He spoke straight-forward, fearlessly uncowed;
The sunlight of his truth dispelled the mist
And set in bold relief each dark-hued cloud;
To sin and crime he gave their proper hue,
And hurled at evil what was evil's due.

Thro' good and ill report he cleaved his way
Right onward, with his face set toward the heights,
Nor feared to face the foeman's dread array--
The lash of scorn, the sting of petty spites.
He dared the lightning in the lightning's track,
And answered thunder with his thunder back.

When men maligned him and their torrent wrath
In furious imprecations o'er him broke,
He kept his counsel as he kept his path;
'Twas for his race, not for himself, he spoke.
He knew the import of his Master's call
And felt himself too mighty to be small.

No miser in the good he held was he--
His kindness followed his horizon's rim.
His heart, his talents and his hands were free
To all who truly needed aught of him.
Where poverty and ignorance were rife,
He gave his bounty as he gave his life.

The place and cause that first aroused his might
Still proved its pow'r until his latest day.
In Freedom's lists and for the aid of Right
Still in the foremost rank he waged the fray;
Wrong lived; His occupation was not gone.
He died in action with his armor on!

We weep for him, but we have touched his hand,
And felt the magic of his presence nigh,
The current that he sent thro' out the land,
The kindling spirit of his battle-cry
O'er all that holds us we shall triumph yet
And place our banner where his hopes were set!

Oh, Douglass, thou hast passed beyond the shore,
But still thy voice is ringing o'er the gale!
Thou 'st taught thy race how high her hopes may soar
And bade her seek the heights, nor faint, nor fail.
She will not fail, she heeds thy stirring cry,
She knows thy guardian spirit will be nigh,
And rising from beneath the chast'ning rod,
She stretches out her bleeding hands to God!

 I thought he was dumb, said he was dumb,
Yet I've heard him cry.
First faint scream,
Out of life's unfathomable dawn,
Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim,
Far, far off, far scream.
Tortoise in extremis.
Why were we crucified into sex?
Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
As we began,
As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?

A far, was-it-audible scream,
Or did it sound on the plasm direct?

Worse than the cry of the new-born,
A scream,
A yell,
A shout,
A paean,
A death-agony,
A birth-cry,
A submission,
All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.

War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian,
Why was the veil torn?
The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane?
The male soul's membrane
Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.

Crucifixion.
Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female,
Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell
In tortoise-nakedness,

Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spreadeagle over her house-roof,
And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls,
Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension
Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!
Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck
And giving that fragile yell, that scream,
Super-audible,
From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth,
Giving up the ghost,
Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.

His scream, and his moment's subsidence,
The moment of eternal silence,
Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once
The inexpressible faint yell --
And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back
To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.

So he tups, and screams
Time after time that frail, torn scream
After each jerk, the longish interval,
The tortoise eternity,
Age-long, reptilian persistence,
Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.

I remember, when I was a boy,
I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake;
I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring;
I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night
Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;
I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul;
I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight;
I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible,
I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats;
I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning,
And running away from the sound of a woman in labour, something like an owl whooing,
And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb,
The first wail of an infant,
And my mother singing to herself,
And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death,
The first elements of foreign speech
On wild dark lips.

And more than all these,
And less than all these,
This last,
Strange, faint coition yell
Of the male tortoise at extremity,
Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.

The cross,
The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence,
Tearing a cry from us.

Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.

Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.

Already the people murmur that I am your enemy
because they say that in verse I give the world your me.

They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.
Who rises in my verses is not your voice. It is my voice
because you are the dressing and the essence is me;
and the most profound abyss is spread between us.

You are the cold doll of social lies,
and me, the virile starburst of the human truth.

You, honey of courtesan hypocrisies; not me;
in all my poems I undress my heart.

You are like your world, selfish; not me
who gambles everything betting on what I am.

You are only the ponderous lady very lady;
not me; I am life, strength, woman.

You belong to your husband, your master; not me;
I belong to nobody, or all, because to all, to all
I give myself in my clean feeling and in my thought.

You curl your hair and paint yourself; not me;
the wind curls my hair, the sun paints me.

You are a housewife, resigned, submissive,
tied to the prejudices of men; not me;
unbridled, I am a runaway Rocinante
snorting horizons of God's justice.

You in yourself have no say; everyone governs you;
your husband, your parents, your family,
the priest, the dressmaker, the theatre, the dance hall,
the auto, the fine furnishings, the feast, champagne,
heaven and hell, and the social, "what will they say."

Not in me, in me only my heart governs,
only my thought; who governs in me is me.
You, flower of aristocracy; and me, flower of the people.
You in you have everything and you owe it to everyone,
while me, my nothing I owe to nobody.

You nailed to the static ancestral dividend,
and me, a one in the numerical social divider,
we are the duel to death who fatally approaches.

When the multitudes run rioting
leaving behind ashes of burned injustices,
and with the torch of the seven virtues,
the multitudes run after the seven sins, 
against you and against everything unjust and inhuman,
I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand.

Copyright (c) 2005, Julia de Burgos. All rights reserved.
Translation (c) 2005, Jack Agüeros.

 The secrets of the mind convene splendidly,
Though the mind is meek.
To be aware inwardly
of brain and beauty
Is dark too recognizable.
Thought looking out on thought
Makes one an eye:
Which it shall be, both decide.
One is with the mind alone,
The other is with other thoughts gone
To be seen from afar and not known.

When openly these inmost sights
Flash and speak fully,
Each head at home shakes hopelessly
Of being never ready to see self
And sees a universe too soon.
The immense surmise swims round and round
And heads grow wise
With their own bigness beatified
In cosmos, and the idiot size
Of skulls spells Nature on the ground,
While ears listening the wrong way report
Echoes first and hear words before sounds
Because the mind, being quiet, seems late.
By ears words are copied into books,
By letters minds are taught self-ignorance.
From mouths spring forth vocabularies
To the assemblage of strange objects
Grown foreign to the faithful countryside
Of one king, poverty,
Of one line, humbleness.
Unavowed and false horizons claim pride
For spaces in the head
The native head sees outside.
The flood of wonder rushing from the eyes
Returns lesson by lesson.
The mind, shrunken of time,
Overflows too soon.
The complete vision is the same
As when the world-wideness began
Worlds to describe
The excessiveness of man.

But man's right portion rejects
The surplus in the whole.
This much, made secret first,
Now makes
The knowable, which was
Thought's previous flesh,
And gives instruction of substance to its intelligence
As far as flesh itself,
As bodies upon themselves to where
Understanding is the head
And the identity of breath and breathing are established
And the voice opening to cry: I know,
Closes around the entire declaration
With this evidence of immortality—
The total silence to say:
I am dead.

For death is all ugly, all lovely,
Forbids mysteries to make
Science of splendor, or any separate disclosing
Of beauty to the mind out of body's book
That page by page flutters a world in fragments,
Permits no scribbling in of more
Where spaces are,
Only to look.

Body as Body lies more than still.
The rest seems nothing and nothing is
If nothing need be.
But if need be,
Thought not divided anyway
Answers itself, thinking
All open and everything.
Dead is the mind that parted each head.
But now the secrets of the mind convene
Without pride, without pain
To any onlookers.
What they ordain alone
Cannot be known
The ordinary way of eyes and ears
But only prophesied
If an unnatural mind, refusing to divide,
Dies immediately
Of too plain beauty
Foreseen within too suddenly,
And lips break open of astonishment
Upon the living mouth and rehearse
Death, that seems a simple verse
And, of all ways to know,
Dead or alive, easiest.

 AS evening shaped I found me on a moor
Which sight could scarce sustain:
The black lean land, of featureless contour,
Was like a tract in pain.

"This scene, like my own life," I said, "is one
Where many glooms abide;
Toned by its fortune to a deadly dun--
Lightless on every side.

I glanced aloft and halted, pleasure-caught
To see the contrast there:
The ray-lit clouds gleamed glory; and I thought,
"There's solace everywhere!"

Then bitter self-reproaches as I stood
I dealt me silently
As one perverse--misrepresenting Good
In graceless mutiny.

Against the horizon's dim-descern?d wheel
A form rose, strange of mould:
That he was hideous, hopeless, I could feel
Rather than could behold.

"'Tis a dead spot, where even the light lies spent
To darkness!" croaked the Thing.
"Not if you look aloft!" said I, intent
On my new reasoning.

"Yea--but await awhile!" he cried. "Ho-ho!--
Look now aloft and see!"
I looked. There, too, sat night: Heaven's radiant show
Had gone. Then chuckled he.

 THERE was a child went forth every day; 
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became; 
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many
 years, or
 stretching cycles of years. 

The early lilacs became part of this child, 
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of
 the
 phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal,
 and
 the
 cow’s calf, 
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side, 
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious
 liquid, 
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—all became part of him. 

The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part of him;
Winter-grain sprouts, and those of the light-yellow corn, and the esculent roots of the
 garden,

And the apple-trees cover’d with blossoms, and the fruit afterward, and wood-berries,
 and
 the
 commonest weeds by the road; 
And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence he had
 lately
 risen, 
And the school-mistress that pass’d on her way to the school, 
And the friendly boys that pass’d—and the quarrelsome boys,
And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls—and the barefoot ***** boy and girl, 
And all the changes of city and country, wherever he went. 

His own parents, 
He that had father’d him, and she that had conceiv’d him in her womb, and
 birth’d
 him, 
They gave this child more of themselves than that;
They gave him afterward every day—they became part of him. 

The mother at home, quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table; 
The mother with mild words—clean her cap and gown, a wholesome odor falling off her
 person
 and
 clothes as she walks by; 
The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger’d, unjust; 
The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure,
The family usages, the language, the company, the furniture—the yearning and swelling
 heart, 
Affection that will not be gainsay’d—the sense of what is real—the thought
 if,
 after
 all, it should prove unreal, 
The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time—the curious whether and how, 
Whether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes and specks? 
Men and women crowding fast in the streets—if they are not flashes and specks, what
 are
 they?
The streets themselves, and the façades of houses, and goods in the windows, 
Vehicles, teams, the heavy-plank’d wharves—the huge crossing at the ferries, 
The village on the highland, seen from afar at sunset—the river between, 
Shadows, aureola and mist, the light falling on roofs and gables of white or brown, three
 miles
 off,

The schooner near by, sleepily dropping down the tide—the little boat
 slack-tow’d
 astern,
The hurrying tumbling waves, quick-broken crests, slapping, 
The strata of color’d clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint, away solitary by
 itself—the
 spread of purity it lies motionless in, 
The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud; 
These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will
 always go
 forth
 every day.