10 Best Famous Lowering Poems

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

• All Famous Lowering Poems

 In vain, fair Maid, you ask in vain,
My pen should try th' advent'rous strain,
And following truth's unalter'd law,
Attempt your character to draw.
I own indeed, that generous mind
That weeps the woes of human kind,
That heart by friendship's charms inspired,
That soul with sprightly fancy fired,
The air of life, the vivid eye,
The flowing wit, the keen reply--
To paint these beauties as they shine,
Might ask a nobler pen than mine.


Yet what sure strokes can draw the Fair,
Who vary, like the fleeting air,
Like willows bending to the force,
Where'er the gales direct their course,
Opposed to no misfortune's power,
And changing with the changing hour.
Now gaily sporting on the plain,
They charm the grove with pleasing strain;
Anon disturb'd, they know not why,
The sad tear trembles in their eye:
Led through vain life's uncertain dance,
The dupes of whim, the slaves of chance.


From me, not famed for much goodnature,
Expect not compliment, but satire;
To draw your picture quite unable,
Instead of fact accept a Fable.


One morn, in Æsop's noisy time,
When all things talk'd, and talk'd in rhyme,
A cloud exhaled by vernal beams
Rose curling o'er the glassy streams.
The dawn her orient blushes spread,
And tinged its lucid skirts with red,
Wide waved its folds with glitt'ring dies,
And gaily streak'd the eastern skies;
Beneath, illumed with rising day,
The sea's broad mirror floating lay.
Pleased, o'er the wave it hung in air,
Survey'd its glittering glories there,
And fancied, dress'd in gorgeous show,
Itself the brightest thing below:
For clouds could raise the vaunting strain,
And not the fair alone were vain.


Yet well it knew, howe'er array'd,
That beauty, e'en in clouds, might fade,
That nothing sure its charms could boast
Above the loveliest earthly toast;
And so, like them, in early dawn
Resolved its picture should be drawn,
That when old age with length'ning day
Should brush the vivid rose away,
The world should from the portrait own
Beyond all clouds how bright it shone.


Hard by, a painter raised his stage,
Far famed, the Copley[1] of his age.
So just a form his colours drew,
Each eye the perfect semblance knew;
Yet still on every blooming face
He pour'd the pencil's flowing grace;
Each critic praised the artist rare,
Who drew so like, and yet so fair.


To him, high floating in the sky
Th' elated Cloud advanced t' apply.
The painter soon his colours brought,
The Cloud then sat, the artist wrought;
Survey'd her form, with flatt'ring strictures,
Just as when ladies sit for pictures,
Declared "whatever art can do,
My utmost skill shall try for you:
But sure those strong and golden dies
Dipp'd in the radiance of the skies,
Those folds of gay celestial dress,
No mortal colours can express.
Not spread triumphal o'er the plain,
The rainbow boasts so fair a train,
Nor e'en the morning sun so bright,
Who robes his face in heav'nly light.
To view that form of angel make,
Again Ixion would mistake,[2]
And justly deem so fair a prize,
The sovereign Mistress of the skies,"


He said, and drew a mazy line,
With crimson touch his pencils shine,
The mingling colours sweetly fade,
And justly temper light and shade.


He look'd; the swelling Cloud on high
With wider circuit spread the sky,
Stretch'd to the sun an ampler train,
And pour'd new glories on the main.
As quick, effacing every ground,
His pencil swept the canvas round,
And o'er its field, with magic art,
Call'd forth new forms in every part.


But now the sun, with rising ray,
Advanced with speed his early way;
Each colour takes a differing die,
The orange glows, the purples fly.
The artist views the alter'd sight,
And varies with the varying light;
In vain! a sudden gust arose,
New folds ascend, new shades disclose,
And sailing on with swifter pace,
The Cloud displays another face.
In vain the painter, vex'd at heart,
Tried all the wonders of his art;
In vain he begg'd, her form to grace,
One moment she would keep her place:
For, "changing thus with every gale,
Now gay with light, with gloom now pale,
Now high in air with gorgeous train,
Now settling on the darken'd main,
With looks more various than the moon;
A French coquette were drawn as soon."


He spoke; again the air was mild,
The Cloud with opening radiance smiled;
With canvas new his art he tries,
Anew he joins the glitt'ring dies;
Th' admiring Cloud with pride beheld
Her image deck the pictured field,
And colours half-complete adorn
The splendor of the painted morn.


When lo, the stormy winds arise,
Deep gloom invests the changing skies;
The sounding tempest shakes the plain,
And lifts in billowy surge the main.
The Cloud's gay dies in darkness fade,
Its folds condense in thicker shade,
And borne by rushing blasts, its form
With lowering vapour joins the storm.

 Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

 Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can't withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: "Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to 
Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,
Not vivid performances of the past." But why not?
All other things must change too.
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along
Somehow. That's where Orpheus made his mistake.
Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;
She would have even if he hadn't turned around.
No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel
Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to 
utter an intelligent
Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.
Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,
These other ones, call life. Singing accurately
So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of
Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers
Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulizes
The different weights of the things. 
But it isn't enough
To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this
And didn't mind so much about his reward being in heaven
After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven
Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.
Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.
But probably the music had more to do with it, and
The way music passes, emblematic
Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it
And say it is good or bad. You must
Wait till it's over. "The end crowns all,"
Meaning also that the "tableau"
Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,
Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure
That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this
Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow, 
Powerful stream, the trailing grasses
Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action
No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky
Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth
Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses
Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks, 
"I'm a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,
Though I can understand the language of birds, and
The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is 
fully apparent to me.
Their jousting ends in music much
As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm
And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, 
day after day."

But how late to be regretting all this, even
Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!
To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,
Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,
Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of
Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.
And no matter how all this disappeared,
Or got where it was going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. Its subject
Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward
That the meaning, good or other, can never
Become known. The singer thinks
Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages
Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.
The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness
Which must in turn flood the whole continent
With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer
Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved
Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification
Is for the few, and comes about much later
When all record of these people and their lives
Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them. "But what about
So-and-so?" is still asked on occasion. But they lie
Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus
Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name
In whose tale are hidden syllables
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one different summer.

I am dead;
Yet somehow, somewhere,
In Time's weird contradiction, I
May tell of that dread deed, wherewith
I brought to Children of the Moon
Freedom and vast salvation.
I was a woman born,
And trod the streaming street,
That ebbs and flows from Harlem's hills,
Through caves and cañons limned in light,
Down to the twisting sea.
That night of nights,
I stood alone and at the End,
Until the sudden highway to the moon,
Golden in splendor,
Became too real to doubt.
Dimly I set foot upon the air,
I fled, I flew, through the thrills of light,
With all about, above, below, the whirring
Of almighty wings.
I found a twilight land,
Where, hardly hid, the sun
Sent softly-saddened rays of
Red and brown to burn the iron soil
And bathe the snow-white peaks
In mighty splendor.
Black were the men,
Hard-haired and silent-slow,
Moving as shadows,
Bending with face of fear to earthward;
And women there were none.
"Woman, woman, woman!"
I cried in mounting terror.
"Woman and Child!"
And the cry sang back
Through heaven, with the
Whirring of almighty wings.
Wings, wings, endless wings,—
Heaven and earth are wings;
Wings that flutter, furl, and fold,
Always folding and unfolding,
Ever folding yet again;
Wings, veiling some vast
And veiléd face,
In blazing blackness,
Behind the folding and unfolding,
The rolling and unrolling of
Almighty wings!
I saw the black men huddle,
Fumed in fear, falling face downward;
Vainly I clutched and clawed,
Dumbly they cringed and cowered,
Moaning in mournful monotone:
O Freedom, O Freedom,
O Freedom over me;
Before I'll be a slave,
I'll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my God,
And be free.
It was angel-music
From the dead,
And ever, as they sang,
Some wingéd thing of wings, filling all heaven,
Folding and unfolding, and folding yet again,
Tore out their blood and entrails,
'Til I screamed in utter terror;
And a silence came—
A silence and the wailing of a babe.
Then, at last, I saw and shamed;
I knew how these dumb, dark, and dusky things
Had given blood and life,
To fend the caves of underground,
The great black caves of utter night,
Where earth lay full of mothers
And their babes.
Little children sobbing in darkness,
Little children crying in silent pain,
Little mothers rocking and groping and struggling,
Digging and delving and groveling,
Amid the dying-dead and dead-in-life
And drip and dripping of warm, wet blood,
Far, far beneath the wings,—
The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.
I bent with tears and pitying hands,
Above these dusky star-eyed children,—
Crinkly-haired, with sweet-sad baby voices,
Pleading low for light and love and living—
And I crooned:
"Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair;
Guerdon for your deep distress,
He shall send His tenderness;
For the tripping of your feet
Make a mystic music sweet
In the darkness of your hair;
Light and laughter in the air—
Little children weeping there,
God shall find your faces fair!"
I strode above the stricken, bleeding men,
The rampart 'ranged against the skies,
And shouted:
"Up, I say, build and slay;
Fight face foremost, force a way,
Unloose, unfetter, and unbind;
Be men and free!"
Dumbly they shrank,
Muttering they pointed toward that peak,
Than vastness vaster,
Whereon a darkness brooded,
"Who shall look and live," they sighed;
And I sensed
The folding and unfolding of almighty wings.
Yet did we build of iron, bricks, and blood;
We built a day, a year, a thousand years,
Blood was the mortar,—blood and tears,
And, ah, the Thing, the Thing of wings,
The wingéd, folding Wing of Things
Did furnish much mad mortar
For that tower.
Slow and ever slower rose the towering task,
And with it rose the sun,
Until at last on one wild day,
Wind-whirled, cloud-swept and terrible
I stood beneath the burning shadow
Of the peak,
Beneath the whirring of almighty wings,
While downward from my feet
Streamed the long line of dusky faces
And the wail of little children sobbing under earth.
Alone, aloft,
I saw through firmaments on high
The drama of Almighty God,
With all its flaming suns and stars.
"Freedom!" I cried.
"Freedom!" cried heaven, earth, and stars;
And a Voice near-far,
Amid the folding and unfolding of almighty wings,
Answered, "I am Freedom—
Who sees my face is free—
He and his."
I dared not look;
Downward I glanced on deep-bowed heads and closed eyes,
Outward I gazed on flecked and flaming blue—
But ever onward, upward flew
The sobbing of small voices,—
Down, down, far down into the night.
Slowly I lifted livid limbs aloft;
Upward I strove: the face! the face!
Onward I reeled: the face! the face!
To beauty wonderful as sudden death,
Or horror horrible as endless life—
Up! Up! the blood-built way;
(Shadow grow vaster!
Terror come faster!)
Up! Up! to the blazing blackness
Of one veiléd face.
And endless folding and unfolding,
Rolling and unrolling of almighty wings.
The last step stood!
The last dim cry of pain
Fluttered across the stars,
And then—
Wings, wings, triumphant wings,
Lifting and lowering, waxing and waning,
Swinging and swaying, twirling and whirling,
Whispering and screaming, streaming and gleaming,
Spreading and sweeping and shading and flaming—
Wings, wings, eternal wings,
'Til the hot, red blood,
Flood fleeing flood,
Thundered through heaven and mine ears,
While all across a purple sky,
The last vast pinion.
Trembled to unfold.
I rose upon the Mountain of the Moon,—
I felt the blazing glory of the Sun;
I heard the Song of Children crying, "Free!"
I saw the face of Freedom—
And I died.

 A bullet through his heart at dawn. On 
the table a letter signed
with a woman's name. A wind that goes howling round the 
house,
and weeping as in shame. Cold November dawn peeping through 
the windows,
cold dawn creeping over the floor, creeping up his cold legs,
creeping over his cold body, creeping across his cold face.
A glaze of thin yellow sunlight on the staring eyes. Wind 
howling
through bent branches. A wind which never dies down. Howling, 
wailing.
The gazing eyes glitter in the sunlight. The lids are 
frozen open
and the eyes glitter.

The thudding of a pick on hard earth. A spade grinding 
and crunching.
Overhead, branches writhing, winding, interlacing, unwinding, scattering;
tortured twinings, tossings, creakings. Wind flinging 
branches apart,
drawing them together, whispering and whining among them. A 
waning,
lobsided moon cutting through black clouds. A stream 
of pebbles and earth
and the empty spade gleams clear in the moonlight, then is rammed 
again
into the black earth. Tramping of feet. Men 
and horses.
Squeaking of wheels.
"Whoa! Ready, Jim?"
"All ready."
Something falls, settles, is still. Suicides 
have no coffin.
"Give us the stake, Jim. Now."
Pound! Pound!
"He'll never walk. Nailed to the ground."
An ash stick pierces his heart, if it buds the 
roots will hold him.
He is a part of the earth now, clay to clay. Overhead 
the branches sway,
and writhe, and twist in the wind. He'll never walk with 
a bullet
in his heart, and an ash stick nailing him to the cold, black ground.

Six months he lay still. Six months. And the 
water welled up in his body,
and soft blue spots chequered it. He lay still, for the 
ash stick
held him in place. Six months! Then her face 
came out of a mist of green.
Pink and white and frail like Dresden china, lilies-of-the-valley
at her breast, puce-coloured silk sheening about her. Under 
the young
green leaves, the horse at a foot-pace, the high yellow wheels of 
the chaise
scarcely turning, her face, rippling like grain a-blowing,
under her puce-coloured bonnet; and burning beside her, flaming 
within
his correct blue coat and brass buttons, is someone. What 
has dimmed the sun?
The horse steps on a rolling stone; a wind in the branches makes 
a moan.
The little leaves tremble and shake, turn and quake, over and over,
tearing their stems. There is a shower of young leaves,
and a sudden-sprung gale wails in the trees.
The yellow-wheeled chaise is rocking -- rocking, 
and all the branches
are knocking -- knocking. The sun in the sky is a flat, 
red plate,
the branches creak and grate. She screams and cowers, 
for the green foliage
is a lowering wave surging to smother her. But she sees 
nothing.
The stake holds firm. The body writhes, the body squirms.
The blue spots widen, the flesh tears, but the stake wears well
in the deep, black ground. It holds the body in the still, 
black ground.

Two years! The body has been in the ground two years. It 
is worn away;
it is clay to clay. Where the heart moulders, a greenish 
dust, the stake
is thrust. Late August it is, and night; a night flauntingly 
jewelled
with stars, a night of shooting stars and loud insect noises.
Down the road to Tilbury, silence -- and the slow flapping of large 
leaves.
Down the road to Sutton, silence -- and the darkness of heavy-foliaged 
trees.
Down the road to Wayfleet, silence -- and the whirring scrape of 
insects
in the branches. Down the road to Edgarstown, silence 
-- and stars like
stepping-stones in a pathway overhead. It is very quiet 
at the cross-roads,
and the sign-board points the way down the four roads, endlessly 
points
the way where nobody wishes to go.
A horse is galloping, galloping up from Sutton. Shaking 
the wide,
still leaves as he goes under them. Striking sparks with 
his iron shoes;
silencing the katydids. Dr. Morgan riding to a child-birth 
over Tilbury way;
riding to deliver a woman of her first-born son. One 
o'clock from
Wayfleet bell tower, what a shower of shooting stars! And 
a breeze
all of a sudden, jarring the big leaves and making them jerk up 
and down.
Dr. Morgan's hat is blown from his head, the horse swerves, and 
curves away
from the sign-post. An oath -- spurs -- a blurring of 
grey mist.
A quick left twist, and the gelding is snorting and racing
down the Tilbury road with the wind dropping away behind him.
The stake has wrenched, the stake has started, 
the body, flesh from flesh,
has parted. But the bones hold tight, socket and ball, 
and clamping them down
in the hard, black ground is the stake, wedged through ribs and 
spine.
The bones may twist, and heave, and twine, but the stake holds them 
still
in line. The breeze goes down, and the round stars shine, 
for the stake
holds the fleshless bones in line.

Twenty years now! Twenty long years! The body 
has powdered itself away;
it is clay to clay. It is brown earth mingled with brown 
earth. Only flaky
bones remain, lain together so long they fit, although not one bone 
is knit
to another. The stake is there too, rotted through, but 
upright still,
and still piercing down between ribs and spine in a straight line.
Yellow stillness is on the cross-roads, yellow 
stillness is on the trees.
The leaves hang drooping, wan. The four roads point four 
yellow ways,
saffron and gamboge ribbons to the gaze. A little swirl 
of dust
blows up Tilbury road, the wind which fans it has not strength to 
do more;
it ceases, and the dust settles down. A little whirl 
of wind
comes up Tilbury road. It brings a sound of wheels and 
feet.
The wind reels a moment and faints to nothing under the sign-post.
Wind again, wheels and feet louder. Wind again -- again 
-- again.
A drop of rain, flat into the dust. Drop! -- Drop! Thick 
heavy raindrops,
and a shrieking wind bending the great trees and wrenching off their 
leaves.
Under the black sky, bowed and dripping with rain, 
up Tilbury road,
comes the procession. A funeral procession, bound for 
the graveyard
at Wayfleet. Feet and wheels -- feet and wheels. And 
among them
one who is carried.
The bones in the deep, still earth shiver and pull. There 
is a quiver
through the rotted stake. Then stake and bones fall together
in a little puffing of dust.
Like meshes of linked steel the rain shuts down 
behind the procession,
now well along the Wayfleet road.
He wavers like smoke in the buffeting wind. His 
fingers blow out like smoke,
his head ripples in the gale. Under the sign-post, in 
the pouring rain,
he stands, and watches another quavering figure drifting down
the Wayfleet road. Then swiftly he streams after it. It 
flickers
among the trees. He licks out and winds about them. Over, 
under,
blown, contorted. Spindrift after spindrift; smoke following 
smoke.
There is a wailing through the trees, a wailing of fear,
and after it laughter -- laughter -- laughter, skirling up to the 
black sky.
Lightning jags over the funeral procession. A heavy clap 
of thunder.
Then darkness and rain, and the sound of feet and wheels.

 The day begins to droop,-- 
Its course is done: 
But nothing tells the place 
Of the setting sun. 
The hazy darkness deepens, 
And up the lane 
You may hear, but cannot see, 
The homing wain. 
An engine pants and hums 
In the farm hard by: 
Its lowering smoke is lost 
In the lowering sky. 
The soaking branches drip, 
And all night through 
The dropping will not cease 
In the avenue. 
A tall man there in the house 
Must keep his chair: 
He knows he will never again 
Breathe the spring air: 
His heart is worn with work; 
He is giddy and sick 
If he rise to go as far 
As the nearest rick: 
He thinks of his morn of life, 
His hale, strong years; 
And braves as he may the night 
Of darkness and tears.

CANZONE II.
 
Amor, se vuoi ch' i' torni al giogo antico.
 
UNLESS LOVE CAN RESTORE HER TO LIFE, HE WILL NEVER AGAIN BE HIS SLAVE.
 
 
If thou wouldst have me, Love, thy slave again,One other proof, miraculous and new,Must yet be wrought by you,Ere, conquer'd, I resume my ancient chain—Lift my dear love from earth which hides her now,For whose sad loss thus beggar'd I remain;Once more with warmth endowThat wise chaste heart where wont my life to dwell;And if as some divine, thy influence so,From highest heaven unto the depths of hell,Prevail in sooth—for what its scope below,'Mid us of common race,Methinks each gentle breast may answer well—Rob Death of his late triumph, and replaceThy conquering ensign in her lovely face!
 
Relume on that fair brow the living light,Which was my honour'd guide, and the sweet flame.Though spent, which still the sameKindles me now as when it burn'd most bright;For thirsty hind with such desire did ne'erLong for green pastures or the crystal brook,As I for the dear look,Whence I have borne so much, and—if arightI read myself and passion—more must bear:This makes me to one theme my thoughts thus bind,An aimless wanderer where is pathway none,With weak and wearied mind[Pg 237]Pursuing hopes which never can be won.Hence to thy summons answer I disdain,Thine is no power beyond thy proper reign.
 
Give me again that gentle voice to hear,As in my heart are heard its echoes still,Which had in song the skillHate to disarm, rage soften, sorrow cheer,To tranquillize each tempest of the mind,And from dark lowering clouds to keep it clear;Which sweetly then refinedAnd raised my verse where now it may not soar.And, with desire that hope may equal vie,Since now my mind is waked in strength, restoreTheir proper business to my ear and eye,Awanting which life mustAll tasteless be and harder than to die.Vainly with me to your old power you trust,While my first love is shrouded still in dust.
 
Give her dear glance again to bless my sight,Which, as the sun on snow, beam'd still for me;Open each window brightWhere pass'd my heart whence no return can be;Resume thy golden shafts, prepare thy bow,And let me once more drink with old delightOf that dear voice the sound,Whence what love is I first was taught to know.And, for the lures, which still I covet so,Were rifest, richest there my soul that bound,Waken to life her tongue, and on the breezeLet her light silken hair,Loosen'd by Love's own fingers, float at ease;Do this, and I thy willing yoke will bear,Else thy hope faileth my free will to snare.
 
Oh! never my gone heart those links of gold,Artlessly negligent, or curl'd with grace,Nor her enchanting face,Sweetly severe, can captive cease to hold;These, night and day, the amorous wish in meKept, more than laurel or than myrtle, green,When, doff'd or donn'd, we seeOf fields the grass, of woods their leafy screen.[Pg 238]And since that Death so haughty stands and sternThe bond now broken whence I fear'd to flee,Nor thine the art, howe'er the world may turn,To bind anew the chain,What boots it, Love, old arts to try again?Their day is pass'd: thy power, since lost the armsWhich were my terror once, no longer harms.
 
Thy arms were then her eyes, unrivall'd, whenceLive darts were freely shot of viewless flame;No help from reason came,For against Heaven avails not man's defence;Thought, Silence, Feeling, Gaiety, Wit, Sense,Modest demeanour, affable discourse,In words of sweetest forceWhence every grosser nature gentle grew,That angel air, humble to all and kind,Whose praise, it needs not mine, from all we find;Stood she, or sat, a grace which often threwDoubt on the gazer's mindTo which the meed of highest praise was due—O'er hardest hearts thy victory was sure,With arms like these, which lost I am secure.
 
The minds which Heaven abandons to thy reign,Haply are bound in many times and ways,But mine one only chain,Its wisdom shielding me from more, obeys;Yet freedom brings no joy, though that he burst.Rather I mournful ask, "Sweet pilgrim mine,Alas! what doom divineMe earliest bound to life yet frees thee first:God, who has snatch'd thee from the world so soon,Only to kindle our desires, the boonOf virtue, so complete and lofty, gaveNow, Love, I may derideThy future wounds, nor fear to be thy slave;In vain thy bow is bent, its bolts fall wide,When closed her brilliant eyes their virtue died.
 
"Death from thy every law my heart has freed;She who my lady was is pass'd on high,Leaving me free to count dull hours drag by,To solitude and sorrow still decreed."
 
Macgregor.

I am the Smoke King 
I am black! 
I am swinging in the sky, 
I am wringing worlds awry; 
I am the thought of the throbbing mills, 
I am the soul of the soul-toil kills, 
Wraith of the ripple of trading rills; 
Up I’m curling from the sod, 
I am whirling home to God; 
I am the Smoke King 
I am black. 

I am the Smoke King, 
I am black! 
I am wreathing broken hearts, 
I am sheathing love’s light darts; 
Inspiration of iron times 
Wedding the toil of toiling climes, 
Shedding the blood of bloodless crimes— 
Lurid lowering ’mid the blue, 
Torrid towering toward the true, 
I am the Smoke King, 
I am black. 

I am the Smoke King, 
I am black! 
I am darkening with song, 
I am hearkening to wrong! 
I will be black as blackness can— 
The blacker the mantle, the mightier the man! 
For blackness was ancient ere whiteness began. 
I am daubing God in night, 
I am swabbing Hell in white: 
I am the Smoke King 
I am black. 

I am the Smoke King 
I am black! 
I am cursing ruddy morn, 
I am hearsing hearts unborn: 
Souls unto me are as stars in a night, 
I whiten my black men—I blacken my white! 
What’s the hue of a hide to a man in his might? 
Hail! great, gritty, grimy hands— 
Sweet Christ, pity toiling lands! 
I am the Smoke King 
I am black.

 Before my bed
there is bright moonlight
So that it seems
Like frost on the ground:

Lifting my head
I watch the bright moon,
Lowering my head
I dream that I'm home.

 I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,
A-purpose to revisit the old claim.
I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate,
And the lads who once were with me in the game.
Poor boys, they're down-and-outers, and there's scarcely one to-day
Can show a dozen colors in his poke;
And me, I'm still prospecting, old and battered, gaunt and gray,
And I'm looking for a grub-stake, and I'm broke.

I strolled up old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down;
The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me;
But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town,
Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see.
There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan,
And turning round a bend I heard a roar,
And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan
Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt from the shore.

It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung;
It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs;
Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung;
It glared around with fierce electric eyes.
Full fifty buckets crammed its maw; it bellowed out for more;
It looked like some great monster in the gloom.
With two to feed its sateless greed, it worked for seven score,
And I sighed: "Ah, old-time miner, here's your doom!"

The idle windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls;
The holes you digged are water to the brim;
Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls
Are deathly now and mouldering and dim.
The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out;
The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold;
But there's a little army that they'll never put to rout--
The men who simply live to seek the gold.

The men who can't remember when they learned to swing a pack,
Or in what lawless land the quest began;
The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back,
The restless buccaneer of pick and pan.
On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North,
You will find us, changed in face but still the same;
And it isn't need, it isn't greed that sends us faring forth--
It's the fever, it's the glory of the game.

For once you've panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,
Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;
It's little else you care about; you go because you must,
And you feel that you could follow it to hell.
You'd follow it in hunger, and you'd follow it in cold;
You'd follow it in solitude and pain;
And when you're stiff and battened down let someone whisper "Gold",
You're lief to rise and follow it again.

Yet look you, if I find the stuff it's just like so much dirt;
I fling it to the four winds like a child.
It's wine and painted women and the things that do me hurt,
Till I crawl back, beggared, broken, to the Wild.
Till I crawl back, sapped and sodden, to my grub-stake and my tent--
There's a city, there's an army (hear them shout).
There's the gold in millions, millions, but I haven't got a cent;
And oh, it's me, it's me that found it out.

It was my dream that made it good, my dream that made me go
To lands of dread and death disprized of man;
But oh, I've known a glory that their hearts will never know,
When I picked the first big nugget from my pan.
It's still my dream, my dauntless dream, that drives me forth once more
To seek and starve and suffer in the Vast;
That heaps my heart with eager hope, that glimmers on before--
My dream that will uplift me to the last.

Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there's none of you too sane;
It's just a little matter of degree.
My hobby is to hunt out gold; it's fortressed in my brain;
It's life and love and wife and home to me.
And I'll strike it, yes, I'll strike it; I've a hunch I cannot fail;
I've a vision, I've a prompting, I've a call;
I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail,
To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all.

Beyond the shark-tooth ranges sawing savage at the sky
There's a lowering land no white man ever struck;
There's gold, there's gold in millions, and I'll find it if I die,
And I'm going there once more to try my luck.
Maybe I'll fail--what matter? It's a mandate, it's a vow;
And when in lands of dreariness and dread
You seek the last lone frontier, far beyond your frontiers now,
You will find the old prospector, silent, dead.

You will find a tattered tent-pole with a ragged robe below it;
You will find a rusted gold-pan on the sod;
You will find the claim I'm seeking, with my bones as stakes to show it;
But I've sought the last Recorder, and He's--God.