Famous Long Drug Poems

Famous Long Drug Poems. Long Drug Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Drug long poems

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 THOU, Nature, partial Nature, I arraign;
Of thy caprice maternal I complain.
 The peopled fold thy kindly care have found,
The hornèd bull, tremendous, spurns the ground;
The lordly lion has enough and more,
The forest trembles at his very roar;
Thou giv’st the ass his hide, the snail his shell,
The puny wasp, victorious, guards his cell.
Thy minions, kings defend, controul devour,
In all th’ omnipotence of rule and power:
Foxes and statesmen subtle wiles ensure;
The cit and polecat stink, and are secure:
Toads with their poison, doctors with their drug,
The priest and hedgehog, in their robes, are snug:
E’en silly women have defensive arts,
Their eyes, their tongues—and nameless other parts.
 But O thou cruel stepmother and hard,
To thy poor fenceless, naked child, the Bard!
A thing unteachable in worldly skill,
And half an idiot too, more helpless still:
No heels to bear him from the op’ning dun,
No claws to dig, his hated sight to shun:
No horns, but those by luckless Hymen worn,
And those, alas! not Amalthea’s horn:
No nerves olfact’ry, true to Mammon’s foot,
Or grunting, grub sagacious, evil’s root:
The silly sheep that wanders wild astray,
Is not more friendless, is not more a prey;
Vampyre-booksellers drain him to the heart,
And viper-critics cureless venom dart.
 Critics! appll’d I venture on the name,
Those cut-throat bandits...
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 Sun on the mountain,
Shade in the valley,
Ripple and lightness
Leaping along the world,
Sun, like a gold sword
Plucked from the scabbard,
Striking the wheat-fields,
Splendid and lusty,
Close-standing, full-headed,
Toppling with plenty;
Shade, like a buckler
Kindly and ample,
Sweeping the wheat-fields
Darkening and tossing;
There on the world-rim
Winds break and gather
Heaping the mist
For the pyre of the sunset;
And still as a shadow,
In the dim westward,
A cloud sloop of amethyst
Moored to the world
With cables of rain.

Acres of gold wheat
Stir in the sunshine,
Rounding the hill-top,
Crested with plenty,
Filling the valley,
Brimmed with abundance,
Wind in the wheat-field
Eddying and settling,
Swaying it, sweeping it,
Lifting the rich heads,
Tossing them soothingly
Twinkle and shimmer
The lights and the shadowings,
Nimble as moonlight
Astir in the mere.
Laden with odors
Of peace and of plenty,
Soft comes the wind
From the ranks of the wheat-field,
Bearing a promise 
Of harvest and sickle-time,
Opulent threshing-floors
Dusty and dim 
With the whirl of the flail,
And wagons of bread,
Sown-laden and lumbering
Through the gateways of cities.

When will the reapers 
Strike in their sickles,
Bending and grasping,
Shearing and spreading;
When will the gleaners
Searching the stubble
Take the last wheat-heads
Home in their arms ?

Ask not the question! -
Something tremendous
Moves to the answer.

Hunger and poverty
Heaped like the ocean
Welters and mutters,
Hold back the sickles!

Millions of children
Born to their mothers' womb,
Starved at the nipple, cry,--
Ours is the harvest!
Millions of women 
Learned in...
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 Down along the Snakebite River, where the overlanders camp, 
Where the serpents are in millions, all of the most deadly stamp; 
Where the station-cook in terror, nearly every time he bakes, 
Mixes up among the doughboys half-a-dozen poison-snakes: 
Where the wily free-selector walks in armour-plated pants, 
And defies the stings of scorpions, and the bites of bull-dog ants: 
Where the adder and the viper tear each other by the throat,— 
There it was that William Johnson sought his snake-bite antidote. 
Johnson was a free-selector, and his brain went rather queer, 
For the constant sight of serpents filled him with a deadly fear; 
So he tramped his free-selection, morning, afternoon, and night, 
Seeking for some great specific that would cure the serpent’s bite. 
Till King Billy, of the Mooki, chieftain of the flour-bag head, 
Told him, “Spos’n snake bite pfeller, pfeller mostly drop down dead; 
Spos’n snake bite old goanna, then you watch a while you see, 
Old goanna cure himself with eating little pfeller tree.” 
“That’s the cure,” said William Johnson, “point me out this plant sublime,” 
But King Billy, feeling lazy, said he’d go another time. 
Thus it came to pass that Johnson, having got the tale by...
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 1
SAUNTERING the pavement, or riding the country by-road—lo! such faces! 
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality; 
The spiritual, prescient face—the always welcome, common, benevolent face, 
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges, broad
 at
 the
 back-top; 
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows—the shaved blanch’d faces
 of
 orthodox citizens;
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face; 
The ugly face of some beautiful Soul, the handsome detested or despised face; 
The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face of the mother of many children; 
The face of an amour, the face of veneration; 
The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock;
The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face; 
A wild hawk, his wings clipp’d by the clipper; 
A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs and knife of the gelder. 

Sauntering the pavement, thus, or crossing the ceaseless ferry, faces, and faces, and
 faces: 
I see them, and complain not, and am content with all.

2
Do you suppose I could be content with all, if I thought them their own finale? 

This now is too lamentable a face for a man; 
Some abject...
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 A Fantasy, dedicated to the little poet Alice Oliver Henderson, ten years old. 

The Fantasy shows how tiger-hearts are the cause of war in all ages. It shows how the mammoth forces may be either friends or enemies of the struggle for peace. It shows how the dream of peace is unconquerable and eternal.


I

Peace-of-the-Heart, my own for long,
Whose shining hair the May-winds fan,
Making it tangled as they can,
A mystery still, star-shining yet,
Through ancient ages known to me
And now once more reborn with me: —

This is the tale of the Tiger Tree
A hundred times the height of a man,
Lord of the race since the world began.

This is my city Springfield,
My home on the breast of the plain.
The state house towers to heaven,
By an arsenal gray as the rain...
And suddenly all is mist,
And I walk in a world apart,
In the forest-age when I first knelt down
At your feet, O Peace-of-the-Heart.

This is the wonder of twilight:
Three times as high as the dome
Tiger-striped trees encircle the town,
Golden geysers of foam.
While giant white parrots sail past in their pride.
The roofs now are clouds and storms that they ride.
And there with the huntsmen of mound-builder days
Through jungle and meadow I stride.
And the Tiger Tree leaf...
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 [The late Mr. Jonathan Swift Somers, laureate of Spoon River, planned The Spooniad as an epic in twenty-four books, but unfortunately did not live to complete even the first book. The fragment was found among his papers by William Marion Reedy and was for the first time published in Reedy's Mirror of December 18th, 1914.]


Of John Cabanis' wrath and of the strife
Of hostile parties, and his dire defeat
Who led the common people in the cause
Of freedom for Spoon River, and the fall
Of Rhodes' bank that brought unnumbered woes
And loss to many, with engendered hate
That flamed into the torch in Anarch hands
To burn the court-house, on whose blackened wreck
A fairer temple rose and Progress stood --
Sing, muse, that lit the Chian's face with smiles,
Who saw the ant-like Greeks and Trojans crawl
About Scamander, over walls, pursued
Or else pursuing, and the funeral pyres
And sacred hecatombs, and first because
Of Helen who with Paris fled to Troy
As soul-mate; and the wrath of Peleus' son,
Decreed to lose Chryseis, lovely spoil
Of war, and dearest concubine.
Say first,
Thou son of night, called Momus, from whose eyes
No secret hides, and Thalia, smiling one,
What bred 'twixt Thomas Rhodes and John Cabanis
The deadly strife? His daughter Flossie, she,
Returning from her wandering...
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 Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet 't is early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle-horn. 

'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall; 

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts. 

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West. 

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. 

Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time; 

When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;
When I clung to all the present for the promise that it closed: 

When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.-- 

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin's breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest; 

In the Spring a livelier iris...
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 Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs, 
The not-incurious in God's handiwork 
(This man's-flesh he hath admirably made, 
Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste, 
To coop up and keep down on earth a space 
That puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul) 
--To Abib, all-sagacious in our art, 
Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast, 
Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks 
Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, 
Whereby the wily vapour fain would slip 
Back and rejoin its source before the term,-- 
And aptest in contrivance (under God) 
To baffle it by deftly stopping such:-- 
The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home 
Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace) 
Three samples of true snakestone--rarer still, 
One of the other sort, the melon-shaped, 
(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs) 
And writeth now the twenty-second time. 

My journeyings were brought to Jericho; 
Thus I resume. Who studious in our art 
Shall count a little labour unrepaid? 
I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone 
On many a flinty furlong of this land. 
Also, the country-side is all on fire 
With rumours of a marching hitherward: 
Some say Vespasian...
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 A drifting, April, twilight sky,
A wind which blew the puddles dry,
And slapped the river into waves
That ran and hid among the staves
Of an old wharf. A watery light
Touched bleak the granite bridge, and white
Without the slightest tinge of gold,
The city shivered in the cold.
All day my thoughts had lain as dead,
Unborn and bursting in my head.
From time to time I wrote a word
Which lines and circles overscored.
My table seemed a graveyard, full
Of coffins waiting burial.
I seized these vile abortions, tore
Them into jagged bits, and swore
To be the dupe of hope no more.
Into the evening straight I went,
Starved of a day's accomplishment.
Unnoticing, I wandered where
The city gave a space for air,
And on the bridge's parapet
I leant, while pallidly there set
A dim, discouraged, worn-out sun.
Behind me, where the tramways run,
Blossomed bright lights, I turned to leave,
When someone plucked me by the sleeve.
"Your pardon, Sir, but I should be
Most grateful could you lend to me
A carfare, I have lost my purse."
The voice was clear, concise, and terse.
I turned and met the quiet gaze
Of strange eyes flashing through the haze.
The man was old and slightly bent,
Under his cloak some instrument
Disarranged its stately line,
He rested on his cane a fine
And nervous hand, an almandine
Smouldered...
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 "Oh yes, I went over to Edmonstoun the other day and saw Johnny, mooning around as usual! He will never make his way." 
Letter of George Keats, 18-- 


Night falls; the great jars glow against the dark, 
Dark green, dusk red, and, like a coiling snake, 
Writhing eternally in smoky gyres, 
Great ropes of gorgeous vapor twist and turn 
Within them. So the Eastern fisherman 
Saw the swart genie rise when the lead seal, 
Scribbled with charms, was lifted from the jar; 
And -- well, how went the tale? Like this, like this? . . . 

No herbage broke the barren flats of land, 
No winds dared loiter within smiling trees, 
Nor were there any brooks on either hand, 
Only the dry, bright sand, 
Naked and golden, lay before the seas. 

One boat toiled noiselessly along the deep, 
The thirsty ripples dying silently 
Upon its track. Far out the brown nets sweep, 
And night begins to creep 
Across the intolerable mirror of the sea. 

Twice the nets rise, a-trail with sea-plants brown, 
Distorted shells, and rocks green-mossed with slime, 
Nought else. The fisher, sick at heart, kneels down; 
"Prayer may appease God's frown," 
He thinks, then, kneeling, casts for...
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 A quay with vessels moored 

Thomas 
To India! Yea, here I may take ship; 
From here the courses go over the seas, 
Along which the intent prows wonderfully 
Nose like lean hounds, and tack their journeys out, 
Making for harbours as some sleuth was laid 
For them to follow on their shifting road. 
Again I front my appointed ministry. -- 
But why the Indian lot to me? Why mine 
Such fearful gospelling? For the Lord knew 
What a frail soul He gave me, and a heart 
Lame and unlikely for the large events. -- 
And this is worse than Baghdad! though that was 
A fearful brink of travel. But if the lots, 
That gave to me the Indian duty, were 
Shuffled by the unseen skill of Heaven, surely 
That fear of mine in Baghdad was the same 
Marvellous Hand working again, to guard 
The landward gate of India from me. There 
I stood, waiting in the weak early dawn 
To start my journey; the great caravan's 
Strange cattle with their snoring breaths made steam 
Upon the air, and (as I thought) sadly 
The beasts at market-booths and awnings gay 
Of shops, the city's comfortable trade, 
Lookt, and then into...
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 1
A yellow band of light upon the street
Pours from an open door, and makes a wide
Pathway of bright gold across a sheet
Of calm and liquid moonshine. From inside
Come shouts and streams of laughter, and a snatch
Of song, soon drowned and lost again in mirth,
The clip of tankards on a table top,
And stir of booted heels. Against the patch
Of candle-light a shadow falls, its girth
Proclaims the host himself, and master of his shop.

2
This is the tavern of one Hilverdink,
Jan Hilverdink, whose wines are much esteemed.
Within his cellar men can have to drink
The rarest cordials old monks ever schemed
To coax from pulpy grapes, and with nice art
Improve and spice their virgin juiciness.
Here froths the amber beer of many a brew,
Crowning each pewter tankard with as smart
A cap as ever in his wantonness
Winter set glittering on top of an old yew.

3
Tall candles stand upon the table, where
Are twisted glasses, ruby-sparked with wine,
Clarets and ports. Those topaz bumpers were
Drained from slim, long-necked bottles of the Rhine.
The centre of the board is piled with pipes,
Slender and clean, the still unbaptized clay
Awaits its burning fate. Behind, the vault
Stretches from dim to dark, a groping way
Bordered by casks and puncheons, whose brass stripes
And bands gleam dully...
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 THE HOUSE OF DUST
A Symphony

BY
CONRAD AIKEN

To Jessie

NOTE

. . . Parts of this poem have been printed in "The North American
Review, Others, Poetry, Youth, Coterie, The Yale Review". . . . I am
indebted to Lafcadio Hearn for the episode called "The Screen Maiden"
in Part II.


 This text comes from the source available at 
 Project Gutenberg, originally prepared by Judy Boss 
 of Omaha, NE.

THE HOUSE OF DUST


PART I.


I.

The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.
The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east:
And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.
A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.
Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.

And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
The purple lights leap down the hill before him.
The gorgeous night has begun again.

'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .'
The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
Or...
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