Delphi Poetry Anthology: The World's Greatest Poems (Delphi Poets Series Book 50) (311 page)
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Authors: Homer,William Shakespeare
Bret Harte (1839–1902)
HARK! I hear the tramp of thousands,
And of armèd men the hum;
Lo! a nation’s hosts have gathered
Round the quick alarming drum, —
Saying, ‘Come,
5
Freemen, come!
Ere your heritage be wasted,’ said the quick alarming drum.
Let me of my heart take counsel:
War is not of life the sum;
Who shall stay and reap the harvest
10
When the autumn days shall come?
But the drum
Echoed, ‘Come!
Death shall reap the braver harvest,’ said the solemn-sounding drum.
‘But when won the coming battle,
15
What of profit springs therefrom?
What if conquest, subjugation,
Even greater ills become?’
But the drum
Answered, ‘Come!
20
You must do the sum to prove it,’ said the Yankee-answering drum.
‘What if, ‘mid cannons’ thunder,
Whistling shot and bursting bomb,
When my brothers fall around me,
Should my heart grow cold and numb?’
25
But the drum
Answered, ‘Come!
Better there in death united, than in life a recreant, — Come!’
Thus they answered, — hoping, fearing,
Some in faith, and doubting some,
30
Till a trumpet-voice proclaiming,
Said, ‘My chosen people, come!’
Then the drum,
Lo! was dumb.
For the great heart of the nation, throbbing, answered, ‘Lord, we come!’
35
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,
“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away.
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there
No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there.
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fevourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet
Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony’s load
When he sighed and slowed.
What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led, —
Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.
It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.
Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is — that we two passed.
And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.
I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love’s domain
Never again.
March 1913
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined — just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the drummer never knew —
Fresh from his Wessex home —
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
List of Poems in Alphabetical Order
List of Poets in Alphabetical Order