Selected Poems

My life closed twice before its close.
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

We like March, his shoes are purple,
He is new and high;
Makes he mud for dog and peddler,
Makes he forest dry;
Knows the adder's tongue his coming,
And begets her spot.
Stands the sun so close and mighty
That our minds are hot
News is he of all the others;
Bold it were to die
With the blue-birds buccaneering
On his British sky.

The soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend,
Or the most agonizing spy
An enemy could send.

Secure against its own,
No treason it can fear.
Itself its sovereign, of itself
The soul should stand in awe.

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent and you are sane;
Demur, you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong June
To an admiring bog!

“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all

And sweetest in the gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm

I’ve heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet never in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

A wounded deer leaps highest,
I’ve heard the hunter tell;
’Tis but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!

Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it cautious arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You’re hurt” exclaim!

I never hear the word “escape”
Without a quicker blood,
A sudden expectation –
A flying attitude!

I never hear of prisons broad
By soldiers battered down,
But I tug childish at my bars
Only to fail again!