But search and question where I will,
I cannot ever find them out.
Melchizedek he praised the Lord,
And gave some wine to Abraham;
But who can tell what else he did
Must be more learned than I am.
Ucalegon he lost his house
When Agamemnon came to Troy;
But who can tell me who he was —
I’ll pray the gods to give him joy.
There be two men of all mankind
That I’m forever thinking on:
They chase me everywhere I go, —
Melchizedek, Ucalegon.
Nor shall another’s fringe with nightTheir woman-hidden world as they did.No more shall quiver down the daysThe flowing wonder of her ways,Whereof no language may requiteThe shifting and the many-shaded.The grace, divine, definitive,Clings only as a faint forestalling;The laugh that love could not forgiveIs hushed, and answers to no calling;The forehead and the little earsHave…
And who are there to see by them,Or what they see, we do not know.Poor strangers of another tongueMay now creep in from anywhere,And we, forgotten, be no moreThan twilight on a ruin there.We two, the remnant. All the restAre cold and quiet. You nor I,Nor fiddle now, nor flagon-lid,May ring them back from where…
Around me hung on every handA deathful stillness of decay;And silent, as in bleak dismayThat song should thus forsaken be,On that forgotten ground there layThe broken flutes of Arcady.The forest that was all so grandWhen pipes and tabors had their swayStood leafless now, a ghostly bandOf skeletons in cold array.A lonely surge of ancient sprayTold…
That filled it when he stopped and cried, ‘Hollo!’Shone joyously, and so I let it shine.He said his name was Fleming Helphenstine,But be that as it may;—I only knowHe talked of this and that and So-and-So,And laughed and chaffed like any friend of mine.But soon, with a queer, quick frown, he looked at me,And I…
All outward recognition of revealedAnd righteous omnipresence are the daysOf most of us affrighted and diseased,But rather by the common snarls of lifeThat come to test us and to strengthen usIn this the prentice-age of discontent,Rebelliousness, faint-heartedness, and shame.IIWhen through hot fog the fulgid sun looks downUpon a stagnant earth where listless menLaboriously dawdle, curse,…
A town that always like a friend appears,And always in the sunrise by the sea.And over it, somehow, there seems to beA downward flash of something new and fierce,That ever strives to clear, but never clearsThe dimness of a charmed antiquity.
