C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Lewis Frank Tooker (18551925)
He Bringeth Them unto Their Desired Haven
I
Who lies a fathom underground;
Above him now the grasses stir,
Two rose-trees set a bound.
Through sighing larches to the sea;
Now for the ocean’s raucous rout
All June the humblebee
And shy wood-creatures come and go
Above the green mound where he keeps
His silent watch below.
Loved God, his wife, his children dear,
And fared through dangers of the sea
Without a sense of fear.
In all the moods of wave and cloud:
Before the pageant of the skies
Nightly his spirit bowed:
And felt the viking’s fierce delight
To face the north wind’s icy hail,
Unmoved to thought of flight.
His thoughts, like homing pigeons, came
Back where his casement candle burned
Through many a league its flame.
The summer gale has brought him home,
Where on the hillsides thickly massed
The elders break in foam.
No longer hold him; nor the gale,
Sweeping the desolated blue,
Roars in his slanting sail.
The winter silence of the hills;
For him the stately twilights fall,
The hemlock softly shrills
His vigilance off many a shore
Whereon the vibrant billows broke.
Now he awakes no more.
Was ever that the sea had power
To hold from him the budding leaf,
The opening of the flower.
The hissing, furrow-turning plow,
The first thin notes the bluebirds sing,
The reddening of the bough.
Upon his watery deck, and dreamed
Of thrushes singing in the wood,
And murmurous brooks that streamed
Lulling the summer afternoon
With mellow trumpetings of ease,
Of drowsiness the boon;
The wise Ulysses of his crew
Of children’s children, who would roam
With him the lands he knew,
And hear the slanting billows roar
Their diapason round his rail—
All safe beside his door.
Sunshine and bird-song round the spot,
And scents from spicy woodlands blown,—
Yet haply knows it not.
Unsolaced by regret or woe,
His narrowed heritage in sleep,
The little children go.
And read in reverent awe his name,
Until for them the very ground
Doth blossom with his fame.