pilots on their ships, To many a lofty song and picture without recognition—I’d rear a laurel-cover’d monument, High, high above the rest—To all cut off before their time, Possess’d by some strange spirit of fire, Quench’d by an early death.
A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine
A carol closing sixty-nine—a résumé —a repetition, My lines in joy and hope continuing on the same, Of ye, O God, Life, Nature, Freedom, Poetry; Of you, my Land—your rivers, prairies, States—you, mottled Flag I love, Your aggregate retain’d entire—Of north, south, east and west, your items all; Of me myself—the jocund heart yet beating in my breast, The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed—the strange inertia falling pall-like round me, The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct, The undiminish’d faith—the groups of loving friends.
The Bravest Soldiers
Brave, brave were the soldiers (high named to-day) who lived through the fight; But the bravest press’d to the front and fell, unnamed, unknown.
A Font of Type
This latent mine—these unlaunch’d voices—passionate powers, Wrath, argument, or praise, or comic leer, or prayer devout, (Not nonpareil, brevier, bourgeois, long primer merely,) These ocean waves arousable to fury and to death, Or sooth’d to ease and sheeny sun and sleep, Within the pallid slivers slumbering.