Image worship
Why mounts my blood to cheek and brow,
Like an ascending flame,
Whene'er from careless lips I hear
The accents of thy name?
Why, when my idle fancy seeks
Some pictured form to trace,
Beneath my pencil still will grow
The features of thy face?
Why comes thy haunting shadow thus
Between the world and me,
To bind my spirit with a charm
That blinds to all but thee?
To bid me watch thine upward course,
Thy path from mine so far;
As earth, 'mid all the hosts of heaven,
Watches the polar star?
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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On seeing Mrs. Kean as Constance in King John
'Twas no illusion; from the Past the veil was rent away;
The tide that never changes ebbed, and bore me to that day,
When in the lists and on the field brave deeds of arms were done,
When England blushed beneath the rule of recreant King John.
Scenes from that dim and buried Past came thronging on the gaze,
In all the splendid pageantry of those heroic days.
There Angiers' towers and battlements in stately grandeur frowned
Upon the engines of grim war grouped threat'ningly around:
And where the gathering warlike ranks in burnished armor gleamed,
The sacred Oriflamme of France, the Red Cross Banner streamed:
There Templars came with cross and sword, vowed to the Holy Land,
There were the fiery feudal lords, each with his vassal band:
And in his scarlet robes arrayed, the haughty legate strode,
As when above the prostrate King, in ancient days he trode.
Forgetful, for the hour I lived in that chivalric age,
Amid the stirring scenes portrayed on History's varied page.
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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To the memory of Channing
"The Prophets, do they live forever?" -- Zech. I. 5.
Those spirits God ordained,
To stand the watchmen on the outer wall,
Upon whose souls the beams of truth first fall;
They who reveal the ideal, the unattained,
And to their age, in stirring tones, and high,
Speak out for God, Truth, Man, and Liberty --
Such prophets, do they die?
When dust to dust returns,
And the freed spirit seeks again its God,
To those with whom the blessed ones have trod;
Are they then lost? No, still their spirit burns
And quickens in the race; the life they give,
Humanity receives, and they survive,
While Hope and Virtue live.
The landmarks of their age,
High Priests, Kings of the realm of mind, are they,
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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The image broken
'Twas but a dream; a fond and foolish dream;
The calenture of a delirious brain,
Whose fever thirst creates the rushing stream.
Now to the actual I awake again:
The vision to my gaze one moment granted,
Fades in its light away, and leaves me disenchanted.
The image that my glowing fancy wrought,
Now to the dust with ruthless hand I cast:
Thus I renounce the worship that I sought;
Of my own idol the iconoclast.
The echo of "Eureka, I have found!"
Falls back upon my heart, a vain and empty sound.
Oh disembodied being of my mind,
So wildly loved, so fervently adored;
In whom all high and glorious gifts I shrined,
And my heart's incense on the altar poured;
Now do I know, that clad in mortal guise,
Ne'er on this earth wilt thou upon my vision rise.
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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On the death of a friend
There was no bell to peal thy funeral dirge,
No nodding plumes to wave above thy bier,
No shroud to wrap thee but the foaming surge,
No kindly voices thy dark way to cheer,
No eye to give the tribute of a tear.
Alone, "unknell'd, uncoffin'd," thou hast died,
Without one gentle mourner lingering near;
Down the deep waters thou unseen didst glide,
With Ocean's countless dead to slumber side by side.
Thou sleep'st not with thy fathers. O'er thy bed,
The flowers that deck their tombs may never wave;
To plead remembrance for thee o'er thy head
No sculptur'd marble shall arise. Thy grave
Is the dark boundless deep, whose waters lave
The shores of empires. When thou sought'st thy rest
Within their silent depths, they only gave
A circling ripple, then with foaming crest
The booming waves roll'd over their unconscious guest.
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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The wasted fountains
"And their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters;
they came to the pits and found no water; they returned with
their vessels empty." -- Jeremiah XIV. 3.
When the fitful fever of the soul
Is awakened in thee first;
And thou goest like Judah's children forth,
To slake thy burning thirst; --
And when dry and wasted, like the springs
Sought by that little band,
Before thee, in their emptiness
Life's broken cisterns stand; --
When the ripened fruits that tempted,
Turn to ashes on the taste;
And thine early visions fade and pass,
Like the mirage of the waste; --
When faith darkens, and hopes languish,
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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Day-dawn in Italy
Italia! in thy bleeding heart,
I thought, e'en hope was dead;
That from thy scarred and prostrate form,
The spark of life had fled.
I thought, as Memory's sunset glow
Its radiance o'er thee cast,
That all thy glory and thy fame
Were buried in the past.
Twice Mistress of the world! I thought
Thy star had set in gloom;
That all thy shrines and monuments
Were but thy spirit's tomb.
The mausoleum of the world,
Where Art her spoils might keep;
Where pilgrims from all shrines might come,
To wonder and to weep.
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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A summer idyl
The city is dreary and dusty and lone,
The Smiths and the Joneses and Jenkinses gone;
The doors are all barred, and the shutters all down,
And nobody left in this desolate town---
Save the sweeper who wearily loiters and lags,
The ashman, and he who cries "Bottles and rags!"
And a hurrying crowd one knows nothing about,
Though each one of them somebody cares for, no doubt;
The streets everywhere are plowed into a rut,
For putting down pipes that never stay put.
Gazing up from my window above may be scanned
A strip of the sky as wide as my hand;
At least a square yard once of emerald green;
But now from the heat and sewer-gas, behold!
It has taken the favorite hue of old gold.
Then the odors,---not Milton's Sabean, I own,
Nor yet those that Coleridge found at Cologne,
But here to our trained, tried olfactories known,
As the Hunter's Point perfume---from boiling old bone.
You boast of your singing birds lodged in the trees,
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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Webster
"When I and all those that hear me shall have gone to our last home, and when the mould may have gathered on our memories, as it will on our tombs:" -- Webster's Speech in the Senate, July, 1850.
The mould upon thy memory! -- No,
Not while one note is rung,
Of those divine, immortal songs
Milton and Shakespeare sung; --
Not till the night of years enshrouds
The Anglo-Saxon tongue.
No! let the flood of Time roll on,
And men and empires die; --
Genius enthroned on lofty heights
Can its dread course defy,
And here on earth, can claim the gift
Of immortality:
Can save from that Lethean tide
That sweeps so dark along,
A people's name; -- a people's fame
To future time prolong,
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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The Ideal
"How the shadow the Ideal throws before it darkens the actual." -- Zanoni
"La vie est un sommeil, l'amour en est le rêve;."
A sad, sweet dream; it fell upon my soul
When song and thought first woke their echoes there,
Swaying my spirit to its wild control,
And with the shadow of a fond despair
Darkening the fountain of my young life's stream --
It haunts me still, and yet I know 'tis but a dream.
Whence art thou, shadowy presence, that canst hide
From my charmed sight the glorious things of earth?
A mirage o'er life's desert dost thou glide?
Or, with those glimmerings of a former birth,
A "trailing cloud of glory," hast thou come
From some bright world afar, our unremembered home?
I know thou dwell'st not in this dull cold Real,
I know thy home is in some brighter sphere;
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poem by Anne Lynch Botta from Poems (1848)
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