When the Great Gray Ships Come In
To eastward ringing, to westward winging, o’er mapless miles of sea,
On winds and tides the gospel rides that the furthermost isles are free,
And the furthermost isles make answer, harbor, and height, and hill,
Breaker and beach cry, each to each, “’Tis the Mother who calls! Be still!”
Mother! new-found, beloved, and strong to hold from harm,
Stretching to these across the seas the shield of her sovereign arm,
Who summoned the guns of her sailor sons, who bade her navies roam,
Who calls again to the leagues of main, and who calls them this time home!
And the great gray ships are silent, and the weary watchers rest;
The black cloud dies in the August skies, and deep in the golden west
Invisible hands are limning a glory of crimson bars,
And far above is the wonder of a myriad wakened stars!
Peace! As the tidings silence the strenuous cannonade,
Peace at last! is the bugle blast the length of the long blockade,
And eyes of vigil weary are lit with the glad release,
From ship to ship and from lip to lip it is “Peace! Thank God for peace.”
Ah, in the sweet hereafter Columbia still shall show
The sons of these who swept the seas how she bade them rise and go,—
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1898)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Haven-Mother
By ways I know not of they come, wind-swept along the miles,
From the palm-encircled beaches of the jewelled southern isles,
Through stress of gales that shred their sails and split their straining spars,
Through nights of calm unbroken and the wonder of the stars:
And, sliding to their moorings where the harbor beacons shine,
They drop their sullen anchors for a moment, and are mine.
Of their questing grown a-weary, for a moment they abide,
Standing mutely and majestic, where the ripple of the tide
With its lazy lips is lapping in the shadows at their side.
Of the wind and waves beleaguered, and assailed of berg and floe,
To the ends of sea undaunted, these, my errant children, go;
Seeking out the northern waters, it is theirs a way to win
Through the grinding of the ice-pack, threading slowly out and in,
Where the castles of the Frost King in their pride and pallor rise,
Thrusting tower and buttress upward to the steely Arctic skies:
And a deep auroral glory from the white horizon grows,
Mounting swift towards the zenith and reflected on the snows,
Till each pinnacled escarpment turns to amethyst and rose.
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1897)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Harlequin
The world lay brown and barren at the closing of the year,
Where the rushes shook and shuddered on the borders of the mere,
And the troubled tide ran shoreward, where the estuaries twined
Through the wide and empty marsh toward the sullen hills behind:
And the smoke-engirdled city sulked beneath the leaden skies,
With the rain-tears slowly sliding from her million window eyes,
And the fog-ghost limped and lingered past the buildings clad in grime,
Till the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime!
Then we heard the winds of winter on their brazen trumpets blow
The summons for the ballet of the nimble-footed snow,
And the flakes, all silver-spangled, through the mazy measures wound,
Till each finished out his figure, and took station on the ground.
And the drifts, in shining armor, and with gem-encrusted shields,
Spread their wide-deployed battalions on the drill-ground of the fields,
Till the hillside shone and shimmered with the armies of the rime,
As the Frost King gave the signal for the Christmas pantomime !
He spread a crystal carpet on the rush-encircled pond,
And looped about with ermine all the hemlock-trees beyond:
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1902)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Rex Captivus
Americans if ye be, who stand surrounding my prison,
Has the sight of me, caged and cowed, no hint of the past to say,
Of the days when ye chose me symbol of Freedom the New-arisen?
Free ye found me, and King ye crowned me,
And what is your King to-day?
Shackled for fools to laugh at, shorn of defence and defiance,
Tainted and reeking with filth in this barred, unspeakable slough,
Behold the sign of a creed divine, the bird of your faith’s reliance!
Polluted and shamed, the King ye acclaimed
Recalls your allegiance now !
Born to be Prince of the Air, and the great Sun’s peer and brother,
Who alone might meet his eye in the infinite heights of blue,
Butt of the vulgar and lewd, in the ruck of my pen I smother:
Yet King! Ye have said it! Is my discredit
Not greater disgrace for you?
Men—if ye still be men, not blind, unreasoning cattle—
See what the work of your hands hath made of the work of God!
These tabid things were once such wings as flash on your flags in battle,
And benisons put on every foot
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1901)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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The Fog
The fog slunk down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow,
Southwardly shifting, far inshore, so never a man might know
How the sea it trod with feet soft-shod, watching the distance dim.
Where the fishing-fleet to the eastward beat, white dots on the ocean’s rim.
Feeling the sands with its furtive hands, fingering cape and cove.
Where the sweet salt smells of the nearer swells up the sloping hillside rove;
Where the whimpering sea-gulls swoop and soar, and the great king-herons go,
The fog slunk down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow!
Then a stillness fell on crag and cliff, on beach and breaker fell,
As the sea-breeze brought on its final whiff the note of a distant bell,
One faint, far sound, and the fog unwound its mantle across the lea.
Joined hand in hand with a wind from land, and the twain went out to sea.
And the wind that rose spoke soft, of those who watch on the cliffs at dawn,
And the fog’s white lips, of sinking ships where the tortured tempests spawn,
As, each to each, they told once more such things as fishers know,
When the fog slinks down from Labrador, stealthy, sure, and slow !
Oh, the wan, white hours go limping by, when that pall comes in between
The great, blue bell of the cloudless sky and the ocean’s romping green!
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1901)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Phœbus Apollo
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, who are shorn of contempt and pride,
Humbled and crushed in a world gone wrong since the smoke on thine altars died;
Hear us, Lord of the morning, King of the Eastern Flame,
Dawn on our doubts and darkness and the night of our later shame!
There are strange gods come among us, of passion, and scorn, and greed;
They are throned in our stately cities, our sons at their altars bleed:
The smoke of their thousand battles hath blinded thy children’s eyes,
And our hearts are sick for a ruler that answers us not with lies,
Sick for thy light unblemished, great fruit of Latona’s pain—
Hear us, Phœbus Apollo, and come to thine own again!
Our eyes, of earth grown weary, through the backward ages peer,
Till, wooed by our eager craving, the scent of thy birth grows clear
And across the calm Ægean, gray-green in the early morn,
We hear the cry of the circling swans that salute the god new-born—
The challenge of mighty Python, the song of thy shafts that go
Straight to the heart of the monster, sped from the loosened bow.
Again through the vale of Tempe a magical music rings
The songs of the marching muses, the ripple of fingered strings!
But this is our dreaming only; we wait for a stronger strain:
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1900)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Derelict
In younger days, of idleness grown sick,
On this low bank I saw, as in a dream,
The fingers of the leaning willows prick
Long dimples in the slow, reluctant stream.
Watching the pilgrim leaves forsake the stem,
Impatient of the dull familiar cove,
And idle down the tide, I longed like them,
Untrammelled, homeless, free of heart, to rove.
I mind me that of these I noted one
That at the bend a wayward eddy turned
And drifted back, its journey just begun,
The secret of the wider stream unlearned.
It seemed a poor reward for one so bold,
Checked at the start, and beaten back, to find
So stale a death. I did not know, of old,
What seemed so hard could be in truth so kind!
I little thought that on a larger stream
I, too, one day should drift away at will
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1900)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Gloria Mundi
Magician hands through long, laborious nights
Have made these princely palaces to loom
Whiter than are the city’s legion lights,
On threads unseen stretched out across the gloom.
Reared in an hour, for one brief hour to reign,
The proud pavilions watchful hold in fee
A world’s achievements, where the stately Seine
Slides slowly past her bridges to the sea.
Mute and memorial, as on either bank
She sees the marvel worked before her eyes,
Beholds as in a vision, rank on rank.
Pagoda, dome, and campanile rise,
Like to a mother scowling on a child
Sceptred and crowned to make a queen of May,
The Seine, that sorrowed not for France defiled,
Past France triumphant frowning goes her way.
Yet, dragged reluctant from these ransomed shores,
Upon her tide, that sullenly and slow
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1900)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Gettysburg
Though the winds be strong that lash along the steeds of the charging sea,
With lunge and urge of assaulting surge yet seeking a further goal,
God in His pleasure hath set a measure, the bound of their boast to be,
Where, pile upon pile, and mile on mile, are the cliffs of calm control.
But the Lord of Hosts who guardeth the coasts yet loveth each sieging swell,
And He who is Brother to surge and smother is Brother to cliff as well:
He giveth the word if the shore be stirred, He biddeth the sea subside,
And this is our trust, that His will is just, however He turn the tide!
As night went gray at the touch of day and the slow dawn mounted higher,
On the Federal right the third day’s fight was born in a sheet of fire:
Gun upon gun to the front was run, and each in its turn spoke forth
From fevered mouth to the waiting South the word of the watching North:
And the wraith of Death with withering breath o’er the wide arena played,
As across the large swept on the charge of the old Stonewall brigade;
But the first great wave on a sudden gave, retreating across the slain—
Gave and broke, as the rifles spoke from the long blue line of Kane!
Then silence sank on the double rank deployed on the sullen hill,
And, across the plain of the early slain, the hosts of the South were still,
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1898)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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Tripoli
One to ten of you lesser men—these are the odds we crave:
For the ring of the sword, at the cry to board, is a song that befits the brave.
Board and burn, that ye well may learn, how American tars atone:
Borrow ye may, but there dawns a day when we come to claim our own!
Tripolitan pirate and Turkish thief, they had harried her there on the sunken reef,
Plundered, and robbed, and stripped her crew, for such was Tripoli law:
Lowered her barred and star-set flag, and run to her peak their pirate rag,
For the shaming of William Bainbridge and the fame of Jussuf Bashaw!
They had towed the wreck to the haven’s neck, and under the castle’s guns,
And bound and jailed all them that sailed as the Philadelphia’s sons:
So the frigate lay in Tripoli Bay, by the Molehead batteries pinned,
And along her flank, in a watchful rank, the guardian gunboats grinned!
Out of the Gulf of Sidra’s gales, a brig and a ketch, with flattened sails,
Slid toward Tripoli harbor as the sun ahead went down,
And, by the forts of Jussuf Bashaw pinned like prey in a panther’s paw,
The captured frigate at anchor saw, in the curve of the pirate town.
And one of the pair had the peaceful air of a merchantman landward led,
And one of the two a Maltese crew, in fezzes of flaming red;
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poem by Guy Wetmore Carryl from The Garden of Years and Other Poems (1902)
Added by Veronica Serbanoiu
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