Until she too grew fabulous as a song
Sung to a beechwood fiddle, and all the old
Barely-recorded chants that are the land
And no one poet’s or musician’s—
“Old Dan Tucker,” “The Belle of Albany,”
The girl who died for love in the high woods
And cruel Barbara Allen in her pride.
So she became a concertina tune
Played in plank taverns by a blind, old man,
A jew’s-harp strain, a comb-and-banjo song,
The music of a soapbox violin
Shrilled out against the tree-toads and the crickets
Through the hot nights of June. So, though she passed
Unknowing, yet she left the legend-touch
Bright as a splash of sumach still behind
Wherever the gaunt horse pulled on his load.
Till, later, those who knew no more of her
Living, than they might know of such removed
And singable creations as “Lord Randall,”
“Colombo,” “Little Musgrave,” or “Jay Gould’s Daughter,”
Yet knew enough of her to sing about
And fit her name, Melora, to the same
Slow-dropping minor of the water and earth—
The minor of the country barber-shops
That keens above the grave of Jesse James
And the lone prairie where the cowboy died,
The desolate minor of the jail-bird’s song,
Luscious with sorrow, and the minor notes
That tell about the tragic end of such
As loved too well to have such cruel fathers
But were so loving, even in the dust,
A red-rose brier grew out of their dead hearts
And twined together in a lover’s knot
For all the county people to admire,
And every lost, waif ballad we have made
And, making, scorned because it smelt of the earth,
And now would seek, but cannot make again—
So she became a legend and a name.
John Vilas, moving always toward the East,
Upon his last adventure, felt the sun
Strike at his bones and warm them like the last
Heat of the wood so long within the fire
That long ago the brightness ate its heart
And yet it lies and burns upon the iron
Unready still to crumble and be cool,
The white, transmuted log of purest ash
Still glowing with a late and borrowed flame.
“This is the sun of age,” he thought, “and so
We enter our last journeys with that sun
Which we have watched sink down ten thousand times
Knowing he would arise like Dedalus
On the first wings of morning, and exult
Like our own youth, fresh-risen from its bed
And inexhaustible of space and light.
But now the vessel which could not be filled
By violence or desire or the great storm,
Runs over with its weight of little days
And when this sun sinks now, we’ll sink with him
And not get up again. I find it fit
That I, who spent the years of my desire
In the lost forest, seeking the lost stone,
With little care for Harriet or the rest,
With little trust in safety or the world,
Should now retrace at last, and in my age,
The exact highway of my youth’s escape
From everything that galled it and take on,
Like an old snake resuming his cast skins,
The East I fled, the little towns I mocked,
The dust I thought was shaken from my shoes,
The sleepiness from which I ran away.
Harriet’s right and Harriet is just
And Harriet’s back in that chintz-curtained room
From which I took her, twenty years ago,
With all the children who were always hers
Because I gave them nothing but my seed
And hardly heard their laughter or their tears
And hardly knew their faces or their names,
Because I listened for the wind in the bough,
Because my daughters were the shooting-stars,
Because my sons were the forgotten streams
And the wild silvers of the wilderness.
Men who go looking for the wilderness-stone
And find it, should not marry or beget,
For, if they do so, they may work a wrong
Deeper than any mere intent of pain.
And yet, what I have sought that I have sought
And cannot disavouch, although it is
The double knife that cuts the giver’s hand
And the unwilling taker’s. So I took
My wife, long since, from that chintz-curtained room
And so she has gone back to it again
After these years, with children of those years,
And, being kind, she will not teach them there
To curse me, as I think, though if she did
She could find reason in her neighbor’s eyes,
And, being Harriet, she will bring them up
In all such houses, till the end of time,
As if she had not been away at all.
And so, at last, she’ll get the peace she should.
And yet, some time, a child may run away.
We have had sons and daughters, she and I,
And, of them all, one daughter and one son
In whom our strange bloods married with the true
Marriage that is not merely sheath and sword.
The rest are hers. Those two were partly mine.
I taught my son to wander in the woods
Till he could step the hidden paths with me
Light as a whisper, indolent as Spring.
I would not tame his sister when I might,
I let her follow patterns of leaves,
Looking for stones rejected by the wise.
I kept them by me jealously and long.
And yet, the day they took him, when he sat
There on his horse, before they all rode off,
It was his mother who looked out of him
And it was to his mother that he looked.
That is my punishment and my offence
And that is how it was. And he is dead.
Dead of a fever, buried in the South,
Dead in this war I thought a whirligig
For iron fools to play with and to kill
Other men’s sons, not mine. He’s buried deep.
I kept him by me jealously and long.
Well, he walked well, alive. He was my son.
I’ll not make tags of him. We got the news.
She could not stay beside me after that.
I see so clearly why she could not stay.
So I retrace the hard steps of my youth
Now with this daughter, in a rattling cart
Drawn by a horse as lean as famine’s self,
And am an omen in the little towns—
Because this daughter has too much of me
To be content with bread made out of wheat.
To be in love and give it up for rest,
To live serene without a knife at heart.
Such is the manner and the bound escape
Of those a disproportion drives unfed
From the world’s table, without meat or grace,
Though both are wholesome, but who seek instead
Their solitary victual like the fox.
And who at last return as I return
In the
