William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878)
American Romantic poet and journalist.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
Wild was the day; the wintry sea
Moaned sadly on New England's strand,
When first the thoughtful and the free,
Our fathers, trod the desert land.
Thou unrelenting Past!
Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain,
And fetters, sure and fast,
Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.
These struggling tides of life that seem
In wayward, aimless course to tend,
Are eddies of the mighty stream
That rolls to its appointed end.
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.
Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings.
Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson,
Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green.
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.
Weep not that the world changes—did it keep
A stable, changeless state, 'twere cause indeed to weep.
But ’neath yon crimson tree
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
Her blush of maiden shame.
He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd and under roofs
That our frail hands have raised?
The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on.
When April winds
Grew soft, the maple burst into a flush
Of scarlet flowers. The tulip tree, high up,
Opened in airs of June her multitude
Of golden chalices to humming-birds
And silken-wing'd insects of the sky.
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.
Here the free spirit of mankind, at length,
Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place
A limit to the giant's unchained strength,
Or curb his swiftness in the forward race!
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
Heed not the night; a summer lodge amid the wild is mine -
'Tis shadowed by the tulip-tree, 'tis mantled by the vine.
The victory of endurance born.