See, Winter comes to rule the varied year, Sullen and sad, with all his rising train— Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme, These, that exalt the soul to solemn thought And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms! Congenial horrors, hail! With frequent foot, Pleas’d have I, in my cheerful morn of life, When nurs’d by careless solitude I liv’d And sung of Nature with unceasing joy, Pleas’d have I wander’d through your rough domain; Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure; Heard the winds roar, and the big torrent burst; Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew’d In the grim evening-sky. Thus pass’d the time, Till through the lucid chambers of the south
Alas, my Purse! how lean and low! My silken Purse! what art thou now! One I beheld—but stocks will fall— When both thy ends had wherewithal. When I within thy slender fence My fortune placed, and confidence; A poet’s fortune!—not immense: Yet, mixed with keys, and coins among,
As the dead prey upon us, they are the dead in ourselves, awake, my sleeping ones, I cry out to you, disentangle the nets of being!
I pushed my car, it had been sitting so long unused. I thought the tires looked as though they only needed air. But suddenly the huge underbody was above me, and the rear tires were masses of rubber and thread variously clinging together
Our sweet companions—sharing your bunk and your bed The versts and the versts and the versts and a hunk of your bread The wheels' endless round The rivers, streaming to ground The road. . .
Oh the heavenly the Gypsy the early dawn light Remember the breeze in the morning, the steppe silver-bright Wisps of blue smoke from the rise
Why did my parents send me to the schools That I with knowledge might enrich my mind? Since the desire to know first made men fools, And did corrupt the root of all mankind.
[Introduction] Lo now! four other acts upon the stage, Childhood, and Youth, the Manly, and Old-age. The first: son unto Phlegm, grand-child to water, Unstable, supple, moist, and cold’s his Nature. The second: frolic claims his pedigree; From blood and air, for hot and moist is he. The third of fire and choler is compos’d, Vindicative, and quarrelsome dispos’d. The last, of earth and heavy melancholy, Solid, hating all lightness, and all folly. Childhood was cloth’d in white, and given to show, His spring was intermixed with some snow. Upon his head a Garland Nature set: Of Daisy, Primrose, and the Violet.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1963. Then, my concernwas particularly for my own people and this version was written especially for them. I am happy that it has done and is doing its job. However, I want it to be known, that I am not a proponent of the concept of cultural nationalism. I dearly love and am proud of my good, serious, sincere black people, yet at the same time, my concern is with all people of goodwill no matter the color. I make no mystique of blackness. I am a humanist. Indeed, I am auniversalist. This truth, I know. The liberation of black people in the United States is tightly linked with the liberation of black people in the far flungdiaspora. Further, and more important, the liberation of black and oppressed people all over the world, is linked with the struggles of the workers of the world of every nationality and color against the common oppressors, overlords, and exploiters of their labor.
Thus it was only natural that I should write "What Shall We Tell Our Children?" in 1973. I have tried to tell them the facts of life and the truth as I see it:
I hope I have succeeded.
What shall we tell our children who are black?
What shall we tell our children who are white?
What shall we tell children of every race and hue?
For all children are the children of all of us
Thus far, O Friend! have we, though leaving much Unvisited, endeavour'd to retrace My life through its first years, and measured back The way I travell'd when I first began To love the woods and fields; the passion yet Was in its birth, sustain'd, as might befal, By nourishment that came unsought, for still, From week to week, from month to month, we liv'd A round of tumult: duly were our games Prolong'd in summer till the day-light fail'd; No chair remain'd before the doors, the bench And threshold steps were empty; fast asleep The Labourer, and the old Man who had sate, A later lingerer, yet the revelry Continued, and the loud uproar: at last,
This day, whate'er the Fates decree, Shall still be kept with joy by me: This day then let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old; Nor think on our approaching ills, And talk of spectacles and pills. To-morrow will be time enough To hear such mortifying stuff. Yet, since from reason may be brought A better and more pleasing thought, Which can, in spite of all decays, Support a few remaining days: From not the gravest of divines Accept for once some serious lines.
Mute is thy wild harp, now, O Bard sublime! Who, amid Scotia’s mountain solitude, Great Nature taught to “build the lofty rhyme,” And even beneath the daily pressure, rude, Of laboring Poverty, thy generous blood, Fired with the love of freedom—Not subdued Wert thou by thy low fortune: But a time Like this we live in, when the abject chime Of echoing Parasite is best approved, Was not for thee—Indignantly is fled Thy noble Spirit; and no longer moved By all the ills o’er which thine heart has bled, Associate worthy of the illustrious dead, Enjoys with them “the Liberty it loved.”
’Twas in the month of December, and in the year 1883, That a monster whale came to Dundee, Resolved for a few days to sport and play, And devour the small fishes in the silvery Tay.
So the monster whale did sport and play Among the innocent little fishes in the beautiful Tay, Until he was seen by some men one day,
Myths of the landscape— the sun going down in the mouths of the furnaces, the fires banked and cooling, ticking into dark, here and there the sudden flaring into roses, then the light across the long factory of the field, the split and rusted castings, across the low slant tin roofs of the buildings, across fallow and tar and burnt potato ground. . . . Everything a little still on fire, in sunlight, then smoke, then cinder, then the milling back to earth, rich earth, the silica of ash. The times I can taste the iron in the air, the gray wash like exhaust, smell the burn-off,
You can shuffle and scuffle and scold, You can rattle the knockers and knobs, Or batter the doorsteps with buckets of gold Till the Deputy-Governor sobs. You can sneak up a suitable plank In a frantic endeavor to see— But what do they do in the Commonwealth Bank When the Big Door bangs at Three?
Machine stitched rivets ravel on a tree Whose name he does not know. Left in the sky, He dangles from a silken cumulus (Stork’s bundle upside down On the delivering wind) and sees unborn Incredible jungles of the lizard’s eye: Dark fern, dark river, a shale coliseum
1 Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.
The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
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