Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE ROAMER: BOOK 1, by GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE ROAMER: BOOK 1, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Harken, o outcast race, to man outcast, / into the desert driven in his youth
Last Line: Crying, and on its forehead was a star.
Subject(s): Strength; Travel; Journeys; Trips


HARKEN, O outcast Race, to man outcast,
Into the desert driven in his youth
To lead, though mortal, the eternal life!
Once more know him, the child of earth gone forth,
In whom the spirit wakens uncontrolled,
Insatiate hope, unconquerable will!
Now over-seas he bears the human fates;
He opens mighty lands; he lieth down
In the waste places. Harken to his voice,
In this world's wilderness his living cry,
The soul of man, heard now in this new verse!
In me he is the passion perilous;
In me he is the truth all-nourishing;
In me he is the never-silent song,
In new lands rising. Watch, O Heavenly Truth!
Though past the pillars of Atlantic seas
Another earth I travel and new stars
In this great continent that yokes the poles,
Yet not from thee removed, o'er lake and plain
And all along the many-coasted land
I lift the lone notes of my native song,
And thee implore, and thy immortal strength
Which turns the breath of man to adamant;
Now, as when first prophet and sibyl sang
Empire, and tribes gone forth, and rising fates,
And with dominion thou didst equal move,
Watch where far down the world a later race,
Rimmed round about with vast discovery,
Founds milder power, and shapes of sweet, new speech
The syllables of slow-divulging time;
Here raise aloft the world's great hope anew,
Proclaiming man, who lives in all men's lives,
What is endures, what shall be brings! O send
Omnipotently forth thy word where now
He sows the western edges of the world
With wisdom and delight and love's increase,
Till earth shall lift one harvest from one field,
Reaped by one race that shall one Father own,
Eat at one table, sleep beside one hearth,
Confederate in blessèd unities,
One law, one faith, and one prosperity,
One labor looking to one end divine:
So fair a star hangs in our western skies.
Wherefore I also toil. Hear now, who will,
How first, how last, I knew man's soul in me
A greater soul, and in my mortal self
Divined the Roamer; speed, O vital verse,
And first the passion of thy boyhood tell,
And with thy youngest idyls smooth the way!
With idyls life, with idyls song begins.
Ah, then my years expected the sweet bud,
And still put forth no flower, beside the sea.
Ah, then my tender years expected light,
And saw no ray; only the wild reed mine,
And heaven-hunger, such as boyhood knows,
In me begun, forecasting some fair shape —
Frail as the visionary form that comes
On sleeping eyes, but love sleeps not in them
And with desire draws holy souls from heaven —
Or so I dreamed; and mute the wild reed slept,
But not my heart of boyhood, swift in love;
And unto me that shape of dream was dear,
And dear the dream of music in my hand.
Then as from shadowy pines, before light comes,
A solitary wood-note bursts too soon —
Some bird hath waked, and feels his darkened wings —
Low in the hollow of the sea-blown wood
I set my fingers to the unknown stops,
And blew; and fresh as over quiet fields
Rises the burden of the bough and briar,
New music, wild and sweet, blown through the world,
So rose my idyl; all the valley-side
Was hushed, and clinging to my lips the reed
Felt the first tremor of immortal breath;
And like an angel singing in his birth,
Aloft the lone and mounting melody
Moved, darkling, to the bosom of the dawn.
Then was I 'ware of him I loved unseen,
An image and an unapparent form,
A little way, a little way, before.
Out of the valley, up the slopes I sprang
Toward heaven's reach; but him I could not see,
Whom my heart hungered after, following,
Till, from far heights, the pale and streaming East
Forth from its bosom gave the golden flood
To the bare rock of beauty; down the pass
The shadows rolled away; and pine and cliff
Dropped lustre, and the smooth mist, like a floor,
Sea-deep spread round me, lifted o'er the world.
Then first, beside me, islanded in dawn,
A form of tender mould and boyish grace,
I saw him, like my shadow, stand and gaze
Upon the dense and mountainous world that lay
Like sun-struck dragons couched immutable,
Vast broods of earth-might round about us drawn;
And straight I heard the challenge of old fame,
And in my bosom leaped the maiden heart,
And he, beside me, like my spirit shone.
Then oft between the pine-ridge and the sea
I saw him, guarded round with solitude,
In meditation lost and deeds of dream,
The poet's frailty, nursing his sweet age
On great achievement that eternal rings,
And fame to be; what was, heroic done —
Man's graven record, or the poet's breath —
He was the doer in his fantasy;
And what yet waits its passage to the stars,
In the dark underworld and womb of time,
For which a race in pain doth weary heaven,
Smiling he stood in that unrisen morn
And lined it with his glory; so he burned
In that long passion of my youth begun,
From him beginning — dark the issue is —
And what was hope in him, in me was fate.
So sweet in memory shines his fair young face,
That still to see youth's sweetness gives me pain,
Remembering all that heaven had fixed for him
To do and suffer, though at first he seemed
Not to inhabit here, or wear our earth;
He stood apart, nor knew I all he was,
Until my years were equal with love's hour
And life dissolved the mortal barrier
That from the spirit parteth every man.
Yet not with gentleness that most endears
We grew together; never morn nor eve
He gave himself all trembling to my arms,
Nor any precious seal set on my lips,
Nor used our way; he saw another world;
More than the wrath of God I feared his eyes.
Yet mildly reigned his beauty in my breast,
And more made fine my senses to discern
His heavenly portion in my frame of earth;
Until, as one who in some friend's true heart
Trembles to find the image of himself
Made pure and perfect in those thoughts of love,
Awe came upon me seeing in his face
The lineaments of my own all sweetly changed
To that ideal I hope to wear in heaven.
So with his passion blending more and more,
As the dark earth when sinks the starry West,
Mortal I moved to meet eternal light;
And, moving, dreamed how that young soul should be
The flaming of a torch across the years,
And through the world the rising of a star.
Ay me! but what avails to nurse the soul,
And will the better world, that heaven delays?
When hath it come? Soon gathered round his heart —
O, too familiar to this clouded breast —
Immortal dread, awe of the alien powers
In this dark sphere — these vague infinities
Of matter round the solitude of mind
With menace, this dull crush of monstrous force
Crumbling the dense compàct, this far-strown world,
Abysmal being without mete or bound,
With endless shadows roved; whence thought, alarmed,
Strains in its orbit and its casing frame,
Ranges the vast, and calls from star to star,
With question of this cold eternity.
O striving Stress, O everlasting Might,
In every atom spawning energy
And cradling life in every blowing germ,
Storm of the world, swift drift and surge of time
That lifts the swimmer to the rushing flood
One moment's space, and thrusts him down to hell,
And rolls the next aloft, while, age on age,
Millions of men innumerably spread,
Faces along the illimitable wave,
Float up, and look, and sink — O star-cold Space,
When hast thou answered, unto whom, or where!
O, sudden sprang in him the formless fear,
And swift the dark assault began to mount,
Motions of sorrow, instincts of despair!
Before my boyhood done, such darkness came —
Night in the soul; and heaviest on him,
Who most was born to be the child of trust,
Heaviest on him and earliest, sank the stroke.
Then, O, too early chosen, his tender heart
Broke into voice and mingled tears and vows.
He stares into the waste; nought else he sees;
Base if he go not, if he go then rash,
Yet must he go; for such a soul He made
Who made him man, and set him yet a child
Among his enemies exposed and left,
And gave his naked bosom to the sword,
His heart unfortified to sure defeat,
And his pure spirit to the bond of sin;
For high designs stern counsel; not with men
Who wheel with day and night, and think 'tis fate,
His journey lies; O, sent not seldom here,
Too mortal is he born whom God doth choose!
Ah, yet must fall on him the heavier change,
Which who knows not, his soul hath never known
The wandering sea that moans and mourns in man,
The melancholy load and charge of song,
Voices rebellions, dismal wailing loss
The pæan of the long betrayal flung
Up from the sounding flood to sun and stars —
And souls like waves move there, each with its cry —
The sea of life; he felt from world-wide woe,
Vague breaking upon vague, the life-song rise,
Blind music, wandering o'er the face of things,
Heard in his heart, and heard creation through.
But when the treason was, that worked so sore,
And in himself he knew the doom begun,
And felt the blood of man, is dark to me;
Only he made him friends with night and storm,
The sad woods roved, and paced the passionate shore,
And ever on the desert's border hung,
Disturbed, distressful, watched by rising stars.
Deep in his breast the iron entered in,
Savage and sudden, thrust and stroke unseen,
And life went ebbing from his every wound.
Then by the stream that girds the world he sat,
Looking on night, and felt within him fear
Rise like a mist that blotteth out the stars.
Dark was the mind, the heart within was dark,
And all his soul was sunk in memory.
What then he was he knows whose heavy head
The passionless stupor of despair bows down
In solitary places that he loved!
So mute among the moveless stones he sat,
And hid his face within the sea's gray robe,
And heard obscure the roaring of the deep;
Till in the East the red and ragged moon
Across the hollow waters and the night
Struck on his eyes and he once more was man.
O, sharp the eternal pain began to gnaw!
Hoarse the incessant trampling of the surf
Beat up the wind; athwart the western stars,
Crag-like, hung storm, and all its heights were fire;
And midway of the waste, 'twixt tossing seas
And those dark pastures of the roving flame,
No life but his — and his a life bereft,
Brooding, and tranced, and full of fantasy.
The black marsh and the mounded sand stood still;
Old willows whispered near; the beach-grass sighed,
In the low moonshine rustling its thin blades,
And ceased; and Nature's loneliness was there
That fills the desert where God talks with man.
Scarce was the soul reseated on her throne;
Still near the dark relapse he suffered doubt;
Still did he seem to seek remembered light,
With mortal senses wakened, seemed to hear
Some far-off rally of great souls in death
From fields of heroes fallen; and his gaze,
Loaded with all divine expectancy,
Was fastened as a spirit's where he saw
Those thunder-brows of storm; o'er him they loomed
Like mountains fanged, upon some desperate coast,
Whereto the sailor drifts with asking looks
And superstition; and upon him came
That strangeness round the heart that poets know,
And in the swift arrest of sleepless hope
Straightway he trembled; on that chain unloosed
The lightning burst in white and washing seas,
Pale-coursing floods; and, cloven with bolts oblique,
The vaporous summits swam in fiery air,
Chasm and cliff dividing; pass in pass,
Gulf after gulf, deep-trenched, interminable,
With caverned vale on vale, the vast defile
Leapt up night's core; and like a man who shakes
With hope of what he fears, he saw, far off,
The darkness, gathering up from the wide world
In his forecasting heart, take awful shape
Upon the burning glare; terrific gloom
Stood on the mountains, black with dragon-coils —
The vision that he dreamed, the hope he dared,
Since from the angelic flight of innocent years
There stooped and touched his lips such rosy flame
That God's might in him cannot ever die.
O, how he kindled at the very foe
Made instant visible! the fabled place,
Whose horror crests the lone eternal steep,
The goal of lost adventure, goal and grave!
There, by the slope, and worming o'er the edge,
The narrow track of noble peril ran;
And, thinly springing, many a lonely sheaf
Of beamy blades and starry-dipping points
Flashed back the battle of the dying world.
He saw — he sprang — he heard the challenge peal,
Caught like the mighty blast of Roland dead
Far-blown from standards of the fallen Christ;
And light o'erflowed within him, light long sought,
From the old sources gushing, light divine,
Whose piercing revelation nought obstructs,
Created or imagined or devised,
The masks of mimicry or vestures true,
Earth's massy mould or the dark breast of man.

Now on he bore unto the place of dread,
Youth gone and manhood come; soon should his soul
Encounter fate; slowly those mountains rose,
And morning turned to night upon their slopes,
And in their shadow now the Roamer moved,
And nothing else but that great vision saw
Of earth or heaven or any human face.
Up soared aloft the lone eternal steep;
He knew the Range that borders on the night —
To North and South its summits blocked the sky,
Before in silence stood its awful front;
And, irresistible, the terror fell,
And, irrepressible, the longing broke —
Terror that seizes on the spirit spent,
Longing that swells within the homeless heart,
To yield the soul's adventure and the search,
To kiss our mother-earth, and so to end;
And o'er the long years trembling came the song
From that fair valley where his joy began,
And bird-like beat against his prison bars:

'The new grass springs, and red the willow glows;
O'er fallen showers, sweet-breathed, the rainbow smiles,
And sunset floods the fields; as in a lake
Reflected lies the bow along the grass
Rain-beaded, and is brighter in the grass
It lies on; in the black loam gleams the plough;
And all the land is freshened with the rain.
Now twilight falls, star-clear; the flowers shut;
The hills shine low — O, wilt thou never come?
The woods oblivious, venerable, dim,
Loved by the winds, and loved by quiet stars,
Listen for thee as for the feet of spring,
And "O sweet truant" cry and cry in vain;
"The singing birds are come, but not thy voice";
And to the sea they send their fragrant breath —
"Roams now the Child in thy dear charge" they call;
And voiceless is the beach, and echo flown;
And Ocean's self, whose benedictions move
Still blessèd in thy blood, sets in to shore,
And landward calls the wandering waves with him;
But One no more he shepherds whom he loved.
O, thou ungrateful, why dost thou delay?
Too far into the West thy roaming is!
Too long upon thy ocean-cherished eyes,
Brown, bleak, and bare, withers the wind-blown waste;
No fresh-turned field, no glade of violets there,
Nor far gleams of the emerald winter-wheat,
Nor drifts of orchard-blossoms on the hills,
Nor garden-plot, nor tree, nor lilac-spray!
Now homeward through the moonlight-darkened fields
The lover goes; the fire-flies flash; but he
Sees one sweet face that held the rosy West' —

The moon dropped down behind the shouldering rocks;
The gauntlet narrowed on; the cliffs closed in,
Age-shattered spurs compact of rocky spires,
Slim monoliths and boulder-pilèd towers,
Fantastic masonry — earth's nakedness —
Dark colored veins of purple porphyry,
Volcanic thrusts, dull spots of hematite,
Chaotic sediment; there, as he stood,
He held the skull of Nature in his hand
Musing, and curiously turned it o'er;
And versed he was to read what there is found —
For some is known, and some is darkly guessed —
The cosmic tale that vaunts its ignorance,
No chaos, no catastrophe, no more
But definite order in indefinite time,
Events, successions, processes, fixed change.
He touched the gray grooves of the icy flood,
The delicate print of tropic fern and flower,
Strange petrifactions of the forest; saw,
So were his eyes anointed with their lore,
The bones of mammoth bedded in the clay,
Reptilian birds, the horse's five-fold hoof,
The buried drift of antenatal earth,
Transparent ruin; backward spun the orb,
Whirled through the seethe and steam of fusing fire,
Metallic vapors of the molten globe,
The planetary star, the comet mist,
The sun-belt meteoric — fleece and flame;
And finer than all vision probed his thought,
Bared Nature's pulse, told the electric throb
Like his own blood, beats of ethereal force,
Laying his finger on the element.
Then, startled, he remembered what man is,
Hidden in this dark corner of chilled space,
His history with all its circumstance,
Races, religions, policies, archives
Of scriptured wisdom, monumental war,
The passing of a grain of that gray sand
That measures Nature's period — a drop
That falls within the glacier's blue crevasse,
While the slow frozen motion creeps along
Through ages, and the sun expires in frost.

Once more he taught his spirit to endure
The rugged track; o'er crevice and high ravine
Great huddled peaks and ridges bulked in air —
Rivers of ice, vast copes of ageless frost,
With glittering bergs and thin crevasses hoar,
The waste eternal winter; loft on loft,
The rolling snow-field whitened the great skies;
Now nigh to heaven he rose and prospects broad,
Out of the silent valleys drifting death,
On great plateaus that should command the world;
And ever where the far horizons flung
Round him with mightier folds the starry robe,
He read the man-myth on the shining hem —
Iràn, Chaldæa, Egypt — and more late,
Divinely springing from the Olympian mount,
The torch-race of the ever-dying gods,
Orb after orb of throneless deity;
And spectral o'er him broke in that frore air
The burnt-out hopes, and ghosts of prophecy,
That once from holy hearts rose charioted,
And in the zenith hung their mighty faiths —
Visions of old, by every mastering race,
Set in the blazing zodiac of time;
The fiery pillar that brought Israel forth
Rose like an exhalation; flaming stood
The Cross that went before imperial Rome;
Pale swam the moon of Islam dropping blood;
And out they flickered, brief as shooting stars;
Then dark the slow recovery of his sight,
Weary of all that never ceasing death,
Saw Lethe roll against a purple dawn,
Weird as by breadths of watery gloom far North
The sun at midnight sheds unearthly morn;
Saw still Avilion on the unoared lake,
Dim, dusky, fragile, like a flower of night
Half-open to the white and slumbrous moon —
'Peace, if not hope; death, if not life; calm death
That of the grave keeps but tranquillity,'
He murmured — snatches of remembered prayer;
'Not mine, no longer mine, no more,' he mused;
'O, for Thy service build Thy Strength in me
To do Thy will unknown!' he pressed his heart,
And, patient, climbed against the barren skies,
And, fain to see, saw not; 'nay, not the sight,'
He sighed, 'the very truth, man's miracle —
Not in the heaven of heavens, eternal built,
The city shining down the fadeless stars,
Where no night is, nor ever falls a tear,
Hope cannot die, and memory is not pain,
And there no partings are, but love is all.'
The summit of the pass could not be far.
With bold, strong curves the ice-ribbed floor pierced on;
Loud fell his footstep; sudden opposite
The mountain broke, one headlong precipice,
Upon the western stars; and, crest on crest,
The pale ledge, like a billow of the night
On shores unknown, bore him upon his fate;
Almost he hoped — was there indeed an end?
Low in the sunken West the red moon flared;
A savage land rolled on the vacant air;
The sloping, vast, dead wilderness — 'twas all.
There ran the swift descent straight to the waste.
O, evil was his case! down, down he went;
Little he thought save that his grave lay there.
Now had he borne his body to the death —
The passion spent, the corpse at last would fall.
And many a sign came whispering of the end;
All helplessly he felt the loosening life
Waver from sense and flutter from his will;
And, as o'er dying men comes fantasy
Of their own selves beside them waiting lone,
A phantom seemed to reach, with motions dark,
For pity and comfort in its solitude;
But he neglectful walked, remembering all
The passion and the loyalty of years.
The peaks sprang up behind; woods arched him in,
Unmindful, and on swards of grass, he came,
Nor knew he moved, and death was in his limbs.
Ah, yet once more, out of the dark obscure
Earth's wheel of torture heaved his soul aloft,
And Nature rallied for her last farewell.
Then was he 'ware of strange lights in the North —
Pale silver gleams on banks of emerald shone
Changeful, and now a drifting rose, and now
A thousand shadowy rainbows wavering;
And lone thereunder, laid by pine trees hoar,
He saw a youth, and broken in his hand
A reed of nature set with golden stops.
He drew more near where on the brown he lay,
And knelt, and took his head between his hands,
And parted the fair hair from off his brows.
Upon his own dead face he seemed to look.
He could no more. He sank to earth. 'Would God
Might press the sponge of death upon my lips,'
He murmured; and again by that far sea
He seemed to sit, again he died to light,
And on the burning darkness came the gloom,
Terrifically near, his soul's eclipse,
And in his ears faint rang the dying blast
Of Roland dead with all his chivalry;
Then Roland's dark breath seemed with his to mix,
Head laid to head, the heroic kiss of death;
'Non sono traditore,' low he sighed;
And ere night sucked him downward, in that dusk,
Even as the flown soul to the body seems,
Borne on the drifting dark the past went by
Crying, and on its forehead was a star.




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