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Now, like withdrawing music
Where pillared aisles implore,
You are a vanished choir,
A soft-closed door.
Victorious voices blended
Fade, and I kneel still-hearted.
Sudden my life is ended.
We have parted.
Lost in the vault’s vast splendor
My ghost goes rising, thinning.
Can heartbreak be an end, or
Some strange beginning?
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 24, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
Rich raptures, you say, our dreams assume,
Slaking the heart’s immortal thirst?
Only the old we reillume;
But think—to have dreamed the flowers first!
Think,—to have dreamed the first blue sea;
Imaged every illustrious hue
Of the earliest sunset’s tapestry;
And the snow,—and the birds, when their songs were new!
Think,—from the blue of highest heaven
To have sown all the stars, to have whispered “Light!”—
Hung a moon in a prismy even,
Spun a world on its splendid flight!
To Robert H. Davis
I went forth to sing the city, today’s city—
The blank stone sphinx, the monster search-light-eyed,
The roaring mill where gods grind without pity,
The falling torrent, the many-colored tide.
Wakening in the night, the pain that slumber
Strikes with her mace of silence dead and dumb
Loomed over me and, formless, said, “I come!
Bringing illusions lost beyond all number.
Rigid you lie, yet for a little cumber
This flaming world, where some die proudly, some
Glitter like granite, or dream millenium.”