Poetry Thursday: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr
I remember the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, but I had forgotten Holmes was the author. I didn’t remember much about Holmes at all, in fact. According to All Poetry:
Holmes’s literary career unfolded during the American Renaissance, a period of extraordinary literary creativity in the United States that lasted roughly from the 1830s to the end of the Civil War. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson were among his contemporaries. Transcendentalism, a philosophical and literary movement that emphasized the inherent goodness of humanity and the unity of creation, was a powerful intellectual force in New England during these years. Holmes, however, viewed Transcendentalism with a skeptical eye and satirized some of its excesses.
That puts him into context for me. All right, let me look for some poems I haven’t seen before … lots of these are on the long side … Here, how about this shorter one:
The Two StreamsBehold the rocky wall
That down its sloping sides
Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
In rushing river-tides!
Yon stream, whose sources run
Turned by a pebble’s edge,
Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
The slender rill had strayed,
But for the slanting stone,
To evening’s ocean, with the tangled braid
Of foam-flecked Oregon.
So from the heights of Will
Life’s parting stream descends,
And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
Each widening torrent bends, —
From the same cradle’s side,
From the same mother’s knee, —
One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
One to the Peaceful Sea!
***
An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor.
In candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.
How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,
Carp the suave berries from thc crescent vine,
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!
To me, alas! no verdurous visions come,
Save yon exiguous pool’s conferva-scum,–
No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!
Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades!
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,–
Depart,–be off,-excede,–evade,–crump!
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