I Here stays the house, here stay the selfsame places, Here the white lilacs and the buttonwoods; Here the dark pine-groves, there the river-floods, And there the threading brook that interlaces Green meadow-bank with meadow-bank the same. The melancholy nightly chorus came Long, long ago from the same pool, and yonder Stark poplars lift in the same twilight air Their ancient lonelinesses; nearer, fonder, The black-heart cherry-tree's gaunt branches bare Rasp on the same old window where I ponder. II And we, the only living, only pass; We come and go, whither and whence we know not, From birth to bound the same house keeps, alas! New lives as gently as the old; there show not Among the haunts that each had thought his own The looks that partings bring to human faces. The black-heart there, that heard my earliest moan, And yet shall hear my last, like all these places I love so well, unloving lives from child To child; from morning joy to evening sorrow -- Untouched by joy, by anguish undefiled; All one the generations gone, and new; All one dark yesterday and bright to-morrow; To the old tree's insensate sympathy All one the morning and the evening dew -- My far, forgotten ancestor and I. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ON AN INFANT WHICH DIED BEFORE BAPTISM by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE ANDROMEDA by GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS THE SMUGGLER'S LEAP; A LEGEND OF THANET by RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM TWELVE SONNETS: 11. FIRST, BATTLE; THEN, WOMAN by GEORGE BARLOW (1847-1913) SPRING MORNING by MAVIS CLARE BARNETT LITTLE JESSIE by WILLIAM C. CAMERON SUMMER'S ADIEU by JOHN JAY CHAPMAN UPON THE CHAIR MADE OUT OF SIR FRANCIS DRAKE'S SHIP ... by ABRAHAM COWLEY |