Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, IN THE OASIS, by GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

IN THE OASIS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: It was a paradise of trees
Last Line: Within my mind these memories are.
Subject(s): Islands; Kindness; Oases; Sea Voyages


IT was a paradise of trees
In the blue vague of sand and sea;
An isle of ocean histories,
An unknown isle, it seemed to me;
A precinct of the ancient grove,
Sacred to fruit and corn and peace;
Old as the spring of life and love,
It seemed a bank where time might cease.

It was a tract of sky and palm
Where yellowing waters ooze and run,
And dark folk dwell amid the calm
Of earthen shadows red and dun;
They brought me gourds of liquor pale
The cut palm yields at break of dawn;
In hearts so simple could not fail
The kindness out of nature drawn.

So voyagers whose victorious keel
First swam the lone Pacific floods,
Felt morn's mysterious lights unseal
The tribes of ocean solitudes;
And found the bloom without decay,
The life through fading centuries sown,
That flower-like lifts a little way
Its head to heavens that soar unknown.

There Carthage led her navied host,
Passing the desert solemn;
And nigher rose on that sparse coast
Rome's eagle-bearing column;
The distant centuries lapsed away,
But nothing here knew time had flown;
The small dark race that moulds the clay
Outlasts the race that built in stone.

You wonder how I understand
Man's soul in dusky faces,
And, though a stranger in the land,
A friend roved that oasis;
They strove to please with gentle art,
Soft smiles and silent duty;
Unconsciously they soothed my heart
With touches of wild beauty.

I twined my soft gray hat with bloom
They brought me in the desert bowers,
And wound along the palm's white plume
The dark-leaved red pomegranate flowers;
I wandered, thoughtless of the lure,
Beside the burning sapphire sea;
The bronzed boys laughed, and sat demure,
And every eye shot love at me.

Ah, never moves man far apart
From kinship and from duty,
And straightest unto every heart
Winds the old path of beauty;
They showed me all the secret isle,
They brought me all their meagre store,
And many a child's caressing smile
Followed me down to the sea-shore.

It was a paradise of trees
In the blue vague of sand and sea;
An isle of antique histories,
A long-lost isle, it seemed to me;
They rowed my boat, I sailed away
To lands beyond the western star;
Like something lost my natal day,
Within my mind these memories are.





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