08.01.2016, 18:10
Two Lives: 1:01
1
The shining City of my manhood's grief
Is girt by hills and lakes (the lakes are four),
Left by the ice-sheet with from Labrador
under old suns once carved this land's relief,
Ere wild men came with building and belief
Across the midland swale. And slope and shore
Still guard the forest pathos of dead lore
With burial mound of many an Indian chief,
And sacred spring. Around me, Things-to-come
Are rising (by the plans of my compeers)
For art and science, like a wiser Rome
Upon a wiser earth for wiser years. -
Large thoughts, before and after; yet they be
Time's pallid backgrounds to my soul and me.
2
´Tis no mean city: when I shut my eyes,
To thought she seems memorial as hey,
The world's white cities famous far away,
With her own beauty, her own sunset skies
Across her waters, her own enterprise
Beside her woodlands, with her thousand homes,
Her squares and flowering parks, and those two domes
Of Law and Learning, and her bold and wise.
She too shall have, and has even now, her fame
(Like Florence or Geneva, once the fair
Sojourn of worthy men), and of the same
A solemn part, perhaps, shall be that there,
By house and tree, to flesh and blood befell
The things whereof this story is to tell.
1
The shining City of my manhood's grief
Is girt by hills and lakes (the lakes are four),
Left by the ice-sheet with from Labrador
under old suns once carved this land's relief,
Ere wild men came with building and belief
Across the midland swale. And slope and shore
Still guard the forest pathos of dead lore
With burial mound of many an Indian chief,
And sacred spring. Around me, Things-to-come
Are rising (by the plans of my compeers)
For art and science, like a wiser Rome
Upon a wiser earth for wiser years. -
Large thoughts, before and after; yet they be
Time's pallid backgrounds to my soul and me.
2
´Tis no mean city: when I shut my eyes,
To thought she seems memorial as hey,
The world's white cities famous far away,
With her own beauty, her own sunset skies
Across her waters, her own enterprise
Beside her woodlands, with her thousand homes,
Her squares and flowering parks, and those two domes
Of Law and Learning, and her bold and wise.
She too shall have, and has even now, her fame
(Like Florence or Geneva, once the fair
Sojourn of worthy men), and of the same
A solemn part, perhaps, shall be that there,
By house and tree, to flesh and blood befell
The things whereof this story is to tell.