O setting sun! though the time has come,
I still warble under you, if none else does, unmitigated adoration.

} As at Thy Portals Also Death

As at thy portals also death,
Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds,
To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity,
To her, buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me,
(I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still,
I sit by the form in the coffin,
I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks,
    the closed eyes in the coffin;)
To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth,
    life, love, to me the best,
I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs,
And set a tombstone here.

} My Legacy

The business man the acquirer vast,
After assiduous years surveying results, preparing for departure,
Devises houses and lands to his children, bequeaths stocks, goods,
    funds for a school or hospital,
Leaves money to certain companions to buy tokens, souvenirs of gems
    and gold.

But I, my life surveying, closing,
With nothing to show to devise from its idle years,
Nor houses nor lands, nor tokens of gems or gold for my friends,
Yet certain remembrances of the war for you, and after you,
And little souvenirs of camps and soldiers, with my love,
I bind together and bequeath in this bundle of songs.

} Pensive on Her Dead Gazing

Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of All,
Desperate on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battlefields gazing,
(As the last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger’d,)
As she call’d to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk’d,
Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my
    sons, lose not an atom,
And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable,
And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers’ depths,
And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children’s
    blood trickling redden’d,
And you trees down in your roots to bequeath to all future trees,
My dead absorb or South or North—­my young men’s bodies absorb,
    and their precious precious blood,
Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a
    year hence,
In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,
In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give
    my immortal heroes,
Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an
    atom be lost,
O years and graves!  O air and soil!  O my dead, an aroma sweet! 
Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.

} Camps of Green