Far back, related on my mother’s side,
Old Salt Kossabone, I’ll tell you how he died: 
(Had been a sailor all his life—­was nearly 90—­lived with his
    married grandchild, Jenny;
House on a hill, with view of bay at hand, and distant cape, and
    stretch to open sea;)
The last of afternoons, the evening hours, for many a year his
    regular custom,
In his great arm chair by the window seated,
(Sometimes, indeed, through half the day,)
Watching the coming, going of the vessels, he mutters to himself—­
    And now the close of all: 
One struggling outbound brig, one day, baffled for long—­cross-tides
    and much wrong going,
At last at nightfall strikes the breeze aright, her whole luck veering,
And swiftly bending round the cape, the darkness proudly entering,
    cleaving, as he watches,
“She’s free—­she’s on her destination”—­these the last words—­when
    Jenny came, he sat there dead,
Dutch Kossabone, Old Salt, related on my mother’s side, far back.

} The Dead Tenor

As down the stage again,
With Spanish hat and plumes, and gait inimitable,
Back from the fading lessons of the past, I’d call, I’d tell and own,
How much from thee! the revelation of the singing voice from thee! 
(So firm—­so liquid-soft—­again that tremulous, manly timbre! 
The perfect singing voice—­deepest of all to me the lesson—­trial
    and test of all:)
How through those strains distill’d—­how the rapt ears, the soul of
    me, absorbing
Fernando’s heart, Manrico’s passionate call, Ernani’s, sweet Gennaro’s,
I fold thenceforth, or seek to fold, within my chants transmuting,
Freedom’s and Love’s and Faith’s unloos’d cantabile,
(As perfume’s, color’s, sunlight’s correlation:)
From these, for these, with these, a hurried line, dead tenor,
A wafted autumn leaf, dropt in the closing grave, the shovel’d earth,
To memory of thee.

} Continuities

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form—­no object of the world. 
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain. 
Ample are time and space—­ample the fields of Nature. 
The body, sluggish, aged, cold—­the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

} Yonnondio

A song, a poem of itself—­the word itself a dirge,
Amid the wilds, the rocks, the storm and wintry night,
To me such misty, strange tableaux the syllables calling up;
Yonnondio—­I see, far in the west or north, a limitless ravine, with
    plains and mountains dark,
I see swarms of stalwart chieftains, medicine-men,