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...TO A MOSQUITO by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT CA' THE YOWES TO THE KNOWES by ROBERT BURNS SUMMER MATURES by HELENE JOHNSON GRIN by ROBERT WILLIAM SERVICE MANASSAS [JULY 21, 1861] by CATHERINE ANNE WARFIELD O MAGNET-SOUTH by WALT WHITMAN |