Thou ancient oak! whose myriad leaves are loud
With sounds of unintelligible speech,
Sounds as of surges on a shingly beach,
Or multitudinous murmurs of a crowd;
With some mysterious gift of tongues endowed,
Thou speakest a different dialect to each;
To me a language that no man can teach,
Of a lost race, long vanished like a cloud.
For underneath thy shade, in days remote,
Seated like Abraham at eventide
Beneath the oaks of Mamre, the unknown
Apostle of the Indians, Eliot, wrote
His Bible in a language that hath died
And is forgotten, save by thee alone.
Keramos and Other Poems 1878
- Nature
- In the Churchyard at Tarrytown
- Eliot's Oak
- The Descent of the Muses
- Venice
- The Poets
- Parker Cleaveland
- The Harvest Moon
- To the River Rhone
- The Three Silences of Molinos
- The Two Rivers
- Boston
- St. John's, Cambridge
- Moods
- Woodstock Park
- The Four Princesses at Wilna
- Holidays
- Wapentake
- The Broken Oar