Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us --
Nothing now to comfort us, but love's road home: --
Over there beyond the darkness there's a window gleams to greet us,
And a warm hearth waits for us within.
Come away! come away! -- or the roving-fiend will hold us,
And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:
There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,
There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.
So we'll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better
For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: --
The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.
Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us --
Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh
That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,
And the long fall wind on the lake.
Octaves
I
To get at the eternal strength of things,
And fearlessly to make strong songs of it,
Is, to my mind, the mission of that man
The world would call a poet.
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