Excerpt
RHYMES OF A ROLLING STONE Prelude I sing no idle songs of dalliance days,No dreams Elysian inspire my rhyming;I have no Celia to enchant my lays,No pipes of Pan have set my heart to chiming.I am no wordsmith dripping gems divineInto the golden chalice of a sonnet;If love songs witch you, close this book of mine,Waste no time on it.Yet bring I to my work an eager joy,A lusty love of life and all things human;Still in me leaps the wonder of the boy,A pride in man, a deathless faith in woman.Still red blood calls, still rings the valiant fray;Adventure beacons through the summer gloaming:Oh long and long and long will be the dayEre I come homing!This earth is ours to love: lute, brush and pen,They are but tongues to tell of life sincerely;The thaumaturgic Day, the might of men,O God of Scribes, grant us to grave them clearly!Grant heart that homes in heart, then all is well.Honey is honey-sweet, howe'er the hiving.Each to his work, his wage at evening bellThe strength of striving. A Rolling Stone There's sunshine in the heart of me,My blood sings in the breeze;The mountains are a part of me,I'm fellow to the trees.My golden youth I'm squandering,Sun-libertine am I;A-wandering, a-wandering,Until the day I die.I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,And I roomed in the cool of a cave;I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,The fret and the sweat of a slave:For far over all that folks hold worth,There lives and there leaps in meA love of the lowly things of earth,And a passion to be free.To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,To range and to change at will;To mock at the mastership of man,To seek Adventure's thrill.Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;To go my own sweet way;To reck not at all what may befall,But to live and to love each day.To make my body a temple pureWherein I dwell serene;To care for the things that shall endure,The simple, sweet and clean.To oust out envy and hate and rage,To breathe with no alarm;For Nature shall be my anchorage,And none shall do me harm.To shun all lures that debauch the soul,The orgied rites of the rich;To eat my crust as a rover mustWith the rough-neck down in the ditch.To trudge by his side whate'er betide;To share his fire at night;To call him friend to the long trail-end,And to read his heart aright.To scorn all strife, and to view all lifeWith the curious eyes of a child;From the plangent sea to the prairie,From the slum to the heart of the Wild.From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,From the vast to the greatly small;For I know that the whole for good is planned,And I want to see it all.To see it all, the wide world-way,From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;With never a one to say me nay,And none to cramp my soul.In belly-pinch I will pay the price,But God! let me be free;For once I know in the long ago,They made a slave of me.In a flannel shirt from earth's clean dirt,Here, pal, is my calloused hand!Oh, I love each day as a rover may,Nor seek to understand....