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Home  »  The World’s Best Poetry  »  A Winter-Evening Hymn to My Fire

Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.

Poems of Home: V. The Home

A Winter-Evening Hymn to My Fire

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

O THOU of home the guardian Lar,

And, when our earth hath wandered far

Into the cold, and deep snow covers

The walks of our New England lovers,

Their sweet secluded evening-star!

’T was with thy rays the English Muse

Ripened her mild domestic hues;

’T was by thy flicker that she conned

The fireside wisdom that enrings

With light from heaven familiar things;

By thee she found the homely faith

In whose mild eyes thy comfort stay’th,

When Death, extinguishing his torch,

Gropes for the latch-string in the porch;

The love that wanders not beyond

His earliest nest, but sits and sings

While children smooth his patient wings:

Therefore with thee I love to read

Our brave old poets: at thy touch how stirs

Life in the withered words! how swift recede

Time’s shadows! and how glows again

Through its dead mass the incandescent verse,

As when upon the anvils of the brain

It glittering lay, cyclopically wrought

By the fast-throbbing hammers of the poet’s thought!

Thou murmurest, too, divinely stirred,

The aspirations unattained,

The rhythms so rathe and delicate,

They bent and strained

And broke, beneath the sombre weight

Of any airiest mortal word.

What warm protection dost thou bend

Round curtained talk of friend with friend,

While the gray snow-storm, held aloof,

To softest outline rounds the roof,

Or the rude North with baffled strain

Shoulders the frost-starred window-pane!

Now the kind nymph to Bacchus borne

By Morpheus’ daughter, she that seems

Gifted upon her natal morn

By him with fire, by her with dreams,

Nicotia, dearer to the Muse

Than all the grapes’ bewildering juice,

We worship, unforbid of thee;

And, as her incense floats and curls

In airy spires and wayward whirls,

Or poises on its tremulous stalk

A flower of frailest revery,

So winds and loiters, idly free,

The current of unguided talk,

Now laughter-rippled, and now caught

In smooth dark pools of deeper thought.

Meanwhile thou mellowest every word,

A sweetly unobtrusive third;

For thou hast magic beyond wine,

To unlock natures each to each;

The unspoken thought thou canst divine:

Thou fill’st the pauses of the speech

With whispers that to dream-land reach,

And frozen fancy-springs unchain,

In Arctic outskirts of the brain;

Sun of all inmost confidences,

To thy rays doth the heart unclose

Its formal calyx of pretences,

That close against rude day’s offences,

And open its shy midnight rose!

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