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A Distant Song

1886 –

1950

Whether awake or sleeping,
I cannot rest for long:
By my casement comes creeping
A distant song.

A song like the chiming of silver
Bells which the breezes play,
Seeming to float for ever
Towards an unseen day:

A song that is weary with sorrow,
Yet knows not any defeat:
Through the past, through to-day, through to-morrow,
It echoes on life’s long street.

Could I but make words of its power,
Bring it from the future here,
Men’s souls would be waking, that hour,
To the victory against fear.

But the vague sweet stanza befools me
With its calm joy, time after time,
And no failure here ever schools me
To cease from an idle rhyme.

That music afar, unspoken,
’Tis I have done it wrong:
I caught, and I have broken,
A distant song.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 29, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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Lincoln

Like a gaunt, scraggly pine
Which lifts its head above the mournful sandhills;
And patiently, through dull years of bitter silence,
Untended and uncared for, starts to grow.

John Gould Fletcher

1917

Dawn

Above the east horizon,
The great red flower of the dawn
Opens slowly, petal by petal;
The trees emerge from darkness
With ghostly silver leaves,
Dew powdered.
Now consciousness emerges
Reluctantly out of tides of sleep;
Finding with cold surprise
No strange new thing to match its dreams,
But merely the familiar shapes
Of bedpost, window-pane, and wall.

John Gould Fletcher

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The Skaters

Black swallows swooping or gliding
In a flurry of entangled loops and curves;
The skaters skim over the frozen river.
And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface,
Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.

John Gould Fletcher

2017

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A Distant Song

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