Song of the Open Road

 

Song of the Open Road

by Walt Whitman


A FOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

The earth—that is sufficient;
I do not want the constellations any nearer;
I know they are very well where they are;
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens;
I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go;
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them;
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return)

Secret and Forgotten Road

A Forest Path in Winter
 by Archibald Lampman

Along this secret and forgotten road
All depths and forest forms, above, below,
Are plumed and draped and hillocked with the snow
A branch cracks now and then, and its soft load
Drifts by me in a thin prismatic shower;
Else not a sound, but vistas bound and crossed
With sheeted gleams and sharp blue shadows, frost,
And utter silence. In his glittering power
The master of mid-winter reveries
Holds all things buried soft and strong and deep.
The busy squirrel has his hidden lair;
And even the spirits of the stalwart trees
Have crept into their utmost roots, and there,
Upcoiled in the close earth, lie fast asleep.

Archibald Lampman, FRSC was a Canadian poet. "He has been described as 'the Canadian Keats;' and he is perhaps the most outstanding exponent of the Canadian school of nature poets." The Canadian Encyclopedia says that he is "generally considered the finest of Canada's late 19th-century poets in English." 

Mt. Shasta 'Heaven On Earth'

The Snows of Shasta

From The Sisson Mirror, November 5, 1896

By Mary C. Bantz

Across the fields all gray and bare,
The foothills rise in ranks of blue,
And through the shadows here and there,
Are flecks of clearer brighter hue-
The Sunset's glow.
The lower hills in shadow rest,
The higher peer above the gloom,
To where, against her shining crest,
The last beams cast the faintest bloom
On Shasta's snow.
In calmest dignity she stands,
While darkness gathers round her base,
And shadows climb with clutching hands,
And clouds approach in billowing race
As wild winds blow.
The winds will wrestle all the night,
And hurl the clouds against her side;
The storm will beat and spend its might,
In effort strong to quell the pride
Of Shasta's snow.
Yet, in tomorrow's cloudless day,
Her stately head with snowy crown
Will sparkle in the sun's first ray,
And mists will chase the shadows down
To vales below.
Through ages gone the storm has sought
To move, to crush that stately form;
But still she stands and yields to naught,
And gathers whiteness from the storm
For Shasta's snow.
If we, who bear the storms of life,
Could calmly patient wait the day,
Could bear the beat of toil and strife,
And never falter on our way
O'er paths of woe.
The light would come, the sun would rise,
And we would stand all strong and sure,
Eternal sunshine in our eyes,
Our doubts at rest, our souls as pure
As Shasta's snow.