Vainly the fowler's eye

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,

As, darkly seen against the crimson sky,

Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?

There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast-
The desert and illimitable air-

Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned,
At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere,
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end;

Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest, And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend, Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He who, from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will lead my steps aright.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

The conclusion of "To a Waterfowl" expresses a moral much more obviously than Wordsworth did in either of the poems just quoted. In fact, ending a poem with a moral is characteristic not only of Bryant but of most of his fellows in the early nineteenth century group of New England poets. Witness the conclusions of two other great compositions:

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

From "Thanatopsis," by William Cullen Bryant

To a description of a tinted shell is applied the following moral, marred by an unfortunate phrase, "shut thee from heaven":

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea! From "The Chambered Nautilus," by Oliver Wendell Holmes

The poem below, now often heard as a song, is a noble expression of the indomitable quality of the human will. Henley, friend of Stevenson, literary critic, and master

of light verse, lay on a sick bed when he wrote it. Invictus means unconquered.

INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

Though sharing with Spenser, Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne the distinction of being a poet for poets, Matthew Arnold is admired less for his metrical subtlety than for his intellectual quality. The following poem, perhaps an echo from Goethe, succinctly reflects its author's philosophy of life.

DESTINY.

Why each is striving, from of old,
To love more deeply than he can?
Still would be true, yet still grows cold?
-Ask of the Powers that sport with man!

They yoked in him, for endless strife,
A heart of ice, a soul of fire;

And hurl'd him on the Field of Life,
An aimless unallay'd Desire.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Whereas Arnold thinks almost wholly in terms of the individual, Kipling thinks in terms of the English racetriumphant, beneficent, conscious of its mission. The title of "The White Man's Burden" has become a current phrase in the language.

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN

Take up the White Man's burden-
Send forth the best ye breed-

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's Burden-
In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain,

To seek another's profit,

And work another's gain.