Poetry
Henry van Dyke Jr. (1852–1933), 1894
A minister who loved birds, ships and the sea writes plain, musical poems about time, strangers and the guest-right of God — quieter and stranger than its era suggests. Plain, musical verse moves between shore, weather and faith, with a slow, wondering voice and a sailor’s wariness underneath.
Feels like wonder and nostalgia. About nature, faith and time.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy lyrical nature poems, sea songs and quiet religious reflection from an earlier era. Some pieces use period dialect and old-fashioned devotional phrasing, so they can feel slower to a modern ear.
Why read it
These poems give you sea air, honest wonder and a minister’s plain music, a quieter, stranger counterpoint to their era.
Pages from the book
A sailor's love for the sea has fear in it; landsmen never understand.
We men hat go down for a livin’ in ships to the sea—We love it a different way from you poets that ’bide on the land.We are fond of it, sure! But, you take it as comin’ from me,There’s a fear and a hate in our love that a landsman can’t understand.Oh, who could help likin’ the salty smell, and the blueOf the waves that are lazily breathin’ as if they dreamed in the sun?She’s a Sleepin’ Beauty, the sea—but you can’t tell what she’ll do;And the seamen never trust her—they know too well what she’s done! Forty years wasted, and the nerve to ask for them back.
Come, give me back my life again, you heavy-handed Death!Uncrook your fingers from my throat, and let me draw my breath.You do me wrong to take me now—too soon for me to die—Ah, loose me from this clutching pain, and hear the reason why.I know I’ve had my forty years, and wasted every one;And yet, I tell you honestly, my life is just begun;I’ve walked the world like one asleep, a dreamer in a trance;But now you’ve gripped me wide awake—I want another chance. A city of lights, with nobody in it who knows your name.
Wide through the landscape dim the lamps are lit in millions;Long avenues unfold clear-shining lines of gold across the green;Clusters and rings of light, and luminous pavilions—Oh, who will tell the city’s name, and what these wonders mean?Why do they beckon me, and what have they to show me?Crowds in the blazing street, mirth where the feasters meet, kisses and wine:Many to laugh with me, but never one to know me:A cityful of stranger-hearts and none to beat with mine! Henry van Dyke Jr..Woodrow Wilson appointed his friend Henry van Dyke — Presbyterian minister and Princeton professor of English — as U.S. Minister to the Netherlands in 1913.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Poetry for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy lyrical nature poems, sea songs and quiet religious reflection from an earlier era. Some pieces use period dialect and old-fashioned devotional phrasing, so they can feel slower to a modern ear.
- What is Poetry like?
- Plain, musical verse moves between shore, weather and faith, with a slow, wondering voice and a sailor’s wariness underneath. Feels like wonder and nostalgia. About nature, faith and time.
- What should I read after Poetry?
- If you liked Poetry, try My First Summer in the Sierra (John Muir), Poetry (John Keats) and The Land of Little Rain (Mary Austin).
A taste of the feed
Pull on any one thing and the whole mountain moves.
No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers.
My First Summer in the Sierra · John Muir
A song that makes one night feel as old as the species.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Poetry · John Keats
A wish for a last song that holds every kind of joy.
Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song—the joy that makes the earth flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has upon the dust, and knows not a word.
Gitanjali · Rabindranath Tagore
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