Poems by Stephen Vincent Benet

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Captain Kidd

1650-1701

This person in the gaudy clothes

Is worthy Captain Kidd.

They say he never buried gold.

I think, perhaps, he did.

They say it's all a story that

His favorite little song

Was "Make these lubbers walk the plank!"

Stephen Vincent Benet

King David

David sang to his hook-nosed harp:

"The Lord God is a jealous God!

His violent vengeance is swift and sharp!

And the Lord is King above all gods!

"Blest be the Lord, through years untold,

The Lord Who has blessed me a thousand fold!

"Cattle and concubines, corn and hives

Stephen Vincent Benet

Litany for Dictatorships

For all those beaten, for the broken heads,

The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,

The ghosts in the burning city of our time ...

For those taken in rapid cars to the house and beaten

By the skilful boys, the boys with the rubber fists,

—Held down and beaten, the table cutting their loins,

Or kicked in the groin and left, with the muscles jerking

Like a headless hen’s on the floor of the slaughter-house

Stephen Vincent Benet

John James Audobon

1780-1851

Some men live for warlike deeds,

Some for women’s words.

John James Audubon

Lived to look at birds.

Pretty birds and funny birds,

All our native fowl

From the little cedar waxwing

Stephen Vincent Benet

American Names

I have fallen in love with American names,

The sharp names that never get fat,

The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,

The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,

Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,

But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn,

There are English counties like hunting-tunes

Stephen Vincent Benet

Lee

The night had fallen on the narrow tent.

--Deep night of Virginia summer when the stars

Are burning wax in the near, languid sky

And the soft flowers hardly close all night

But bathe in darkness, as a woman bathes

In a warm, fragrant water and distill

Their perfume still, without the fire of the sun.

The army was asleep as armies sleep.

Stephen Vincent Benet

Three Day's Ride

"FROM Belton Castle to Solway side,

Hard by the bridge, is three days' ride."

We had fled full fast from her father's keep,

And the time was come that we must sleep.

The first day was an ecstasy,

A golden mist, a burgeoning tree;

Stephen Vincent Benet

1936

All night they marched, the infantrymen under pack,

But the hands gripping the rifles were naked bone

And the hollow pits of the eyes stared, vacant and black,

When the moonlight shone.

The gas mask lay like a blot on the empty chest,

The slanting helmets were spattered with rust and mold,

But they burrowed the hill for the machine-gun nest

As they had of old.

Stephen Vincent Benet

Difference

My mind’s a map. A mad sea-captain drew it

Under a flowing moon until he knew it;

Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,

And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.

“Here there be tygers.” “Here we buried Jim.”

Here is the strait where eyeless fishes swim

About their buried idol, drowned so cold

He weeps away his eyes in salt and gold.

Stephen Vincent Benet

The General Public

"Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?" — Browning.

"Shelley? Oh, yes, I saw him often then,"

The old man said. A dry smile creased his face

With many wrinkles. "That's a great poem, now!

That one of Browning's! Shelley? Shelley plain?

The time that I remember best is this —

A thin mire crept along the rutted ways,

And all the trees were harried by cold rain

Stephen Vincent Benet

The Falconer Of God

I flung my soul to the air like a falcon flying.

I said, “Wait on, wait on, while I ride below!

I shall start a heron soon

In the marsh beneath the moon—

A strange white heron rising with silver on its wings,

Rising and crying

Wordless, wondrous things;

The secret of the stars, of the world’s heart-strings

Stephen Vincent Benet

The Mountain Whippoorwill

Or, How Hill-Billy Jim Won The Great Fiddler’s Prize

(A Georgia Romance)

Up in the mountains, it's lonesome all the time,

(Sof win' slewin' thu' the sweet-potato vine).

Up in the mountains, it's lonesome for a child,

(Whippoorwills a-callin' when the sap runs wild).

Up in the mountains, mountains in the fog,

Everything as lazy as an old houn' dog.

Stephen Vincent Benet