Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889
Mother Margary
By George Shepard Burleigh (18211903)O
Sloped the rough land to the grisly north,
And whose hemlocks, clinging to the ledges,
Like a thinned banditti straggled forth—
In a crouching, wormy-timbered hamlet
Mother Margary shivered in the cold,
With a tattered robe of faded camlet
On her shoulders—crooked, weak, and old.
For her face was very dry and thin,
And the records of his growing measure
Lined and cross-lined all her shrivelled skin.
Scanty goods to her had Heaven allotted,
Yet her thanks rose oftener than desire,
While her bony fingers, bent and knotted,
Fed with withered twigs the dying fire.
Winds howled pitiless around her cot,
Or with long sighs made the jarring splinters
Moan the misery she bemoanèd not.
Drifting tempests rattled at her windows,
And hung snow-wreaths round her naked bed;
While the wind-flaws muttered o’er the cinders
Till the last spark struggled and was dead.
But their dying wrung out no complaints;
Cold, and penury, neglect, and hunger—
These to Margary were guardian saints.
When she sat, her head was prayer-like bending;
When she rose, it rose not any more;
Faster seemed her true heart graveward tending
Than her tired feet, weak and travel-sore.
Had been mother of the brave and fair;
But her branches, bough by bough, were scattered
Till her torn heart was left dry and bare.
Yet she knew, though sorely desolated,
When the children of the poor depart,
Their earth-vestures are but sublimated,
So to gather closer in the heart.
Words to speak it to the soul it blessed,
She endured, in silence and unpitied,
Woes enough to mar a stouter breast.
There was born such holy trust within her,
That the graves of all who had been dear,
To a region clearer and serener
Raised her spirit from our chilly sphere.
Angels to her were the loves and hopes
Which had left her purified, but sadder;
And they lured her to the emerald slopes
Of that heaven where anguish never flashes
Her red fire-whip,—happy land, whose flowers
Blossom over the volcanic ashes
Of this blighted, blighting world of ours.
All her wisdom was a mystic faith
That the rough world’s jargoning and rudeness
Turn to music at the gate of death.
So she walked while feeble limbs allowed her,
Knowing well that any stubborn grief
She might meet with could no more than crowd her
To that wall whose opening was relief.
Lone and peaceful, on the rocky slope;
And, when burning trials came, would borrow
New fire of them for the lamp of hope.
When at last her palsied hand, in groping,
Rattled tremulous at the grated tomb,
Heaven flashed round her joys beyond her hoping,
And her young soul gladdened into bloom.