Vision (by Robert Penn Warren)

Vision
by Robert Penn Warren
[first published in American Poetry Magazine, 5 (December 1922)]

I shall build me a house where the larkspur blooms
    In a narrow glade in an alder wood,
Where the sunset shadows make violent glooms,
    And a whip-poor-will calls in eerie mood.

I shall lie on a bed of river sedge,
    And listen to the glassy dark,
With a guttered light on my window ledge,
    While an owl stares in at me white and stark.

I shall burn my house with the rising dawn,
    And leave but the ashes and smoke behind,
And again give the glade to the owl and the fawn,
    When the grey wood smoke drifts away with the wind.



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Prophecy (by Robert Penn Warren)

Prophecy
by Robert Penn Warren
[first published in The Mess Kit: Food for Thought, Military Training Camps Association, 1922]

You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty holds a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.

You take no joy when dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.

But when it all has passed and you have lost
The swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.



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