Underneath the stars the houses are awake;
Upward comes no sound my silent watch to break.
Night has hid the street, with all its motley sights;
Miles around, afar, shine out the city lights:

Stars that softly glimmer in a lower sky,
Dearer than, the glories unexplored on high;
Home-stars, that, like eyes, are glistening through the dark,
With a human tremor wavers every spark.

Glittering lamps above and twinkling lamps below;
The remote, strange splendor, the familiar glow:
One Eye, looking downward from creation’s dome,
Sees in both, his children’s window-lights of home.

Who have dwellings there, in avenues of space?
Whose clear torches kindle through the vague sky-place?
Are they holding tapers, us, astray, to guide,
spirit-pioneers, who lately left our side?

Never drops an answer from those worlds unknown:
Yet no ray is shining for itself alone.
Hints of heaven gleam upward, through our earthly nights;
Tremulous with pathos are the city lights:—

Tremulous with pathos of a half-told tale:
Through therein hope flickers, burning low and pale,
It shall win completeness perfect as the sun:
Broken rays shall mingle, earth and heaven be one.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on October 20, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
   But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
   And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
   If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
   And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
   Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
   And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
   And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
   And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
   To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
   Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
   Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
   If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
   Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

This poem is in the public domain.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

This poem is in the public domain.