The Poet
Sunlight was something more than that to him.
It was a halo when it formed a rim
Around some far-off mountain peak. He called
It thin-beat leaf of gold, and stood enthralled
When it lay still on some half-sheltered spot
In gilt mosaics where the trees forgot
To hide the grasses carpeting the spot.
The sky to him was not just the blue sky,
But a deep, painted bowl with clouds piled high;
And when these clouds were tinted burning red,
Or gold and bacchic purple, then he said:
“The too-full goblets of the gods had over-run,
Nor give the credit to the disappearing sun
Who flames before he leaves the world in dun.”
Between his eyes and life fate seemed to hold
A magic tissue of transparent gold,
That freed his vision from the dull, drab, hopeless part,
And kept alive a fresh, unsaddened heart.
And all unselfishly he tried to share
His gift with us who see the harsh and bare;
But we refused. We did not know nor care.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on November 8, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The Poet” appeared in The American Indian, Vol. 1, No. 5 (February 1927). The poem was later collected in the anthology Changing Is Not Vanishing (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), in which Robert Dale Parker, professor of English and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois, remarks, “More than any other poet in this collection, more even than Lynn Riggs, [Mary Cornelia] Hartshorne’s sophisticated sense of the poetic line, with its flexible length and its flexible array of enjambments and caesuras, anticipates the style of later poetry.”