THE JOYS OF THE ROAD

Carman, Bliss, (1861-1929)

(My friend Molly showed me this poem, and there are a few verses that she said reminded her of me, starting with 'a lover of books', and my heart took it as a true, deep compliment.)

Now the joys of the road are chiefly these

A crimson touch on the hard-wood trees;

A vagrant's morning wide and blue,

In early fall, when the wind walks, too;

A shadowy highway cool and brown,

Alluring up and enticing down

The outward eye, the quiet will,

And the striding heart from hill to hill;

Asking nothing, revealing naught,

But minting his words from a fund of thought,

A keeper of silence eloquent,

Needy, yet royally well content,

A lover of books, but a reader of man,

No cynic and no charlatan,

Who never defers and never demands,

But, smiling, takes the world in his hands,--

Seeing it good as when God first saw

And gave it the weight of his will for law.

And O the joy that is never won,

But follows and follows the journeying sun,

The racy smell of the forest loam,

When the stealthy, sad-heart leaves go home;

(O leaves, O leaves, I am one with you,

Of the mould and the sun and the wind and the dew!)

The broad gold wake of the afternoon;

The silent fleck of the cold new moon;

With only another league to wend;

And two brown arms at the journey's end!

These are the joys of the open road--

For him who travels without a load.