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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Arthur L. Phelps

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

An Old Man’s Weariness

Arthur L. Phelps

I WANT to lie alone beside the sedges,

Where the dim-faced waters are quietly singing.

There is peace there, and a deep old happiness

That the drake knows when he is tired of winging

The far heights, and avoiding

The craft of the grey hunter.

I have long avoided the grey hunter Death,

And now I am weary and in much need of learning

What still peace is. I need the voice of the sedges

That knows not any of the old earth yearning

And its cry, but is quiet,

Like the air and the water.