Ancestral

By Archibald MacLeish 1892–1982 Archibald MacLeish

The star dissolved in evening—the one star

The silently

and night O soon now, soon

And still the light now

and still now the large

Relinquishing

and through the pools of blue

Still, still the swallows

and a wind now

and the tree

Gathering darkness:

I was small. I lay

Beside my mother on the grass, and sleep

Came—

slow hooves and dripping with the dark

The velvet muzzles, the white feet that move

In a dream water

and O soon now soon

Sleep and the night.

And I was not afraid.

Her hand lay over mine. Her fingers knew

Darkness,—and sleep—the silent lands, the far

Far off of morning where I should awake.

Source: Collected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952)

Biography

A poet, playwright, lawyer, and statesman, Archibald MacLeish's roots were firmly planted in both the new and the old worlds. His father, the son of a poor shopkeeper in Glasgow, Scotland, was born in 1837—the year of Victoria's coronation as Queen of England—and ran away first to London and then, at the age of eighteen, to Chicago. His mother was a Hillard, a family that, as Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren . . .

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