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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Kentucky Poems, by Madison J. Cawein
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Kentucky Poems
+
+Author: Madison J. Cawein
+
+Commentator: Edmund Gosse
+
+Release Date: July 9, 2011 [EBook #36661]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KENTUCKY POEMS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Garcia, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  The Author's thanks are due to Mr. R. H. RUSSELL, of New York, for
+  kind permission to reprint from _Shapes and Shadows_ four of the poems
+  published in this volume.
+
+
+
+
+                             KENTUCKY POEMS
+
+                            BY MADISON CAWEIN
+
+
+                  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EDMUND GOSSE
+
+                                NEW YORK
+                           E. P. DUTTON & CO.
+                                  1903
+
+
+
+
+  NOTE
+
+
+  The poems included in this volume have been selected from the
+  following volumes of the author: _Moods and Memories_, _Red Leaves and
+  Roses_, _Poems of Nature and Love_, _Intimations of the Beautiful_,
+  _Days and Dreams_, _Undertones_, _Idyllic Monologues_, _The Garden of
+  Dreams_, _Shapes and Shadows_, _Myth and Romance_, and _Weeds by the
+  Wall_. None of the longer poems have been included in this selection.
+
+
+
+
+  CONTENTS
+
+
+  PROLOGUE
+
+  FOREST AND FIELD
+
+  SUMMER
+
+  TO SORROW
+
+  NIGHT
+
+  A FALLEN BEECH
+
+  A TWILIGHT MOTH
+
+  THE GRASSHOPPER
+
+  BEFORE THE RAIN
+
+  AFTER RAIN
+
+  THE HAUNTED HOUSE
+
+  OCTOBER
+
+  INDIAN SUMMER
+
+  ALONG THE OHIO
+
+  A COIGN OF THE FOREST
+
+  CREOLE SERENADE
+
+  WILL O' THE WISPS
+
+  THE TOLLMAN'S DAUGHTER
+
+  THE BOY COLUMBUS
+
+  SONG OF THE ELF
+
+  THE OLD INN
+
+  THE MILL-WATER
+
+  THE DREAM
+
+  SPRING TWILIGHT
+
+  A SLEET-STORM IN MAY
+
+  UNREQUITED
+
+  THE HEART O' SPRING
+
+  'A BROKEN RAINBOW ON THE SKIES OF MAY'
+
+  ORGIE
+
+  REVERIE
+
+  LETHE
+
+  DIONYSIA
+
+  THE NAIAD
+
+  THE LIMNAD
+
+  INTIMATIONS
+
+  BEFORE THE TEMPLE
+
+  ANTHEM OF DAWN
+
+  AT THE LANE'S END
+
+  THE FARMSTEAD
+
+  A FLOWER OF THE FIELDS
+
+  THE FEUD
+
+  LYNCHERS
+
+  DEAD MAN'S RUN
+
+  AUGUST
+
+  THE BUSH-SPARROW
+
+  QUIET
+
+  MUSIC
+
+  THE PURPLE VALLEYS
+
+  A DREAM SHAPE
+
+  THE OLD BARN
+
+  THE WOOD WITCH
+
+  AT SUNSET
+
+  MAY
+
+  RAIN
+
+  TO FALL
+
+  SUNSET IN AUTUMN
+
+  THE HILLS
+
+  CONTENT
+
+  HEART OF MY HEART
+
+  OCTOBER
+
+  MYTH AND ROMANCE
+
+  GENIUS LOCI
+
+  DISCOVERY
+
+  THE OLD SPRING
+
+  THE FOREST SPRING
+
+  TRANSMUTATION
+
+  DEAD CITIES
+
+  FROST
+
+  A NIGHT IN JUNE
+
+  THE DREAMER
+
+  WINTER
+
+  MID-WINTER
+
+  SPRING
+
+  TRANSFORMATION
+
+  RESPONSE
+
+  THE SWASHBUCKLER
+
+  SIMULACRA
+
+  CAVERNS
+
+  THE BLUE BIRD
+
+  QUATRAINS
+
+  ADVENTURERS
+
+  EPILOGUE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Since the disappearance of the latest survivors of that graceful and
+somewhat academic school of poets who ruled American literature so long
+from the shores of Massachusetts, serious poetry in the United States
+seems to have been passing through a crisis of languor. Perhaps there is
+no country on the civilised globe where, in theory, verse is treated
+with more respect and, in practice, with a greater lack of grave
+consideration than America. No conjecture as to the reason of this must
+be attempted here, further than to suggest that the extreme value set
+upon sharpness, ingenuity and rapid mobility is obviously calculated to
+depreciate and to condemn the quiet practice of the most meditative of
+the arts. Hence we find that it is what is called 'humorous' verse which
+is mainly in fashion on the western side of the Atlantic. Those rhymes
+are most warmly welcomed which play the most preposterous tricks with
+language, which dazzle by the most mountebank swiftness of turn, and
+which depend most for their effect upon paradox and the negation of
+sober thought. It is probable that the diseased craving for what is
+'smart,' 'snappy' and wide-awake, and the impulse to see everything
+foreshortened and topsy-turvy, must wear themselves out before cooler
+and more graceful tastes again prevail in imaginative literature.
+
+Whatever be the cause, it is certain that this is not a moment when
+serious poetry, of any species, is flourishing in the United States. The
+absence of anything like a common impulse among young writers, of any
+definite and intelligible, if excessive, _parti pris_, is immediately
+observable if we contrast the American, for instance, with the French
+poets of the last fifteen years. Where there is no school and no clear
+trend of executive ambition, the solitary artist, whose talent forces
+itself up into the light and air, suffers unusual difficulties, and runs
+a constant danger of being choked in the aimless mediocrity that
+surrounds him. We occasionally meet with a poet in the history of
+literature, of whom we are inclined to say, Charming as he is, he would
+have developed his talent more evenly and conspicuously,--with greater
+decorum, perhaps,--if he had been accompanied from the first by other
+young men like-minded, who would have formed for him an atmosphere and
+cleared for him a space. This is the one regret I feel in contemplating,
+as I have done for years past, the ardent and beautiful talent of Mr.
+Cawein. I deplore the fact that he seems to stand alone in his
+generation; I think his poetry would have been even better than it is,
+and its qualities would certainly have been more clearly perceived, and
+more intelligently appreciated, if he were less isolated. In his own
+country, at this particular moment, in this matter of serious
+nature-painting in lyric verse, Mr. Cawein possesses what Cowley would
+have called 'a monopoly of wit,' In one of his lyrics Mr. Cawein asks--
+
+    'The song-birds, are they flown away,
+      The song-birds of the summer-time,
+    That sang their souls into the day,
+      And set the laughing hours to rhyme?
+    No cat-bird scatters through the hush
+      The sparkling crystals of her song;
+    Within the woods no hermit-thrush
+      Trails an enchanted flute along.'
+
+To this inquiry, the answer is: the only hermit-thrush now audible
+seems to sing from Louisville, Kentucky. America will, we may be
+perfectly sure, calm herself into harmony again, and possess once more
+her school of singers. In those coming days, history may perceive in Mr.
+Cawein the golden link that bound the music of the past to the music of
+the future through an interval of comparative tunelessness.
+
+The career of Mr. Madison Cawein is represented to me as being most
+uneventful. He seems to have enjoyed unusual advantages for the
+cultivation and protection of the poetical temperament. He was born on
+the 23rd of March 1865, in the metropolis of Kentucky, the vigorous city
+of Louisville, on the southern side of the Ohio, in the midst of a
+country celebrated for tobacco and whisky and Indian corn. These are
+commodities which may be consumed in excess, but in moderation they make
+glad the heart of man. They represent a certain glow of the earth, they
+indicate the action of a serene and gentle climate upon a rich soil. It
+was in this delicate and voluptuous state of Kentucky that Mr. Cawein
+was born, that he was educated, that he became a poet, and that he has
+lived ever since. His blood is full of the colour and odour of his
+native landscape. The solemn books of history tell us that Kentucky was
+discovered in 1769, by Daniel Boone, a hunter. But he first discovers a
+country who sees it first, and teaches the world to see it; no doubt
+some day the city of Louisville will erect, in one of its principal
+squares, a statue to 'Madison Cawein, who discovered the Beauty of
+Kentucky.' The genius of this poet is like one of those deep rivers of
+his native state, which cut paths through the forests of chestnut and
+hemlock as they hurry towards the south and west, brushing with the
+impulsive fringe of their currents the rhododendrons and calmias and
+azaleas that bend from the banks to be mirrored in their flushing
+waters.
+
+Mr. Cawein's vocation to poetry was irresistible. I do not know that he
+ever tried to resist it. I have even the idea that a little more
+resistance would have been salutary for a talent which nothing could
+have discouraged, and which opposition might have taught the arts of
+compression and selection. Mr. Cawein suffered at first, I think, from
+lack of criticism more than from lack of eulogy. From his early writings
+I seem to gather an impression of a Louisville more ready to praise what
+was second-rate than what was first-rate, and practically, indeed,
+without any scale of appreciation whatever. This may be a mistake of
+mine; at all events, Mr. Cawein has had more to gain from the passage
+of years in self-criticism than in inspiring enthusiasm. The fount was
+in him from the first; but it bubbled forth before he had digged a
+definite channel for it. Sometimes, to this very day, he sports with the
+principles of syntax as Nature played games so long ago with the
+fantastic caverns of the valley of the Green River or with the
+coral-reefs of his own Ohio. He has bad rhymes, amazing in so delicate
+an ear; he has awkwardness of phrase not expected in one so plunged in
+contemplation of the eternal harmony of Nature. But these grow fewer and
+less obtrusive as the years pass by.
+
+The virgin timber-forests of Kentucky, the woods of honey-locust and
+buck-eye, of white oak and yellow poplar, with their clearings full of
+flowers unknown to us by sight or name, from which in the distance are
+visible the domes of the far-away Cumberland Mountains, this seems to
+be the hunting-field of Mr. Cawein's imagination. Here all, it must be
+confessed, has hitherto been unfamiliar to the Muses. If Persephone 'of
+our Cumnor cowslips never heard,' how much less can her attention have
+been arrested by clusters of orchids from the Ocklawaha, or by the song
+of the Whippoorwill, rung out when 'the west was hot geranium-red' under
+the boughs of a black-jack on the slopes of Mount Kinnex. 'Not here,'
+one is inclined to exclaim, 'not here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for
+thee,' but the art of the poet is displayed by his skill in breaking
+down these prejudices of time and place. Mr. Cawein reconciles us to his
+strange landscape--the strangeness of which one has to admit is mainly
+one of nomenclature,--by the exercise of a delightful instinctive
+pantheism. He brings the ancient gods to Kentucky, and it is marvellous
+how quickly they learn to be at home there. Here is Bacchus, with a
+spicy fragment of calamus-root in his hand, trampling down the blue-eyed
+grass, and skipping, with the air of a hunter born, into the hickory
+thicket, to escape Artemis, whose robes, as she passes swiftly with her
+dogs through the woods, startle the humming-birds, silence the green
+tree-frogs, and fill the hot still air with the perfumes of peppermint
+and pennyroyal. It is a queer landscape, but one of new natural
+beauties frankly and sympathetically discovered, and it forms a _mise en
+scene_ which, I make bold to say, would have scandalised neither Keats
+nor Spenser.
+
+It was Mr. Howells,--ever as generous in discovering new native talent
+as he is unflinching in reproof of the effeteness of European
+taste,--who first drew attention to the originality and beauty of Mr.
+Cawein's poetry. The Kentucky poet had, at that time, published but one
+tentative volume, the _Blooms of the Berry_, of 1887. This was followed,
+in 1888, by _The Triumph of Music_, and since then hardly a year has
+passed without a slender sheaf of verse from Mr. Cawein's garden. Among
+these (if a single volume is to be indicated), the quality which
+distinguishes him from all other poets,--the Kentucky flavour, if we may
+call it so,--is perhaps to be most agreeably detected in _Intimations of
+the Beautiful_. But it is time that I should leave the American lyrist
+to make his own appeal to English ears, with but one additional word of
+explanation, namely, that in this selection Mr. Cawein's narrative poems
+on mediaeval themes, and in general his cosmopolitan writings, have been
+neglected in favour of such lyrics as would present him most vividly in
+his own native landscape, no visitor in spirit to Europe, but at home
+in that bright and exuberant West--
+
+    Where, in the hazy morning, runs
+      The stony branch that pools and drips,
+      Where red-haws and the wild-rose hips
+    Are strewn like pebbles; where the sun's
+      Own gold seems captured by the weeds;
+      To see, through scintillating seeds,
+    The hunters steal with glimmering guns.
+    To stand within the dewy ring
+      Where pale death smites the bone-set blooms,
+      And everlasting's flowers, and plumes
+    Of mint, with aromatic wing!
+      And hear the creek,--whose sobbing seems
+      A wild man murmuring in his dreams,--
+    And insect violins that sing!
+
+So sweet a voice, so consonant with the music
+of the singers of past times, heard in a place so
+fresh and strange, will surely not pass without
+its welcome from the lovers of genuine poetry.
+
+                                     EDMUND GOSSE.
+
+
+
+
+    PROLOGUE
+
+
+     _There is a poetry that speaks
+       Through common things: the grasshopper,
+     That in the hot weeds creaks and creaks,
+       Says all of summer to my ear:
+       And in the cricket's cry I hear
+     The fireside speak, and feel the frost
+       Work mysteries of silver near
+     On country casements, while, deep lost
+    In snow, the gatepost seems a sheeted ghost.
+
+        And other things give rare delight:
+       Those guttural harps the green-frogs tune,
+     Those minstrels of the falling night,
+       That hail the sickle of the moon
+          From grassy pools that glass her lune:
+     Or,--all of August in its loud
+       Dry cry,--the locust's call at noon,
+     That tells of heat and never a cloud
+    To veil the pitiless sun as with a shroud.
+
+        The rain,--whose cloud dark-lids the moon,
+       The great white eyeball of the night,--
+     Makes music for me; to its tune
+       I hear the flowers unfolding white,
+       The mushroom growing, and the slight
+     Green sound of grass that dances near;
+       The melon ripening with delight;
+     And in the orchard, soft and clear,
+    The apple redly rounding out its sphere.
+
+        The grigs make music as of old,
+       To which the fairies whirl and shine
+        Within the moonlight's prodigal gold,
+       On woodways wild with many a vine:
+       When all the wilderness with wine
+     Of stars is drunk, I hear it say--
+       'Is God restricted to confine
+     His wonders only to the day,
+    That yields the abstract tangible to clay?'
+
+        And to my ear the wind of Morn,--
+       When on her rubric forehead far
+     One star burns big,--lifts a vast horn
+       Of wonder where all murmurs are:
+       In which I hear the waters war,
+     The torrent and the blue abyss,
+       And pines,--that terrace bar on bar
+     The mountain side,--like lovers' kiss,
+    And whisper words where naught but grandeur is.
+
+        The jutting crags,--all iron-veined
+       With ore,--the peaks, where eagles scream,
+     That pour their cataracts, rainbow-stained,
+       Like hair, in many a mountain stream,
+       Can lift my soul beyond the dream
+     Of all religions; make me scan
+       No mere external or extreme,
+     But inward pierce the outward plan
+    And learn that rocks have souls as well as man._
+
+
+
+
+    FOREST AND FIELD
+
+
+    I
+
+    Green, watery jets of light let through
+    The rippling foliage drenched with dew;
+    And golden glimmers, warm and dim,
+    That in the vistaed distance swim;
+    Where, 'round the wood-spring's oozy urn,
+    The limp, loose fronds of forest fern
+    Trail like the tresses, green and wet,
+    A wood-nymph binds with violet.
+    O'er rocks that bulge and roots that knot
+    The emerald-amber mosses clot;
+    From matted walls of brier and brush
+    The elder nods its plumes of plush;
+    And, Argus-eyed with many a bloom,
+    The wild-rose breathes its wild perfume;
+    May-apples, ripening yellow, lean
+    With oblong fruit, a lemon-green,
+    Near Indian-turnips, long of stem,
+    That bear an acorn-oval gem,
+    As if some woodland Bacchus there,--
+    While braiding locks of hyacinth hair
+    With ivy-tod,--had idly tost
+    His thyrsus down and so had lost:
+    And blood-root, that from scarlet wombs
+    Puts forth, in spring, its milk-white blooms,
+    That then like starry footsteps shine
+    Of April under beech and pine;
+    At which the gnarled eyes of trees
+    Stare, big as Fauns' at Dryades,
+    That bend above a fountain's spar
+    As white and naked as a star.
+
+    The stagnant stream flows sleepily
+    Thick with its lily-pads; the bee,--
+    All honey-drunk, a Bassarid,--
+    Booms past the mottled toad, that, hid
+    In calamus-plants and blue-eyed grass,
+    Beside the water's pooling glass,
+    Silenus-like, eyes stolidly
+    The Maenad-glittering dragonfly.
+    And pennyroyal and peppermint
+    Pour dry-hot odours without stint
+    From fields and banks of many streams;
+    And in their scent one almost seems
+    To see Demeter pass, her breath
+    Sweet with her triumph over death.--
+    A haze of floating saffron; sound
+    Of shy, crisp creepings o'er the ground;
+    The dip and stir of twig and leaf;
+    Tempestuous gusts of spices brief
+    Borne over bosks of sassafras
+    By winds that foot it on the grass;
+    Sharp, sudden songs and whisperings,
+    That hint at untold hidden things--
+    Pan and Sylvanus who of old
+    Kept sacred each wild wood and wold.
+    A wily light beneath the trees
+    Quivers and dusks with every breeze--
+    A Hamadryad, haply, who,--
+    Culling her morning meal of dew
+    From frail, accustomed cups of flowers,--
+    Now sees some Satyr in the bowers,
+    Or hears his goat-hoof snapping press
+    Some brittle branch, and in distress
+    Shrinks back; her dark, dishevelled hair
+    Veiling her limbs one instant there.
+
+
+    II
+
+    Down precipices of the dawn
+    The rivers of the day are drawn,
+    The soundless torrents, free and far,
+    Of gold that deluge every star.
+    There is a sound of brooks and wings
+    That fills the woods with carollings;
+    And, dashed on moss and flow'r and fern,
+    And leaves, that quiver, breathe and burn,
+    Rose-radiance smites the solitudes,
+    The dew-drenched hills, the dripping woods,
+    That twitter as with canticles
+    Of shade and light; and wind, that smells
+    Of flowers, and buds, and boisterous bees,
+    Delirious honey, and wet trees.--
+    Through briers that trip them, one by one,
+    With swinging pails, that take the sun,
+    A troop of girls comes--berriers,
+    Whose bare feet glitter where they pass
+    Through dewdrop-trembling tufts of grass.
+    And, oh! their laughter and their cheers
+    Wake Echo 'mid her shrubby rocks
+    Who, answering, from her mountain mocks
+    With rapid fairy horns; as if
+    Each mossy vale and weedy cliff
+    Had its imperial Oberon,
+    Who, seeking his Titania, hid
+    In coverts caverned from the sun,
+    In kingly wrath had called and chid.
+
+    Cloud-feathers, oozing orange light,
+    Make rich the Indian locks of night;
+    Her dusky waist with sultry gold
+    Girdled and buckled fold on fold.
+    One star. A sound of bleating flocks.
+    Great shadows stretched along the rocks,
+    Like giant curses overthrown
+    By some Arthurian champion.
+    Soft-swimming sorceries of mist
+    That streak blue glens with amethyst.
+    And, tinkling in the clover dells,
+    The twilight sound of cattle-bells.
+    And where the marsh in reed and grass
+    Burns, angry as a shattered glass,
+    The flies make golden blurs, that shine
+    Like drops of amber-scattered wine
+    Spun high by reeling Bacchanals,
+    When Bacchus wreathes his curling hair
+    With vine-leaves, and from every lair
+    His worshippers around him calls.
+    They come, they come, a happy throng,
+    The berriers with gibe and song;
+    Their pails brimmed black to tin-bright eaves
+    With luscious fruit, kept cool with leaves
+    Of aromatic sassafras;
+    'Twixt which some sparkling berry slips,
+    Like laughter, from the purple mass,
+    Wine-swollen as Silenus' lips.
+
+
+    III
+
+    The tanned and tired noon climbs high
+    Up burning reaches of the sky;
+    Below the drowsy belts of pines
+    The rock-ledged river foams and shines;
+    And over rainless hill and dell
+    Is blown the harvest's sultry smell:
+    While, in the fields, one sees and hears
+    The brawny-throated harvesters,--
+    Their red brows beaded with the heat,--
+    By twos and threes among the wheat
+    Flash their hot scythes; behind them press
+    The binders--men and maids that sing
+    Like some mad troop of piping Pan;--
+    While all the hillsides swoon and ring
+    Such sounds of Ariel airiness
+    As haunted freckled Caliban.
+    'O ho! O ho! 'tis noon I say.
+        The roses blow.
+    Away, away, above the hay,
+    To the tune o' the bees the roses sway;
+    The love-songs that they hum all day,
+        So low! So low!
+    The roses' Minnesingers they.'
+
+    Up velvet lawns of lilac skies
+    The tawny moon begins to rise
+    Behind low, blue-black hills of trees,--
+    As rises up, in Siren seas,
+    To rock in purple deeps, hip-hid,
+    A virgin-bosomed Oceanid.--
+    Gaunt shadows crouch by tree and scaur,
+    Like shaggy Satyrs waiting for
+    The moonbeam Nymphs, the Dryads white,
+    That take with loveliness the night,
+    And glorify it with their love.
+    The sweet, far notes I hear, I hear,
+    Beyond dim pines and mellow ways,
+    The song of some fair harvester,
+    The lovely Limnad of the grove,
+    Whose singing charms me while it slays.
+    'O deep! O deep! the earth and air
+        Are sunk in sleep.
+    Adieu to care! Now everywhere
+    Is rest; and by the old oak there
+    The maiden with the nut-brown hair
+        Doth keep, doth keep
+    Tryst with her lover the young and fair.'
+
+
+    IV
+
+    Like Atalanta's spheres of gold,
+    Within the orchard, apples rolled
+    From sudden hands of boughs that lay
+    Their leaves, like palms, against the day;
+    And near them pears of rusty brown
+    Lay bruised; and peaches, pink with down,
+    And furry as the ears of Pan,
+    Or, like Diana's cheeks, a tan
+    Beneath which burnt a tender fire;
+    Or wan as Psyche's with desire.
+    And down the orchard vistas,--young,
+    A hickory basket by him swung,
+    A straw-hat, 'gainst the sloping sun
+    Drawn brim-broad o'er his face,--he strode;
+    As if he looked to find some one,
+    His eyes far-fixed beyond the road.
+    Before him, like a living burr,
+    Rattled the noisy grasshopper.
+    And where the cows' melodious bells
+    Trailed music up and down the dells,
+    Beside the spring, that o'er the ground
+    Went whimpering like a fretful hound,
+    He saw her waiting, fair and slim,
+    Her pail forgotten there, for him.
+
+    Yellow as sunset skies and pale
+    As fairy clouds that stay or sail
+    Through azure vaults of summer, blue
+    As summer heavens, the wild-flowers grew;
+    And blossoms on which spurts of light
+    Fell laughing, like the lips one might
+    Feign for a Hebe, or a girl
+    Whose mouth is laughter-lit with pearl.
+    Long ferns, in murmuring masses heaped;
+    And mosses moist, in beryl steeped
+    And musk aromas of the wood
+    And silence of the solitude:
+    And everything that near her blew
+    The spring had showered thick with dew.--
+    Across the rambling fence she leaned,
+    Her fresh, round arms all white and bare;
+    Her artless beauty, bonnet-screened,
+    Rich-coloured with its auburn hair.
+    A wood-thrush gurgled in a vine--
+    Ah! 'tis his step, 'tis he she hears;
+    The wild-rose smelt like some rare wine--
+    He comes, ah, yes! 'tis he who nears.
+    And her brown eyes and all her face
+    Said welcome. And with rustic grace
+    He leant beside her; and they had
+    Some talk with youthful laughter glad:
+    I know not what; I know but this
+    Its final period was a kiss.
+
+
+
+
+    SUMMER
+
+
+    I
+
+    Hang out your loveliest star, O Night! O Night!
+        Your richest rose, O Dawn!
+    To greet sweet Summer, her, who, clothed in light,
+        Leads Earth's best hours on.
+    Hark! how the wild birds of the woods
+    Throat it within the dewy solitudes!
+        The brook sings low and soft,
+          The trees make song,
+        As, from her heaven aloft
+    Comes blue-eyed Summer like a girl along.
+
+
+    II
+
+    And as the Day, her lover, leads her in,
+        How bright his beauty glows!
+    How red his lips, that ever try to win
+        Her mouth's delicious rose!
+    And from the beating of his heart
+    Warm winds arise and sighing thence depart;
+        And from his eyes and hair
+          The light and dew
+        Fall round her everywhere,
+    And Heaven above her is an arch of blue.
+
+
+    III
+
+    Come to the forest, or the treeless meadows
+        Deep with their hay or grain;
+    Come where the hills lift high their thrones of shadows,
+        Where tawny orchards reign.
+    Come where the reapers whet the scythe;
+    Where golden sheaves are heaped; where berriers blythe,
+        With willow-basket and with pail,
+          Swarm knoll and plain;
+        Where flowers freckle every vale,
+    And beauty goes with hands of berry-stain.
+
+
+    IV
+
+    Come where the dragon-flies, a brassy blue,
+        Flit round the wildwood streams,
+    And, sucking at some horn of honey-dew,
+        The wild-bee hums and dreams.
+    Come where the butterfly waves wings of sleep,
+    Gold-disked and mottled over blossoms deep;
+        Come where beneath the rustic bridge
+          The green frog cries;
+        Or in the shade the rainbowed midge,
+    Above the emerald pools, with murmurings flies.
+
+
+    V
+
+    Come where the cattle browse within the brake,
+        As red as oak and strong;
+    Where far-off bells the echoes faintly wake,
+        And milkmaids sing their song.
+    Come where the vine-trailed rocks, with waters hoary,
+    Tell to the sun some legend or some story;
+        Or, where the sunset to the land
+          Speaks words of gold;
+        Where ripeness walks, a wheaten band
+    Around her hair and blossoms manifold.
+
+
+    VI
+
+    Come where the woods lift up their stalwart arms
+        Unto the star-sown skies;
+    Knotted and gnarled, that to the winds and storms
+        Fling mighty rhapsodies:
+    Or to the moon repeat what they have seen,
+    When Night upon their shoulders vast doth lean.
+        Come where the dew's clear syllable
+          Drips from the rose;
+        And where the fireflies fill
+    The night with golden music of their glows.
+
+
+    VII
+
+    Now while the dingles and the vine-roofed glens
+        Whisper their flowery tale
+    Unto the silence; and the lakes and fens
+        Unto the moonlight pale
+    Murmur their rapture, let us seek her out,
+    Her of the honey throat, and peachy pout,
+        Summer! and at her feet,
+          The love of old
+        Lay like a sheaf of wheat,
+    And of our hearts the purest gold of gold.
+
+
+
+
+    TO SORROW
+
+
+    I
+
+    O dark-eyed goddess of the marble brow,
+      Whose look is silence and whose touch is night,
+    Who walkest lonely through the world, O thou,
+      Who sittest lonely with Life's blown-out light;
+    Who in the hollow hours of night's noon
+      Criest like some lost child;
+    Whose anguish-fevered eyeballs seek the moon
+      To cool their pulses wild.
+    Thou who dost bend to kiss Joy's sister cheek,
+      Turning its rose to alabaster; yea,
+    Thou who art terrible and mad and meek,
+      Why in my heart art thou enshrined to-day?
+          O Sorrow say, O say!
+
+
+    II
+
+    Now Spring is here and all the world is white,
+      I will go forth, and where the forest robes
+    Itself in green, and every hill and height
+      Crowns its fair head with blossoms,--spirit globes
+    Of hyacinth and crocus dashed with dew,--
+      I will forget my grief,
+    And thee, O Sorrow, gazing on the blue,
+      Beneath a last year's leaf,
+    Of some brief violet the south wind woos,
+      Or bluet, whence the west wind raked the snow;
+    The baby eyes of love, the darling hues
+      Of happiness, that thou canst never know,
+          O child of pain and woe.
+
+
+    III
+
+    On some hoar upland, sweet with clustered thorns,
+      Hard by a river's windy white of waves,
+    I shall sit down with Spring,--whose eyes are morns
+      Of light; whose cheeks the rose of health enslaves,--
+    And so forget thee braiding in her hair
+      The snowdrop, tipped with green,
+    The cool-eyed primrose and the trillium fair,
+      And moony celandine.
+    Contented so to lie within her arms,
+      Forgetting all the sear and sad and wan,
+    Remembering love alone, who o'er earth's storms,
+      High on the mountains of perpetual dawn,
+          Leads the glad hours on.
+
+
+    IV
+
+    Or in the peace that follows storm, when Even,
+      Within the west, stands dreaming lone and far,
+    Clad on with green and silver, and the Heaven
+      Is brightly brooched with one gold-glittering star.
+    I will lie down beside some mountain lake,
+      'Round which the tall pines sigh,
+    And breathing musk of rain from boughs that shake
+      Storm balsam from on high,
+    Make friends of Dream and Contemplation high
+      And Music, listening to the mocking-bird,--
+    Who through the hush sends its melodious cry,--
+      And so forget a while that other word,
+          That all loved things must die.
+
+
+
+
+    NIGHT
+
+
+    Out of the East, as from an unknown shore,
+      Thou comest with thy children in thine arms,--
+    Slumber and Dream,--whom mortals all adore,
+      Their flowing raiment sculptured to their charms:
+    Soft on thy breast thy lovely children rest,
+    Laid like twin roses in one balmy nest.
+      Silent thou comest, swiftly too and slow.
+    There is no other presence like to thine,
+    When thou approachest with thy babes divine,
+      Thy shadowy face above them bending low,
+    Blowing the ringlets from their brows of snow.
+
+    Oft have I taken Sleep from thy dark arms,
+      And fondled her fair head, with poppies wreathed,
+    Within my bosom's depths, until its storms
+      With her were hushed and I but faintly breathed.
+    And then her sister, Dream, with frolic art
+    Arose from rest, and on my sleeping heart
+      Blew bubbles of dreams where elfin worlds were lost;
+    Worlds where my stranger soul sang songs to me,
+    And talked with spirits by a rainbowed sea,
+      Or smiled, an unfamiliar shape of frost,
+    Floating on gales of breathless melody.
+
+    Day comes to us in garish glory garbed;
+      But thou, thou bringest to the tired heart
+    Rest and deep silence, in which are absorbed
+      All the vain tumults of the mind and mart.
+    Whether thou comest with hands full of stars,
+    Or clothed in storm and clouds, the lightning bars,
+      Rolling the thunder like some mighty dress,
+    God moves with thee; we seem to hear His feet,
+    Wind-like, along the floors of Heaven beat;
+      To see His face, revealed in awfulness,
+    Through thee, O Night, to ban us or to bless.
+
+
+
+
+    A FALLEN BEECH
+
+
+    Nevermore at doorways that are barken
+    Shall the madcap wind knock and the moonlight;
+    Nor the circle which thou once didst darken,
+    Shine with footsteps of the neighbouring moonlight,
+    Visitors for whom thou oft didst hearken.
+
+    Nevermore, gallooned with cloudy laces,
+    Shall the morning, like a fair freebooter,
+    Make thy leaves his richest treasure-places;
+    Nor the sunset, like a royal suitor,
+    Clothe thy limbs with his imperial graces.
+
+    And no more, between the savage wonder
+    Of the sunset and the moon's up-coming,
+    Shall the storm, with boisterous hoof-beats, under
+    Thy dark roof dance, Faun-like, to the humming
+    Of the Pan-pipes of the rain and thunder.
+
+    Oft the Satyr-spirit, beauty-drunken,
+    Of the Spring called; and the music measure
+    Of thy sap made answer; and thy sunken
+    Veins grew vehement with youth, whose pressure
+    Swelled thy gnarly muscles, winter-shrunken.
+
+    And the germs, deep down in darkness rooted,
+    Bubbled green from all thy million oilets,
+    Where the spirits, rain-and-sunbeam-suited,
+    Of the April made their whispering toilets,
+    Or within thy stately shadow footed.
+
+    Oft the hours of blonde Summer tinkled
+    At the windows of thy twigs, and found thee
+    Bird-blithe; or, with shapely bodies, twinkled
+    Lissom feet of naked flowers around thee,
+    Where thy mats of moss lay sunbeam-sprinkled.
+
+    And the Autumn with his gypsy-coated
+    Troop of days beneath thy branches rested,
+    Swarthy-faced and dark of eye; and throated
+    Songs of roaming; or with red hand tested
+    Every nut-bur that above him floated.
+
+    Then the Winter, barren-browed, but rich in
+    Shaggy followers of frost and freezing,
+    Made the floor of thy broad boughs his kitchen,
+    Trapper-like, to camp in; grimly easing
+    Limbs snow-furred and moccasined with lichen.
+
+    Now, alas! no more do these invest thee
+    With the dignity of whilom gladness!
+    They--unto whose hearts thou once confessed thee
+    Of thy dreams--now know thee not! and sadness
+    Sits beside thee where, forgot, dost rest thee.
+
+
+
+
+    A TWILIGHT MOTH
+
+
+    All day the primroses have thought of thee,
+      Their golden heads close-haremed from the heat;
+    All day the mystic moonflowers silkenly
+      Veiled snowy faces,--that no bee might greet
+    Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed;--
+    Keeping Sultana-charms for thee, at last,
+      Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet.
+
+    Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day's
+      Too fervid kisses; every bud that drinks
+    The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays
+      Nocturns of fragrance, thy wing'd shadow links
+    In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith;
+    O bearer of their order's shibboleth,
+      Like some pale symbol fluttering o'er these pinks.
+
+    What dost thou whisper in the balsam's ear
+      That sets it blushing, or the hollyhock's,--
+    A syllabled silence that no man may hear,--
+      As dreamily upon its stem it rocks?
+    What spell dost bear from listening plant to plant,
+    Like some white witch, some ghostly ministrant,
+      Some spectre of some perished flower of phlox?
+
+    O voyager of that universe which lies
+      Between the four walls of this garden fair,--
+    Whose constellations are the fireflies
+      That wheel their instant courses everywhere,--
+    'Mid fairy firmaments wherein one sees
+    Mimic Booetes and the Pleiades,
+      Thou steerest like some fairy ship-of-air.
+
+    Gnome-wrought of moonbeam fluff and gossamer,
+      Silent as scent, perhaps thou chariotest
+    Mab or King Oberon; or, haply, her
+      His queen, Titania, on some midnight quest.--
+    Oh for the herb, the magic euphrasy,
+    That should unmask thee to mine eyes, ah me!
+      And all that world at which my soul hath guessed!
+
+
+
+
+    THE GRASSHOPPER
+
+
+    What joy you take in making hotness hotter,
+      In emphasising dulness with your buzz,
+      Making monotony more monotonous!
+    When Summer comes, and drouth hath dried the water
+    In all the creeks, we hear your ragged rasp
+      Filling the stillness. Or,--as urchins beat
+    A stagnant pond whereon the bubbles gasp,--
+      Your switch-like music whips the midday heat.
+    O bur of sound caught in the Summer's hair,
+              We hear you everywhere!
+
+    We hear you in the vines and berry-brambles,
+      Along the unkempt lanes, among the weeds,
+      Amid the shadeless meadows, gray with seeds,
+    And by the wood 'round which the rail-fence rambles,
+    Sawing the sunlight with your sultry saw.
+      Or,--like to tomboy truants, at their play
+    With noisy mirth among the barn's deep straw,--
+      You sing away the careless summer-day.
+    O brier-like voice that clings in idleness
+              To Summer's drowsy dress!
+
+    You tramp of insects, vagrant and unheeding,
+      Improvident, who of the summer make
+      One long green mealtime, and for winter take
+    No care, aye singing or just merely feeding!
+    Happy-go-lucky vagabond,--'though frost
+      Shall pierce, ere long, your green coat or your brown,
+    And pinch your body,--let no song be lost,
+      But as you lived into your grave go down--
+    Like some small poet with his little rhyme,
+              Forgotten of all time.
+
+
+
+
+    BEFORE THE RAIN
+
+
+    Before the rain, low in the obscure east,
+      Weak and morose the moon hung, sickly gray;
+    Around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased,
+      Wove an enormous web, wherein it lay
+      Like some white spider hungry for its prey.
+    Vindictive looked the scowling firmament,
+      In which each star, that flashed a dagger ray,
+    Seemed filled with malice of some dark intent.
+
+    The marsh-frog croaked; and underneath the stone
+      The peevish cricket raised a creaking cry.
+    Within the world these sounds were heard alone,
+      Save when the ruffian wind swept from the sky,
+      Making each tree like some sad spirit sigh;
+    Or shook the clumsy beetle from its weed,
+      That, in the drowsy darkness, bungling by,
+    Sharded the silence with its feverish speed.
+
+    Slowly the tempest gathered. Hours passed
+      Before was heard the thunder's sullen drum
+    Rumbling night's hollow; and the Earth at last,
+      Restless with waiting,--like a woman, dumb
+      With doubting of the love that should have clomb
+    Her casement hours ago,--avowed again,
+      'Mid protestations, joy that he had come.
+    And all night long I heard the Heavens explain.
+
+
+
+
+    AFTER RAIN
+
+
+    Behold the blossom-bosomed Day again,
+    With all the star-white Hours in her train,
+    Laughs out of pearl-lights through a golden ray,
+    That, leaning on the woodland wildness, blends
+    A sprinkled amber with the showers that lay
+    Their oblong emeralds on the leafy ends.
+    Behold her bend with maiden-braided brows
+    Above the wildflower, sidewise with its strain
+    Of dewy happiness, to kiss again
+    Each drop to death; or, under rainy boughs,
+    With fingers, fragrant as the woodland rain,
+    Gather the sparkles from the sycamore,
+            To set within each core
+    Of crimson roses girdling her hips,
+    Where each bud dreams and drips.
+    Smoothing her blue-black hair,--where many a tusk
+    Of iris flashes,--like the falchions' sheen
+    Of Faery 'round blue banners of its Queen,--
+    Is it a Naiad singing in the dusk,
+    That haunts the spring, where all the moss is musk
+    With footsteps of the flowers on the banks?
+    Or just a wild-bird voluble with thanks?
+
+    Balm for each blade of grass: the Hours prepare
+    A festival each weed's invited to.
+    Each bee is drunken with the honied air:
+    And all the air is eloquent with blue.
+    The wet hay glitters, and the harvester
+    Tinkles his scythe,--as twinkling as the dew,--
+            That shall not spare
+    Blossom or brier in its sweeping path;
+            And, ere it cut one swath,
+    Rings them they die, and tells them to prepare.
+
+    What is the spice that haunts each glen and glade?
+    A Dryad's lips, who slumbers in the shade?
+    A Faun, who lets the heavy ivy-wreath
+    Slip to his thigh as, reaching up, he pulls
+    The chestnut blossoms in whole bosomfuls?
+    A sylvan Spirit, whose sweet mouth doth breathe
+    Her viewless presence near us, unafraid?
+    Or troops of ghosts of blooms, that whitely wade
+    The brook? whose wisdom knows no other song
+    Than that the bird sings where it builds beneath
+    The wild-rose and sits singing all day long.
+
+    Oh, let me sit with silence for a space,
+    A little while forgetting that fierce part
+    Of man that struggles in the toiling mart;
+    Where God can look into my heart's own heart
+    From unsoiled heights made amiable with grace;
+    And where the sermons that the old oaks keep
+    Can steal into me.--And what better then
+    Than, turning to the moss a quiet face,
+    To fall asleep? a little while to sleep
+    And dream of wiser worlds and wiser men.
+
+
+
+
+    THE HAUNTED HOUSE
+
+
+    I
+
+    The shadows sit and stand about its door
+    Like uninvited guests and poor;
+    And all the long, hot summer day
+    The grating locust dins its roundelay
+    In one old sycamore.
+    The squirrel leaves upon its rotting roof,
+    In empty hulls, its tracks;
+    And in its clapboard cracks
+    The spider weaves a windy woof;
+    Its cells the mud-wasp packs.
+    The she-fox whelps upon its floor;
+    The owlet roosts above its door;
+    And where the musty mosses run,
+    The freckled snake basks in the sun.
+
+
+    II
+
+    The children of what fathers sleep
+      Beneath these melancholy pines?
+    The slow slugs crawl among their graves where creep
+      The doddered poison-vines.
+    The orchard, near the meadow deep,
+      Lifts up decrepit arms,
+    Gray-lichened in a withering heap.
+    No sap swells up to make it leap
+      As once in calms and storms;
+    No blossom lulls its age asleep;
+      Each breeze brings sad alarms.
+    Big, bell-round pears and apples, russet-red,
+      No maiden gathers now;
+    The worm-bored trunks weep gum, like tears, instead,
+      From each decaying bough.
+
+
+    III
+
+    The woodlands around it are solitary
+      And fold it like gaunt hands;
+    The sunlight is sad and the moonlight is dreary,
+    And the hum of the country is weary, so weary!
+      And the bees go by in bands
+      To other lovelier lands.
+    The grasses are rotting in walk and in bower;
+      The lonesomeness,--dank and rank
+    As a chamber where lies for a lonely hour
+    An old-man's corpse with many a flower,--
+      Is hushed and blank.
+    And even the birds have passed it by,
+    To sing their songs to a happier sky,
+      A happier sky and bank.
+
+
+    IV
+
+    In its desolate halls are lying,
+      Gold, blood-red and browned,
+    Drifted leaves of summer dying;
+    And the winds, above them sighing,
+      Turn them round and round,
+      Make a ghostly sound
+    As of footsteps falling, flying,
+    Voices through the chambers crying,
+      Of the haunted house.
+
+
+    V
+
+    Gazing down in her white shroud,
+      Shroud of windy cloud,
+    Comes at night the phantom moon;
+    Comes and all the shadows soon,
+      Crowding in the rooms, arouse;
+    Shadows, ghosts, her rays lead on,
+    Till beneath the cloud
+    Like a ghost she's gone,
+    In her gusty shroud,
+    O'er the haunted house.
+
+
+
+
+    OCTOBER
+
+
+    I oft have met her slowly wandering
+      Beside a leafy stream, her locks blown wild,
+    Her cheeks a hectic flush, more fair than Spring,
+      As if on her the sumach copse had smiled.
+    Or I have seen her sitting, tall and brown,--
+      Her gentle eyes with foolish weeping dim,--
+        Beneath a twisted oak from whose red leaves
+    She wound great drowsy wreaths and cast them down;
+      The west-wind in her hair, that made it swim
+        Far out behind, deep as the rustling sheaves.
+
+    Or in the hill-lands I have often seen
+      The marvel of her passage; glimpses faint
+    Of glimmering woods that glanced the hills between,
+      Like Indian faces, fierce with forest paint.
+    Or I have met her 'twixt two beechen hills,
+      Within a dingled valley near a fall,
+        Held in her nut-brown hand one cardinal flower;
+    Or wading dimly where the leaf-dammed rills
+      Went babbling through the wildwood's arrased hall,
+        Where burned the beech and maples glared their power.
+
+    Or I have met her by some ruined mill,
+      Where trailed the crimson creeper, serpentine,
+    On fallen leaves that stirred and rustled chill,
+      And watched her swinging in the wild-grape vine.
+    While Beauty, sad among the vales and mountains,
+      More sad than death, or all that death can teach,
+        Dreamed of decay and stretched appealing arms,
+    Where splashed the murmur of the forest's fountains;
+      With all her loveliness did she beseech,
+        And all the sorrow of her wildwood charms.
+
+    Once only in a hollow, girt with trees,
+      A-dream amid wild asters filled with rain,
+    I glimpsed her cheeks red-berried by the breeze,
+      In her dark eyes the night's sidereal stain.
+    And once upon an orchard's tangled path,
+      Where all the golden-rod had turned to brown,
+        Where russets rolled and leaves were sweet of breath,
+    I have beheld her 'mid her aftermath
+      Of blossoms standing, in her gypsy gown,
+        Within her gaze the deeps of life and death.
+
+
+
+
+    INDIAN SUMMER
+
+
+    The dawn is a warp of fever,
+      The eve is a woof of fire;
+    And the month is a singing weaver
+      Weaving a red desire.
+
+    With stars Dawn dices with Even
+      For the rosy gold they heap
+    On the blue of the day's deep heaven,
+      On the black of the night's far deep.
+
+    It's--'Reins to the blood!' and 'Marry!'--
+      The season's a prince who burns
+    With the teasing lusts that harry
+      His heart for a wench who spurns.
+
+    It's--'Crown us a beaker with sherry,
+      To drink to the doxy's heels;
+    A tankard of wine o' the berry,
+      To lips like a cloven peel's.
+
+    ''S death! if a king be saddened,
+      Right so let a fool laugh lies:
+    But wine! when a king is gladdened,
+      And a woman's waist and her eyes.'
+
+    He hath shattered the loom of the weaver,
+      And left but a leaf that flits,
+    He hath seized heaven's gold, and a fever
+      Of mist and of frost is its.
+
+    He hath tippled the buxom beauty,
+      And gotten her hug and her kiss--
+    The wide world's royal booty
+      To pile at her feet for this.
+
+
+
+
+    ALONG THE OHIO
+
+
+    Athwart a sky of brass long welts of gold;
+      A path of gold the wide Ohio lies;
+    Beneath the sunset, billowing manifold,
+            The dark-blue hill-tops rise.
+
+    And westward dips the crescent of the moon
+      Through great cloud-feathers, flushed with rosy ray,
+    That close around the crystal of her lune
+            The redbird wings of Day.
+
+    A little skiff slips o'er the burnished stream;
+      A fiery wake, that broadens far behind,
+    Follows in ripples; and the paddles gleam
+            Against the evening wind.
+
+    Was it the boat, the solitude and hush,
+      That with dead Indians peopled all the glooms?
+    That made each bank, meseemed, and every bush
+            Start into eagle-plumes?
+
+    That made me seem to hear the breaking brush,
+      And as the deer's great antlers swelled in view,
+    To hear the arrow twang from cane and rush,
+            That dipped to the canoe?
+
+    To see the glimmering wigwams by the waves?
+      And, wildly clad, around the camp-fires' glow,
+    The Shawnee chieftains with their painted braves,
+            Each grasping his war-bow?
+
+    But now the vision like the sunset fades,
+      The ribs of golden clouds have oozed their light;
+    And from the west, like sombre sachem shades,
+            Gallop the shades of night.
+
+    The broad Ohio glitters to the stars;
+      And many murmurs whisper in its woods--
+    Is it the sorrow of dead warriors
+            For their lost solitudes?
+
+    The moon goes down; and like another moon
+      The crescent of the river twinkles there,
+    Unchanged as when the eyes of Daniel Boone
+            Beheld it flowing fair.
+
+
+
+
+    A COIGN OF THE FOREST
+
+
+    The hills hang woods around, where green, below
+    Dark, breezy boughs of beech-trees, mats the moss,
+    Crisp with the brittle hulls of last year's nuts;
+    The water hums one bar there; and a glow
+    Of gold lies steady where the trailers toss
+    Red, bugled blossoms and a rock abuts;
+    In spots the wild-phlox and oxalis grow
+    Where beech-roots bulge the loam, protrude across
+    The grass-grown road and roll it into ruts.
+
+    And where the sumach brakes grow dusk and dense,
+    Among the rocks, great yellow violets,
+    Blue-bells and wind-flowers bloom; the agaric
+    In dampness crowds; a fungus, thick, intense
+    With gold and crimson and wax-white, that sets
+    The May-apples along the terraced creek
+    At bold defiance. Where the old rail-fence
+    Divides the hollow, there the bee-bird whets
+    His bill, and there the elder hedge is thick.
+
+    No one can miss it; for two cat-birds nest,
+    Calling all morning, in the trumpet-vine;
+    And there at noon the pewee sits and floats
+    A woodland welcome; and his very best
+    At eve the red-bird sings, as if to sign
+    The record of its loveliness with notes.
+    At night the moon stoops over it to rest,
+    And unreluctant stars. Where waters shine
+    There runs a whisper as of wind-swept oats.
+
+
+
+
+    CREOLE SERENADE
+
+
+    Under mossy oak and pine
+      Whispering falls the fountained stream;
+    In its pool the lilies shine
+      Silvery, each a moonlight gleam.
+
+    Roses bloom and roses die
+      In the warm rose-scented dark,
+    Where the firefly, like an eye,
+      Winks and glows, a golden spark.
+
+    Amber-belted through the night
+      Swings the alabaster moon,
+    Like a big magnolia white
+      On the fragrant heart of June.
+
+    With a broken syrinx there,
+      With bignonia overgrown,
+    Is it Pan in hoof and hair,
+      Or his image carved from stone?
+
+    See! her casement's jessamines part,
+      And, with starry blossoms blent,
+    Like the moon she leans--O heart,
+      'Tis another firmament.
+
+    SINGS
+
+    The dim verbena drugs the dusk
+      With lemon-heavy odours where
+    The heliotropes breathe drowsy musk
+      Into the jasmine-dreamy air;
+    The moss-rose bursts its dewy husk
+      And spills its attar there.
+
+    The orange at thy casement swings
+      Star-censers oozing rich perfumes;
+    The clematis, long-petalled, clings
+      In clusters of dark purple blooms;
+    With flowers, like moons or sylphide wings,
+      Magnolias light the glooms.
+
+        Awake, awake from sleep!
+          Thy balmy hair,
+        Down-fallen, deep on deep,
+          Like blossoms there,--
+        That dew and fragrance weep,--
+          Will fill the night with prayer.
+        Awake, awake from sleep!
+
+    And dreaming here it seems to me
+      A dryad's bosom grows confessed,
+    Bright in the moss of yonder tree,
+      That rustles with the murmurous West--
+    Or is it but a bloom I see,
+      Round as thy virgin breast?
+
+    Through fathomless deeps above are rolled
+      A million feverish worlds, that burst,
+    Like gems, from Heaven's caskets old
+      Of darkness--fires that throb and thirst;
+    An aloe, showering buds of gold,
+      The night seems, star-immersed.
+
+        Unseal, unseal thine eyes!
+          O'er which her rod
+        Sleep sways;--and like the skies,
+          That dream and nod,
+        Their starry majesties
+          Will fill the night with God.
+        Unseal, unseal thine eyes!
+
+
+
+
+    WILL O' THE WISPS
+
+
+    Beyond the barley meads and hay,
+      What was the light that beckoned there?
+    That made her sweet lips smile and say--
+    'Oh, busk me in a gown of May,
+      And knot red poppies in my hair.'
+
+    Over the meadow and the wood
+      What was the voice that filled her ears?
+    That sent into pale cheeks the blood,
+    Until each seemed a wild-brier bud
+      Mown down by mowing harvesters?...
+
+    Beyond the orchard, down the hill,
+      The water flows, the water whirls;
+    And there they found her past all ill,
+    A plaintive face but smiling still,
+      The cresses caught among her curls.
+
+    At twilight in the willow glen
+      What sound is that the silence hears,
+    When all the dusk is hushed again
+    And homeward from the fields strong men
+      And women go, the harvesters?
+
+    One seeks the place where she is laid,
+      Where violets bloom from year to year--
+    'O sunny head! O bird-like maid!
+    The orchard blossoms fall and fade
+      And I am lonely, lonely here.'
+
+    Two stars burn bright above the vale;
+      They seem to him the eyes of Ruth:
+    The low moon rises very pale
+    As if she, too, had heard the tale,
+      All heartbreak, of a maid and youth.
+
+
+
+
+    THE TOLLMAN'S DAUGHTER
+
+
+    She stood waist-deep among the briers:
+      Above in twisted lengths were rolled
+      The sunset's tangled whorls of gold,
+    Blown from the west's cloud-pillared fires.
+    And in the hush no sound did mar,
+      You almost heard o'er hill and dell,
+    Deep, bubbling over, star on star,
+      The night's blue cisterns slowly well.
+    A crane, like some dark crescent, crossed
+      The sunset, winging towards the west;
+      While up the east her silver breast
+    Of light the moon brought, white as frost.
+
+    So have I painted her, you see,
+      The tollman's daughter.--What an arm
+      And throat was hers! and what a form!--
+    Art dreams of such divinity.
+    What braids of night to hold and kiss!
+      There is no pigment anywhere
+    A man might use to picture this--
+      The splendour of her raven hair.
+    A face as beautiful and bright,
+      As rosy fair as twilight skies,
+      Lit with the stars of hazel eyes
+    And eyebrowed black with pencilled night.
+
+    For her, I know, where'er she trod
+      Each dewdrop raised a looking-glass
+      To flash her beauty from the grass;
+    That wild-flowers bloomed along the sod,
+    And whispered perfume when she smiled;
+      The wood-bird hushed to hear her song,
+    Or, all enamoured, tame, not wild,
+      Before her feet flew fluttering long.
+    The brook went mad with melody,
+      Eddied in laughter when she kissed
+      With naked feet its amethyst--
+    And I--I fell in love; ah me!
+
+
+
+
+    THE BOY COLUMBUS
+
+
+    And he had mused on lands each bird,--
+      That winged from realms of Falerina,
+    O'er seas of the Enchanted Sword,--
+    In romance sang him, till he heard
+      Vague foam on Islands of Alcina.
+
+    For rich Levant and old Castile
+      Let other seamen freight their galleys;
+    With Polo he and Mandeville
+    Through stranger seas a dreamy keel
+      Sailed into wonder-peopled valleys.
+
+    Far continents of flow'r and fruit,
+      Of everlasting spring; where fountains
+    'Mid flow'rs, with human faces, shoot;
+    Where races dwell, both man and brute,
+      In cities under golden mountains.
+
+    Where cataracts their thunders hurl
+      From heights the tempest has at mercy;
+    Vast peaks that touch the moon, and whirl
+    Their torrents down of gold and pearl;
+      And forests strange as those of Circe.
+
+    Let rapiered Love lute, in the shade
+      Of royal gardens, to the Palace
+    And Court, that haunt the balustrade
+    Of terraces and still parade
+      Their vanity and guile and malice.
+
+    Him something calls diviner yet
+      Than Love, more mighty than a lover;
+    Heroic Truth that will not let
+    Deed lag; a purpose, westward set,
+      In eyes far-seeing to discover.
+
+
+
+
+    SONG OF THE ELF
+
+
+    I
+
+    When the poppies, with their shields,
+              Sentinel
+    Forest and the harvest fields,
+              In the bell
+    Of a blossom, fair to see,
+    There I stall the bumble-bee,
+              My good stud;
+    There I stable him and hold,
+    Harness him with hairy gold;
+    There I ease his burly back
+    Of the honey and its sack
+      Gathered from each bud.
+
+
+    II
+
+    Where the glow-worm lights its lamp,
+              There I lie;
+    Where, above the grasses damp,
+              Moths go by;
+    Now within the fussy brook,
+    Where the waters wind and crook
+              Round the rocks,
+    I go sailing down the gloom
+    Straddling on a wisp of broom;
+    Or, beneath the owlet moon,
+    Trip it to the cricket's tune
+      Tossing back my locks.
+
+
+    III
+
+    Ere the crowfoot on the lawn
+              Lifts its head,
+    Or the glow-worm's light be gone,
+              Dim and dead,
+    In a cobweb hammock deep,
+    'Twixt two ferns I swing and sleep,
+              Hid away;
+    Where the drowsy musk-rose blows
+    And a dreamy runnel flows,
+    In the land of Faery,
+    Where no mortal thing can see,
+      All the elfin day.
+
+
+
+
+    THE OLD INN
+
+
+    Red-winding from the sleepy town,
+      One takes the lone, forgotten lane
+    Straight through the hills. A brush-bird brown
+      Bubbles in thorn-flowers, sweet with rain,
+      Where breezes bend the gleaming grain,
+    And cautious drip of higher leaves
+      The lower dips that drip again.--
+    Above the tangled trees it heaves
+    Its gables and its haunted eaves.
+
+    One creeper, gnarled and blossomless,
+      O'erforests all its eastern wall;
+    The sighing cedars rake and press
+      Dark boughs along the panes they sprawl;
+      While, where the sun beats, drone and drawl
+    The mud-wasps; and one bushy bee,
+      Gold-dusty, hurls along the hall
+    To buzz into a crack.--To me
+    The shadows seem too scared to flee.
+
+    Of ragged chimneys martins make
+      Huge pipes of music; twittering, here
+    They build and roost.--My footfalls wake
+      Strange stealing echoes, till I fear
+      I'll see my pale self drawing near,
+    My phantom face as in a glass;
+      Or one, men murdered, buried--where?--
+    Dim in gray stealthy glimmer, pass
+    With lips that seem to moan 'Alas.'
+
+
+
+
+    THE MILL-WATER
+
+
+    The water-flag and wild cane grow
+    'Round banks whereon the sunbeams sow
+    Fantastic gold when, on its shores,
+    The wind sighs through the sycamores.
+
+    In one green angle, just in reach,
+    Between a willow-tree and beech,
+    Moss-grown and leaky lies a boat
+    The thick-grown lilies keep afloat.
+
+    And through its waters, half awake,
+    Slow swims the spotted water-snake;
+    And near its edge, like some gray streak,
+    Stands gaunt the still fly-up-the-creek.
+
+    Between the lily-pads and blooms
+    The water-spirits set their looms,
+    That weave the lace-like light that dims
+    The glimmering leaves of under limbs.
+
+    Each lily is the hiding-place
+    Of some dim wood-imp's elvish face,
+    That watches you with gold-green eyes
+    Where bubbles of its breathing rise.
+
+    I fancy, when the waxing moon
+    Leans through the trees and dreams of June,
+    And when the black bat slants its wing,
+    And lonelier the green-frogs sing;
+
+    I fancy, when the whippoorwill
+    In some old tree sings wild and shrill,
+    With glow-worm eyes that dot the dark,--
+    Each holding high a firefly spark
+
+    To torch its way,--the wood-imps come:
+    And some float rocking here; and some
+    Unmoor the lily leaves and oar
+    Around the old boat by the shore.
+
+    They climb through oozy weeds and moss;
+    They swarm its rotting sides and toss
+    Their firefly torches o'er its edge
+    Or hang them in the tangled sedge.
+
+    The boat is loosed. The moon is pale.
+    Around the dam they slowly sail.
+    Upon the bow, to pilot it,
+    A jack-o'-lantern gleam doth sit.
+
+    Yes, I have seen it in my dreams!--
+    Naught is forgotten! naught, it seems!--
+    The strangled face, the tangled hair
+    Of the drown'd woman trailing there.
+
+
+
+
+    THE DREAM
+
+
+    This was my dream:
+                      It seemed the afternoon
+    Of some deep tropic day; and yet the moon
+    Stood round and bright with golden alchemy
+    High in a heaven bluer than the sea.
+    Long lawny lengths of perishable cloud
+    Hung in a west o'er rolling forests bowed;
+    Clouds raining colours, gold and violet,
+    That, opening, seemed from mystic worlds to let
+    Hints down of Parian beauty and lost charms
+    Of dim immortals, young, with floating forms.
+    And all about me fruited orchards grew,
+    Pear, quince and peach, and plums of dusty blue;
+    Rose-apricots and apples streaked with fire,
+    Kissed into ripeness by the sun's desire
+    And big with juice. And on far, fading hills,
+    Down which it seemed a hundred torrent rills
+    Flashed rushing silver, vines and vines and vines
+    Of purple vintage swollen with cool wines;
+    Pale pleasant wines and fragrant as late June,
+    Their delicate tang drawn from the wine-white moon.
+    And from the clouds o'er this sweet world there dripped
+    An odorous music, strangely feverish-lipped,
+    That swung and swooned and panted in mad sighs;
+    Investing at each throb the air with eyes,
+    And forms of sensuous spirits, limpid white,
+    Clad on with raiment as of starry night;
+    Fair, faint embodiments of melody,
+    From out whose hearts of crystal one could see
+    The music stream like light through delicate hands
+    Hollowing a lamp. And as on sounding sands
+    The ocean murmur haunts the rosy shells,
+    Within whose convolutions beauty dwells,
+    My soul became a vibrant harp of love,
+    Re-echoing all the harmony above.
+
+
+
+
+    SPRING TWILIGHT
+
+
+    The sun set late; and left along the west
+      A belt of furious ruby, o'er which snows
+    Of clouds unrolled; each cloud a mighty breast
+          Blooming with almond-rose.
+
+    The sun set late; and wafts of wind beat down,
+      And cuffed the blossoms from the blossoming quince;
+    Scattered the pollen from the lily's crown,
+          And made the clover wince.
+
+    By dusky forests, through whose fretful boughs
+      In flying fragments shot the evening's flame,
+    Adown the tangled lane the quiet cows
+          With dreamy tinklings came.
+
+    The sun set late; but hardly had he gone
+      When o'er the moon's gold-litten crescent there,
+    Clean Phosphor, polished as a precious stone,
+          Burned in fair deeps of air.
+
+    As from faint stars the glory waned and waned,
+      The crickets made the oldtime garden shrill;
+    And past the luminous pasture-lands complained
+          The first far whippoorwill.
+
+
+
+
+    A SLEET-STORM IN MAY
+
+
+    On southern winds shot through with amber light,
+    Breathing soft balm and clothed in cloudy white,
+    The lily-fingered Spring came o'er the hills,
+    Waking the crocus and the daffodils.
+    O'er the cold Earth she breathed a tender sigh--
+    The maples sang and flung their banners high,
+    Their crimson-tasselled pennons, and the elm
+    Bound his dark brows with a green-crested helm.
+    Beneath the musky rot of Autumn's leaves,
+    Under the forest's myriad naked eaves,
+    Life woke and rose in gold and green and blue,
+    Robed in the starlight of the twinkling dew.
+    With timid tread adown the barren wood
+    Spring held her way, when, lo! before her stood
+    White-mantled Winter wagging his white head,
+    Stormy his brow and stormily he said:
+      'The God of Terror, and the King of Storm,
+    Must I remind thee how my iron arm
+    Raised my red standards 'mid these conquered bowers,
+    Turning their green to crimson?--Thou, with flowers,
+    Thou wouldst supplant me! nay! usurp my throne!--
+    Audacious one!'--And at her breast he tossed
+    A bitter javelin of ice and frost;
+    And left her lying on th' unfeeling mould.
+    The fragile blossoms, gathered in the fold
+    Of her warm bosom, fell in desolate rows
+    About her beauty, and, like fragrant snows,
+    Covered her lovely hands and beautiful feet,
+    Or on her lips lay like last kisses sweet
+    That died there. Lilacs, musky of the May,
+    And bluer violets and snowdrops lay
+    Entombed in crystal, icy dim and fair,
+    Like teardrops scattered in her heavenly hair.
+
+    Alas! sad heart, break not beneath the pain!
+    Time changeth all; the Beautiful wakes again.--
+    We should not question such; a higher power
+    Knows best what bud is ripest or what flower,
+    And silently plucks it at the fittest hour.
+
+
+
+
+    UNREQUITED
+
+
+    Passion? not hers, within whose virgin eyes
+      All Eden lay.--And I remember how
+    I drank the Heaven of her gaze with sighs--
+      She never sighed, nor gave me kiss or vow.
+
+    So have I seen a clear October pool,
+      Cold, liquid topaz, set within the sear
+    Gold of the woodland, tremorless and cool,
+      Reflecting all the heartbreak of the year.
+
+    Sweetheart? not she whose voice was music sweet;
+      Whose face was sweeter than melodious prayer.
+    Sweetheart I called her.--When did she repeat
+      Sweet to one hope or heart to one despair?
+
+    So have I seen a rose set round with thorn,
+      Sung to and sung to by a bird of spring,
+    And when, breast-pierced, the bird lay all forlorn,
+      The rose bloomed on, fair and unnoticing.
+
+
+
+
+    THE HEART O' SPRING
+
+
+    Whiten, oh whiten, O clouds of lawn!
+      Lily-like clouds that whiten above,
+    Now like a dove, and now like a swan,
+    But never, oh never--pass on! pass on!
+      Never so white as the throat of my love.
+
+    Blue-black night on the mountain peaks
+      Is not so black as the locks o' my love!
+    Stars that shine through the evening streaks
+    Over the torrent that flashes and breaks,
+      Are not so bright as the eyes o' my love!
+
+    Moon in a cloud, a cloud of snow,
+      Mist in the vale where the rivulet sounds,
+    Dropping from ledge to ledge below,
+    Turning to gold in the sunset's glow,
+      Are not so soft as her footstep sounds.
+
+    Sound o' May winds in the blossoming trees,
+      Is not so sweet as her laugh that rings;
+    Song o' wild birds on the morning breeze,
+    Birds and brooks and murmur o' bees,
+      Are harsh to her voice when she laughs or sings.
+
+    The rose of my heart is she, my dawn!
+      My star o' the east, my moon above!
+    My soul takes ship for the Avalon
+    Of her heart of hearts, and shall sail on
+      Till it anchors safe in its haven of love.
+
+
+
+
+    'A BROKEN RAINBOW ON THE SKIES OF MAY'
+
+
+    A broken rainbow on the skies of May,
+    Touching the dripping roses and low clouds,
+    And in wet clouds its scattered glories lost:--
+    So in the sorrow of her soul the ghost
+    Of one great love, of iridescent ray,
+    Spanning the roses dim of memory,
+    Against the tumult of life's rushing crowds--
+    A broken rainbow on the skies of May.
+
+    A flashing humming-bird among the flowers,
+    Deep-coloured blooms; its slender tongue and bill
+    Sucking the syrups and the calyxed myrrhs,
+    Till, being full of sweets, away it whirrs:--
+    Such was his love that won her heart's rich bowers
+    To give to him their all, their honied showers,
+    The bloom from which he drank his body's fill--
+    A flashing humming-bird among the flowers.
+
+    A moon, moth-white, that through long mists of fleece
+    Moves amber-girt into a bulk of black,
+    And, lost to vision, rims the black with froth:--
+    A love that swept its moon, like some great moth,
+    Across the heaven of her soul's young peace;
+    And, smoothly passing, in the clouds did cease
+    Of time, through which its burning light comes back--
+    A moon, moth-white, that moves through mists of fleece.
+
+    A bolt of living thunder downward hurled,
+    Momental blazing from the piled-up storm,
+    That instants out the mountains and the ocean,
+    The towering crag, then blots the sight's commotion:--
+    Love, love that swiftly coming bared the world,
+    The deeps of life, 'round which fate's clouds are curled,
+    And, ceasing, left all night and black alarm--
+    A bolt of living thunder downward hurled.
+
+
+
+
+    ORGIE
+
+
+    On nights like this, when bayou and lagoon
+      Dream in the moonlight's mystic radiance,
+      I seem to walk like one deep in a trance
+    With old-world myths born of the mist and moon.
+
+    Lascivious eyes and mouths of sensual rose
+      Smile into mine; and breasts of luring light,
+      And tresses streaming golden to the night,
+    Persuade me onward where the forest glows.
+
+    And then it seems along the haunted hills
+      There falls a flutter as of beautiful feet,
+      As if tempestuous troops of Maenads meet
+    To drain deep bowls and shout and have their wills.
+
+    And then I feel her limbs will be revealed
+      Like some great snow-white moth among the trees;
+      Her vampire beauty, waiting there to seize
+    And dance me downward where my doom is sealed.
+
+
+
+
+    REVERIE
+
+
+    What ogive gates from gold of Ophir wrought,
+      What walls of Parian, whiter than a rose,
+    What towers of crystal, for the eyes of thought,
+      Hast builded on far Islands of Repose?
+    Thy cloudy columns, vast, Corinthian,
+      Or huge, Ionic, colonnade the heights
+        Of dreamland, looming o'er the soul's deep seas;
+    Built melodies of marble, that no man
+      Has ever reached, except in fancy's flights,
+        Templing the presence of perpetual ease.
+
+    Oft, where o'er plastic frieze and plinths of spar,--
+      In glimmering solitudes of pillared stone,--
+    The twilight blossoms with one violet star,
+      With thee, O Reverie, I have stood alone,
+    And there beheld, from out the Mythic Age,
+      The rosy breasts of Cytherea--fair,
+       Full-cestused, and suggestive of what loves
+    Immortal--rise; and heard the lyric rage
+      Of sun-burnt Poesy, whose throat breathes bare
+        O'er leopard skins, fluting among his groves.
+
+    Oft, where thy castled peaks and templed vales
+      Cloud--like convulsive sunsets--shores that dream,
+    Myrrh-fragrant, over siren seas whose sails
+      Gleam white as lilies on a lilied stream,
+    My soul has dreamed. Or by thy sapphire sea,
+      In thy arcaded gardens, in the shade
+       Of breathing sculpture, oft has walked with thought,
+    And bent, in shadowy attitude, its knee
+      Before the shrine of Beauty that must fade
+        And leave no memory of the mind that wrought.
+
+    Who hath beheld thy caverns where, in heaps,
+      The wines of Lethe and Love's witchery,
+    In sealed Amphorae a sibyl keeps,
+      World-old, for ever guarded secretly?--
+    No wine of Xeres or of Syracuse!
+      No fine Falernian and no vile Sabine!--
+        The stolen fire of a demigod,
+    Whose bubbled purple goddess feet did bruise
+      In crusted vats of vintage, where the green
+        Flames with wild poppies, on the Samian sod.
+
+    Oh, for the deep enchantment of one draught!
+      The reckless ecstasy of classic earth!--
+    With godlike eyes to laugh as gods have laughed
+      In eyes of mortal brown, a mighty mirth.
+    Of deity delirious with desire!
+      To breathe the dropping roses of the shrines,
+        The splashing wine-libation and the blood,
+    And all the young priest's dreaming! To inspire
+      My eager soul with beauty, 'til it shines
+        An utt'rance of life's loftier brotherhood!
+
+    So would I slumber in the old-world shades,
+      And Poesy should touch me, as some bold
+    Wild bee a pulpy lily of the glades,
+      Barbaric-covered with the kernelled gold;
+    And feel the glory of the Golden Age
+      Less godly than my purpose, strong to dare
+       Death with the pure immortal lips of love:
+    Less lovely than my soul's ideal rage
+      To mate itself with Music and declare
+        Itself part meaning of the stars above.
+
+
+
+
+    LETHE
+
+
+    I
+
+    There is a scent of roses and spilt wine
+      Between the moonlight and the laurel coppice;
+    The marble idol glimmers on its shrine,
+      White as a star, among a heaven of poppies.
+    Here all my life lies like a spilth of wine.
+    There is a mouth of music like a lute,
+      A nightingale that singeth to one flower;
+    Between the falling flower and the fruit,
+      Where love hath died, the music of an hour.
+
+
+    II
+
+    To sit alone with memory and a rose;
+      To dwell with shadows of whilom romances;
+    To make one hour of a year of woes
+      And walk on starlight, in ethereal trances,
+    With love's lost face fair as a moon-white rose.
+    To shape from music and the scent of buds
+      Love's spirit and its presence of sweet fire,
+    Between the heart's wild burning and the blood's,
+      Is part of life and of the soul's desire.
+
+
+    III
+
+    There is a song to silence and the stars,
+      Between the forest and the temple's arches;
+    And down the stream of night, like nenuphars,
+      The tossing fires of the revellers' torches.--
+    Here all my life waits lonely as the stars.--
+    Shall not one hour of all those hours suffice
+      For resignation God hath given as dower?
+    Between the summons and the sacrifice
+      One hour of love, th' eternity of an hour?
+
+
+    IV
+
+    The shrine is shattered and the bird is gone;
+      Dark is the house of music and of bridal;
+    The stars are stricken and the storm comes on;
+      Lost in a wreck of roses lies the idol,
+    Sad as the memory of a joy that's gone.--
+    To dream of perished gladness and a kiss,
+      Waking the last chord of love's broken lyre,
+    Between remembering and forgetting, this
+      Is part of life and of the soul's desire.
+
+
+
+
+    DIONYSIA
+
+
+    The day is dead; and in the west
+    The slender crescent of the moon--
+    Diana's crystal-kindled crest--
+    Sinks hillward in a silvery swoon.
+    What is the murmur in the dell?
+    The stealthy whisper and the drip?
+    A Dryad with her leaf-light trip?
+    A Naiad o'er her fountain well?--
+    Who with white fingers for her comb,
+    Sleeks her blue hair, and from its curls
+    Showers slim minnows and pale pearls,
+    And hollow music of the foam.
+    What is it in the vistaed ways
+    That leans and springs, and stoops and sways?--
+    The naked limbs of one who flees?
+    An Oread who hesitates
+    Before the Satyr form that waits,
+    Crouching to leap, that there she sees?
+    Or under boughs, reclining cool,
+    A Hamadryad, like a pool
+    Of moonlight, palely beautiful?
+    Or Limnad, with her lilied face,
+    More lovely than the misty lace
+    That haunts a star and gives it grace?
+    Or is it some Leimoniad
+    In wildwood flowers dimly clad?
+    Oblong blossoms white as froth,
+    Or mottled like the tiger-moth;
+    Or brindled as the brows of death,
+    Wild of hue and wild of breath:
+    Here ethereal flame and milk
+    Blent with velvet and with silk;
+    Here an iridescent glow
+    Mixed with satin and with snow:
+    Pansy, poppy and the pale
+    Serpolet and galingale;
+    Mandrake and anemone,
+    Honey-reservoirs o' the bee;
+    Cistus and the cyclamen,--
+    Cheeked like blushing Hebe this,
+    And the other white as is
+    Bubbled milk of Venus when
+    Cupid's baby mouth is pressed,
+    Rosy to her rosy breast.
+    And, besides, all flowers that mate
+    With aroma, and in hue
+    Stars and rainbows duplicate
+    Here on earth for me and you.
+
+    Yea! at last mine eyes can see!
+    'Tis no shadow of the tree
+    Swaying softly there, but she!--
+    Maenad, Bassarid, Bacchant,
+    What you will, who doth enchant
+    Night with sensuous nudity.
+    Lo! again I hear her pant
+    Breasting through the dewy glooms--
+    Through the glow-worm gleams and glowers
+    Of the starlight;--wood-perfumes
+    Swoon around her and frail showers
+    Of the leaflet-tilted rain.
+    Lo! like love, she comes again
+    Through the pale voluptuous dusk,
+    Sweet of limb with breasts of musk.
+    With her lips, like blossoms, breathing
+    Honeyed pungence of her kiss,
+    And her auburn tresses wreathing
+    Like umbrageous helichrys,
+    There she stands, like fire and snow,
+    In the moon's ambrosial glow,
+    Both her shapely loins low-looped
+    With the balmy blossoms, drooped,
+    Of the deep amaracus.
+    Spiritual, yet sensual,
+    Lo, she ever greets me thus
+    In my vision; white and tall,
+    Her delicious body there,--
+    Raimented with amorous air,--
+    To my mind expresses all
+    The allurements of the world.
+    And once more I seem to feel
+    On my soul, like frenzy, hurled
+    All the passionate past.--I reel,
+    Greek again in ancient Greece,
+    In the Pyrrhic revelries;
+    In the mad and Maenad dance;
+    Onward dragged with violence;
+    Pan and old Silenus and
+    Faunus and a Bacchant band
+    Round me. Wild my wine-stained hand
+    O'er tumultuous hair is lifted;
+    While the flushed and Phallic orgies
+    Whirl around me; and the marges
+    Of the wood are torn and rifted
+    With lascivious laugh and shout.
+    And barbarian there again,--
+    Shameless with the shameless rout,
+    Bacchus lusting in each vein,--
+    With her pagan lips on mine,
+    Like a god made drunk with wine,
+    On I reel; and in the revels
+    Her loose hair, the dance dishevels,
+    Blows, and 'thwart my vision swims
+    All the splendour of her limbs....
+
+    So it seems. Yet woods are lonely.
+    And when I again awake,
+    I shall find their faces only
+    Moonbeams in the boughs that shake;
+    And their revels, but the rush
+    Of night-winds through bough and brush.
+    Yet my dreaming--is it more
+    Than mere dreaming? Is a door
+    Opened in my soul? a curtain
+    Raised? to let me see for certain
+    I have lived that life before?
+
+
+
+
+    THE NAIAD
+
+
+    She sits among the iris stalks
+      Of babbling brooks; and leans for hours
+      Among the river's lily flowers,
+    Or on their whiteness walks:
+      Above dark forest pools, gray rocks
+      Wall in, she leans with dripping locks,
+    And listening to the echo, talks
+      With her own face--Iothera.
+
+    There is no forest of the hills,
+      No valley of the solitude,
+      Nor fern nor moss, that may elude
+    Her searching step that stills:
+      She dreams among the wild-rose brakes
+      Of fountains that the ripple shakes,
+    And, dreaming of herself, she fills
+      The silence with 'Iothera.'
+
+    And every wind that haunts the ways
+      Of leaf and bough, once having kissed
+      Her virgin nudity, goes whist
+    With wonder and amaze.
+      There blows no breeze which hath not learned
+      Her name's sweet melody, and yearned
+    To kiss her mouth that laughs and says,
+      'Iothera, Iothera.'
+
+    No wild thing of the wood, no bird,
+      Or brown or blue, or gold or gray,
+      Beneath the sun's or moonlight's ray,
+    That hath not loved and heard;
+      They are her pupils; she can say
+      No new thing but, within a day,
+    They have its music, word for word,
+      Harmonious as Iothera.
+
+    No man who lives and is not wise
+      With love for common flowers and trees,
+      Bee, bird, and beast, and brook, and breeze,
+    And rocks and hills and skies,--
+      Search where he will,--shall ever see
+      One flutter of her drapery,
+    One glimpse of limbs, or hair, or eyes
+      Of beautiful Iothera.
+
+
+
+
+    THE LIMNAD
+
+
+    I
+
+    The lake she haunts gleams dreamily
+    'Twixt sleepy boughs of melody,
+    Set 'mid the hills beside the sea,
+      In tangled bush and brier;
+    Where the ghostly sunsets write
+    Wondrous things in golden light;
+    And above the pine-crowned height,
+    Clouds of twilight, rosy white,
+      Build their towers of fire.
+
+
+    II
+
+    'Mid the rushes there that swing,
+    Flowering flags where voices sing
+    When low winds are murmuring,
+      Murmuring to stars that glitter;
+    Blossom-white, with purple locks,
+    Underneath the stars' still flocks,
+    In the dusky waves she rocks,
+    Rocks, and all the landscape mocks
+      With a song most sweet and bitter.
+
+
+    III
+
+    Soft it sounds, at first, as dreams
+    Filled with tears that fall in streams;
+    Then it soars, until it seems
+      Beauty's very self hath spoken;
+    And the woods grow silent quite,
+    Stars wax faint and flowers turn white;
+    And the nightingales that light
+    Near, or hear her through the night,
+      Die, their hearts with longing broken.
+
+
+    IV
+
+    Dark, dim and sad o'er mournful lands,
+    White-throated stars heaped in her hands,
+    Like wildwood buds, the Twilight stands,
+      The Twilight dreaming lingers;
+    Listening where the Limnad sings
+    Witcheries, whose beauty brings
+    A great moon from hidden springs,
+    Pale with amorous quiverings
+      Feet of fire and silvery fingers.
+
+
+    V
+
+    In the vales Auloniads,
+    On the mountains Oreads,
+    On the leas Leimoniads,
+      Naked as the stars that glisten,
+    Pan, the Satyrs, Dryades,
+    Fountain-lovely Naiades,
+    Foam-lipped Oceanides,
+    Breathless 'mid their seas and trees,
+      Stay and stop and lean and listen.
+
+
+    VI
+
+    Large-eyed, Siren-like she stands,
+    In the lake or on its sands,
+    And with rapture from the hands
+      Of the Night some stars are shaken;
+    To her song the rushes swing,
+    Lilies nod and ripples ring,
+    Lost in helpless listening--
+    These will wake that hear her sing,
+      But one mortal will not waken.
+
+
+
+
+    INTIMATIONS
+
+
+    I
+
+    Is it uneasy moonlight
+    On the restless field, that stirs?
+    Or wild white meadow-blossoms
+    The night-wind bends and blurs?
+
+    Is it the dolorous water,
+    That sobs in the woods and sighs?
+    Or heart of an ancient oak-tree,
+    That breaks and, sighing, dies?
+
+    The wind is vague with the shadows
+    That wander in No-Man's Land;
+    The water is dark with the voices
+    That weep on the Unknown strand.
+
+    O ghosts of the winds that call me!
+    O ghosts of the whispering waves!
+    As sad as forgotten flowers
+    That die upon nameless graves!
+
+    What is this thing you tell me
+    In tongues of a twilight race,
+    Of death, with the vanished features,
+    Mantled, of my own face?
+
+
+    II
+
+    The old enigmas of the deathless dawns
+    And riddles of the all immortal eves,--
+    That still o'er Delphic lawns
+    Speak as the gods spoke through oracular leaves--
+    I read with new-born eyes,
+    Remembering how, a slave;
+    They buried me, a living sacrifice,
+    Once in a dead king's grave.
+
+    Or crowned with hyacinth and helichrys,
+    How, towards the altar in the marble gloom,--
+    Hearing the magadis
+    Dirge through the pale amaracine perfume,--
+    'Mid chanting priests I trod,
+    With never a sigh or pause,
+    To give my life to pacify a god,
+    And save my country's cause.
+
+    Again: Cyrenian roses on wild hair,
+    And oil and purple smeared on breasts and cheeks,
+    How, with mad torches there,--
+    Reddening the cedars of Cithaeron's peaks,--
+    With gesture and fierce glance,
+    Lascivious Maenad bands
+    Once drew and slew me in the Pyrrhic dance,
+    With Bacchanalian hands.
+
+
+    III
+
+    In eons of the senses,
+    My spirit knew of yore,
+    I found the Isle of Circe
+    And felt her magic lore;
+    And still the soul remembers
+    What I was once before.
+
+    She gave me flowers to smell of
+    That wizard branches bore,
+    Of weird and sorcerous beauty,
+    Whose stems dripped human gore--
+    Their scent when I remember
+    I know that world once more.
+
+    She gave me fruits to eat of
+    That grew upon the shore,
+    Of necromantic ripeness,
+    With human flesh at core--
+    Their taste when I remember
+    I know that life once more.
+
+    And then, behold! a serpent,
+    That glides my face before,
+    With eyes of tears and fire
+    That glare me o'er and o'er--
+    I look into its eyeballs,
+    And know myself once more.
+
+
+
+
+    BEFORE THE TEMPLE
+
+
+    I
+
+      All desolate she sate her down
+    Upon the marble of the temple's stair.
+    You would have thought her, with her eyes of brown,
+      Flushed cheeks and hazel hair,
+        A dryad dreaming there.
+
+
+    II
+
+      A priest of Bacchus passed, nor stopped
+    To chide her; deeming her--whose chiton hid
+    But half her bosom, and whose girdle dropped--
+      Some grief-drowned Bassarid,
+        The god of wine had chid.
+
+
+    III
+
+      With wreaths of woodland cyclamen
+    For Dian's shrine, a shepherdess drew near,
+    All her young thoughts on vestal beauty, when--
+      She dare not look for fear--
+        Behold the goddess here!
+
+
+    IV
+
+      Fierce lights on shields of bossy brass
+    And helms of gold, next from the hills deploy
+    Tall youths of Argos. And she sees _him_ pass,
+      Flushed with heroic joy,
+        On towards the siege of Troy.
+
+
+
+
+    ANTHEM OF DAWN
+
+
+    I
+
+    Then up the orient heights to the zenith that balanced the
+          crescent,--
+    Up and far up and over,--the heaven grew erubescent,
+    Vibrant with rose and with ruby from hands of the harpist Dawn,
+    Smiting symphonic fire on the firmament's barbition;
+    And the East was a priest who adored with offerings of gold and of
+          gems,
+    And a wonderful carpet unrolled for the inaccessible hems
+    Of the glittering robes of her limbs; that, lily and amethyst,
+    Swept glorying on and on through temples of cloud and mist.
+
+
+    II
+
+    Then out of the splendour and richness, that burned like a magic
+          stone,
+    The torrent suffusion that deepened and dazzled and broadened and
+          shone,
+    The pomp and the pageant of colour, triumphal procession of glare,
+    The sun, like a king in armour, breathing splendour from feet to
+          hair,
+    Stood forth with majesty girdled, as a hero who towers afar
+    Where the bannered gates are bristling hells and the walls are
+          roaring war:
+    And broad on the back of the world, like a Cherubin's fiery blade,
+    The effulgent gaze of his aspect fell in glittering accolade.
+
+
+    III
+
+    Then billowing blue, like an ocean, rolled from the shores of dawn
+          to even:
+    And the stars, like rafts, went down: and the moon, like a
+          ghost-ship driven,
+    A feather of foam, from port to port of the cloud-built isles that
+          dotted,
+    With pearl and cameo, bays of the day, her canvas webbed and rooted,
+    Lay lost in the gulf of heaven: while over her mixed and melted
+    The beautiful children of Morn, whose bodies are opal-belted;
+    The beautiful daughters of Dawn, who, over and under and after
+    The rivered radiance wrestled; and rainbowed heaven with laughter
+    Of halcyon sapphire.--O Dawn! thou visible mirth,
+    Thou hallelujah of heaven! hosanna of Earth!
+
+
+
+
+    AT THE LANE'S END
+
+
+    I
+
+    No more to strip the roses from
+      The rose-boughs of her porch's place!--
+    I dreamed last night that I was home
+      Beside a rose--her face.
+
+    I must have smiled in sleep--who knows?--
+      The rose aroma filled the lane;
+    I saw her white hand's lifted rose
+      That called me home again.
+
+    And yet when I awoke--so wan,
+      An old face wet with icy tears!--
+    Somehow, it seems, sleep had misdrawn
+      A love gone thirty years.
+
+
+    II
+
+    The clouds roll up and the clouds roll down
+    Over the roofs of the little town;
+    Out in the hills where the pike winds by
+    Fields of clover and bottoms of rye,
+    You will hear no sound but the barking cough
+    Of the striped chipmunk where the lane leads off;
+    You will hear no bird but the sapsuckers
+    Far off in the forest,--that seems to purr,
+    As the warm wind fondles its top, grown hot,
+    Like the docile back of an ocelot:
+    You will see no thing but the shine and shade
+    Of briers that climb and of weeds that wade
+    The glittering creeks of the light, that fills
+    The dusty road and the red-keel hills--
+    And all day long in the pennyroy'l
+    The grasshoppers at their anvils toil;
+    Thick click of their tireless hammers thrum,
+    And the wheezy belts of their bellows hum;
+    Tinkers who solder the silence and heat
+    To make the loneliness more complete.
+    Around old rails where the blackberries
+    Are reddening ripe, and the bumble-bees
+    Are a drowsy rustle of Summer's skirts,
+    And the bob-white's wing is the fan she flirts.
+    Under the hill, through the iron weeds,
+    And ox-eyed daisies and milkweeds, leads
+    The path forgotten of all but one.
+    Where elder bushes are sick with sun,
+    And wild raspberries branch big blue veins
+    O'er the face of the rock, where the old spring rains
+    Its sparkling splinters of molten spar
+    On the gravel bed where the tadpoles are,--
+    You will find the pales of the fallen fence,
+    And the tangled orchard and vineyard, dense
+    With the weedy neglect of thirty years.
+    The garden there,--where the soft sky clears
+    Like an old sweet face that has dried its tears;--
+    The garden plot where the cabbage grew
+    And the pompous pumpkin; and beans that blew
+    Balloons of white by the melon patch;
+    Maize; and tomatoes that seemed to catch
+    Oblong amber and agate balls
+    Thrown from the sun in the frosty falls:
+    Long rows of currants and gooseberries,
+    And the balsam-gourd with its honey-bees.
+    And here was a nook for the princess-plumes,
+    The snap-dragons and the poppy-blooms,
+    Mother's sweet-williams and pansy flowers,
+    And the morning-glories' bewildered bowers,
+    Tipping their cornucopias up
+    For the humming-birds that came to sup.
+    And over it all was the Sabbath peace
+    Of the land whose lap was the love of these;
+    And the old log-house where my innocence died,
+    With my boyhood buried side by side.
+
+    Shall a man with a face as withered and gray
+    As the wasp-nest stowed in a loft away,--
+    Where the hornets haunt and the mortar drops
+    From the loosened logs of the clapboard tops;--
+    Whom vice has aged as the rotting rooms
+    The rain where memories haunt the glooms;
+    A hitch in his joints like the rheum that gnars
+    In the rasping hinge of the door that jars;
+    A harsh, cracked throat like the old stone flue
+    Where the swallows build the summer through;
+    Shall a man, I say, with the spider sins
+    That the long years spin in the outs and ins
+    Of his soul, returning to see once more
+    His boyhood's home, where his life was poor
+    With toil and tears and their fretfulness,
+    But rich with health and the hopes that bless
+    The unsoiled wealth of a vigorous youth;
+    Shall he not take comfort and know the truth
+    In its threadbare raiment of falsehood?--Yea!
+    In his crumbled past he shall kneel and pray,
+    Like a pilgrim come to the shrine again
+    Of the homely saints that shall soothe his pain,
+    And arise and depart made clean from stain!
+
+
+    III
+
+    Years of care can not erase
+      Visions of the hills and trees
+    Closing in the dam and race;
+      Not the mile-long memories
+    Of the mill-stream's lovely place.
+
+    How the sunsets used to stain
+      Mirror of the water lying
+    Under eaves made dark with rain!
+      Where the red-bird, westward flying,
+    Lit to try one song again.
+
+    Dingles, hills, and woods, and springs,
+      Where we came in calm and storm,
+    Swinging in the grape-vine swings,
+      Wading where the rocks were warm,
+    With our fishing-nets and strings.
+
+    Here the road plunged down the hill,
+      Under ash and chinquapin,--
+    Where the grasshoppers would drill
+      Ears of silence with their din,--
+    To the willow-girdled mill.
+
+    There the path beyond the ford
+      Takes the woodside, just below
+    Shallows that the lilies sword,
+      Where the scarlet blossoms blow
+    Of the trumpet-vine and gourd.
+
+    Summer winds, that sink with heat,
+      On the pelted waters winnow
+    Moony petals that repeat
+      Crescents, where the startled minnow
+    Beats a glittering retreat.
+
+    Summer winds that bear the scent
+      Of the iron-weed and mint,
+    Weary with sweet freight and spent,
+      On the deeper pools imprint
+    Stumbling steps in many a dent.
+
+    Summer winds, that split the husk
+      Of the peach and nectarine,
+    Trail along the amber dusk
+      Hazy skirts of gray and green,
+    Spilling balms of dew and musk.
+
+    Where with balls of bursting juice
+      Summer sees the red wild-plum
+    Strew the gravel; ripened loose,
+      Autumn hears the pawpaw drum
+    Plumpness on the rocks that bruise:
+
+    There we found the water-beech,
+      One forgotten August noon,
+    With a hornet-nest in reach,--
+      Like a fairyland balloon,
+    Full of bustling fairy speech.--
+
+    Some invasion sure it was;
+      For we heard the captains scold;
+    Waspish cavalry a-buzz,--
+      Troopers uniformed in gold,
+    Sable-slashed,--to charge on us.
+
+    Could I find the sedgy angle,
+      Where the dragon-flies would turn
+    Slender flittings into spangle
+      On the sunlight? or would burn--
+    Where the berries made a tangle--
+
+    Sparkling green and brassy blue;
+      Rendezvousing, by the stream,
+    Bands of elf-banditti, who,
+      Brigands of the bloom and beam,
+    Drunken were with honey-dew.
+
+    Could I find the pond that lay
+      Where vermilion blossoms showered
+    Fragrance down the daisied way?
+      That the sassafras embowered
+    With the spice of early May?
+
+    Could I find it--did I seek--
+      The old mill? Its weather-beaten
+    Wheel and gable by the creek?
+      With its warping roof; worm-eaten,
+    Dusty rafters worn and weak.
+
+    Where old shadows haunt old places,
+      Loft and hopper, stair and bin;
+    Ghostly with the dust that laces
+      Webs that usher phantoms in,
+    Wistful with remembered faces.
+
+    While the frogs' grave litanies
+      Drowse in far-off antiphone,
+    Supplicating, till the eyes
+      Of dead friendships, long alone
+    In the dusky corners,--rise.
+
+    Moonrays or the splintered slip
+      Of a star? within the darkling
+    Twilight, where the fireflies dip--
+      As if Night a myriad sparkling
+    Jewels from her hands let slip:
+
+    While again some farm-boy crosses,--
+      With a corn-sack for the meal,--
+    O'er the creek, through ferns and mosses
+      Sprinkled by the old mill-wheel,
+    Where the water drips and tosses.
+
+
+
+
+    THE FARMSTEAD
+
+
+    Yes, I love the homestead. There
+      In the spring the lilacs blew
+    Plenteous perfume everywhere;
+      There in summer gladioles grew
+    Parallels of scarlet glare.
+
+    And the moon-hued primrose cool,
+      Satin-soft and redolent;
+    Honeysuckles beautiful,
+      Filling all the air with scent;
+    Roses red or white as wool.
+
+    Roses, glorious and lush,
+      Rich in tender-tinted dyes,
+    Like the gay tempestuous rush
+      Of unnumbered butterflies,
+    Clustering o'er each bending bush.
+
+    Here japonica and box,
+      And the wayward violets;
+    Clumps of star-enamelled phlox,
+      And the myriad flowery jets
+    Of the twilight four-o'-clocks.
+
+    Ah, the beauty of the place!
+      When the June made one great rose,
+    Full of musk and mellow grace,
+      In the garden's humming close,
+    Of her comely mother face!
+
+    Bubble-like, the hollyhocks
+      Budded, burst, and flaunted wide
+    Gypsy beauty from their stocks;
+      Morning glories, bubble-dyed,
+    Swung in honey-hearted flocks.
+
+    Tawny tiger-lilies flung
+      Doublets slashed with crimson on;
+    Graceful slave-girls, fair and young,
+      Like Circassians, in the sun
+    Alabaster lilies swung.
+
+    Ah, the droning of the bee;
+      In his dusty pantaloons
+    Tumbling in the fleurs-de-lis;
+      In the drowsy afternoons
+    Dreaming in the pink sweet-pea.
+
+    Ah, the moaning wildwood-dove!
+      With its throat of amethyst
+    Rippled like a shining cove
+      Which a wind to pearl hath kissed,
+    Moaning, moaning of its love.
+
+    And the insects' gossip thin--
+      From the summer hotness hid--
+    In lone, leafy deeps of green;
+      Then at eve the katydid
+    With its hard, unvaried din.
+
+    Often from the whispering hills,
+      Borne from out the golden dusk,--
+    Gold with gold of daffodils,--
+      Thrilled into the garden's musk
+    The wild wail of whippoorwills.
+
+    From the purple-tangled trees,
+      Like the white, full heart of night,
+    Solemn with majestic peace,
+      Swam the big moon, veined with light;
+    Like some gorgeous golden-fleece.
+
+    She was there with me.--And who,
+      In the magic of the hour,
+    Had not sworn that they could view,
+      Beading on each blade and flower
+    Moony blisters of the dew?
+
+    And each fairy of our home,--
+      Firefly,--its taper lit
+    In the honey-scented gloam,
+      Dashing down the dusk with it
+    Like an instant-flaming foam.
+
+    And we heard the calling, calling,
+      Of the screech-owl in the brake;
+    Where the trumpet-vine hung, crawling
+      Down the ledge, into the lake
+    Heard the sighing streamlet falling.
+
+    Then we wandered to the creek
+      Where the water-lilies, growing
+    Thick as stars, lay white and weak;
+      Or against the brooklet's flowing
+    Bent and bathed a bashful cheek.
+
+    And the moonlight, rippling golden,
+      Fell in virgin aureoles
+    On their bosoms, half unfolden,
+      Where, it seemed, the fairies' souls
+    Dwelt as perfume,--unbeholden;--
+
+    Or lay sleeping, pearly-tented,
+      Baby-cribbed within each bud,
+    While the night-wind, piney-scented,
+      Swooning over field and flood,
+    Rocked them on the waters dented.
+
+    Then the low, melodious bell
+      Of a sleeping heifer tinkled,
+    In some berry-briered dell,
+      As her satin dewlap wrinkled
+    With the cud that made it swell.
+
+    And, returning home, we heard,
+      In a beech-tree at the gate,
+    Some brown, dream-behaunted bird,
+      Singing of its absent mate,
+    Of the mate that never heard.
+
+    And, you see, now I am gray,
+      Why within the old, old place,
+    With such memories, I stay;
+      Fancy out her absent face
+    Long since passed away.
+
+    She was mine--yes! still is mine:
+      And my frosty memory
+    Reels about her, as with wine
+      Warmed into young eyes that see
+    All of her that was divine.
+
+    Yes, I loved her, and have grown
+      Melancholy in that love,
+    And the memory alone
+      Of perfection such whereof
+    She could sanctify each stone.
+
+    And where'er the poppies swing--
+      There we walk,--as if a bee
+    Bent them with its airy wing,--
+      Down her garden shadowy
+    In the hush the evenings bring.
+
+
+
+
+    A FLOWER OF THE FIELDS
+
+
+    Bee-bitten in the orchard hung
+    The peach; or, fallen in the weeds,
+    Lay rotting, where still sucked and sung
+    The gray bee, boring to its seed's
+    Pink pulp and honey blackly stung.
+
+    The orchard-path, which led around
+    The garden,--with its heat one twinge
+    Of dinning locusts,--picket-bound
+    And ragged, brought me where one hinge
+    Held up the gate that scraped the ground.
+
+    All seemed the same: the martin-box--
+    Sun-warped with pigmy balconies--
+    Still stood, with all its twittering flocks,
+    Perched on its pole above the peas
+    And silvery-seeded onion-stocks.
+
+    The clove-pink and the rose; the clump
+    Of coppery sunflowers, with the heat
+    Sick to the heart: the garden stump,
+    Red with geranium-pots, and sweet
+    With moss and ferns, this side the pump.
+
+    I rested, with one hesitant hand
+    Upon the gate. The lonesome day,
+    Droning with insects, made the land
+    One dry stagnation. Soaked with hay
+    And scents of weeds the hot wind fanned.
+
+    I breathed the sultry scents, my eyes
+    Parched as my lips. And yet I felt
+    My limbs were ice.--As one who flies
+    To some wild woe.--How sleepy smelt
+    The hay-sweet heat that soaked the skies!
+
+    Noon nodded; dreamier, lonesomer
+    For one long, plaintive, forest-side
+    Bird-quaver.--And I knew me near
+    Some heartbreak anguish.... She had died.
+    I felt it, and no need to hear!
+
+    I passed the quince and pear-tree; where,
+    All up the porch, a grape-vine trails--
+    How strange that fruit, whatever air
+    Or earth it grows in, never fails
+    To find its native flavour there!
+
+    And she was as a flower, too,
+    That grows its proper bloom and scent
+    No matter what the soil: she, who,
+    Born better than her place, still lent
+    Grace to the lowliness she knew....
+
+    They met me at the porch, and were
+    Sad-eyed with weeping.--Then the room
+    Shut out the country's heat and purr,
+    And left light stricken into gloom--
+    So love and I might look on her.
+
+
+
+
+    THE FEUD
+
+
+    Rocks, trees and rocks; and down a mossy stone
+      The murmuring ooze and trickle of a stream
+    Through bushes, where the mountain spring lies lone,--
+      A gleaming cairngorm where the shadows dream,--
+    And one wild road winds like a saffron seam.
+
+    Here sang the thrush, whose pure, mellifluous note
+      Dropped golden sweetness on the fragrant June;
+    Here cat--and blue-bird and wood-sparrow wrote
+      Their presence on the silence with a tune;
+    And here the fox drank 'neath the mountain moon.
+
+    Frail ferns and dewy mosses and dark brush,--
+      Impenetrable briers, deep and dense,
+    And wiry bushes,--brush, that seemed to crush
+      The struggling saplings with its tangle, whence
+    Sprawled out the ramble of an old rail-fence.
+
+    A wasp buzzed by; and then a butterfly
+      In orange and amber, like a floating flame;
+    And then a man, hard-eyed and very sly,
+      Gaunt-cheeked and haggard and a little lame,
+    With an old rifle, down the mountain came.
+
+    He listened, drinking from a flask he took
+      Out of the ragged pocket of his coat;
+    Then all around him cast a stealthy look;
+      Lay down; and watched an eagle soar and float,
+    His fingers twitching at his hairy throat.
+
+    The shades grew longer; and each Cumberland height
+      Loomed, framed in splendours of the dolphin dusk.
+    Around the road a horseman rode in sight;
+      Young, tall, blonde-bearded. Silent, grim, and brusque,
+    He in the thicket aimed--The gun ran husk;
+
+    And echoes barked among the hills and made
+      Repeated instants of the shot's distress.--
+    Then silence--and the trampled bushes swayed;--
+      Then silence, packed with murder and the press
+    Of distant hoofs that galloped riderless.
+
+
+
+
+    LYNCHERS
+
+
+    At the moon's down-going, let it be
+    On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree....
+
+    The red-rock road of the underbush,
+    Where the woman came through the summer hush.
+
+    The sumach high and the elder thick,
+    Where we found the stone and the ragged stick
+
+    The trampled road of the thicket, full
+    Of footprints down to the quarry pool.
+
+    The rocks that ooze with the hue of lead,
+    Where we found her lying stark and dead.
+
+    The scraggy wood; the negro hut,
+    With its doors and windows locked and shut.
+
+    A secret signal; a foot's rough tramp;
+    A knock at the door; a lifted lamp.
+
+    An oath; a scuffle; a ring of masks;
+    A voice that answers a voice that asks.
+
+    A group of shadows; the moon's red fleck;
+    A running noose and a man's bared neck.
+
+    A word, a curse, and a shape that swings;
+    The lonely night and a bat's black wings....
+
+    At the moon's down-going, let it be
+    On the quarry hill with its one gnarled tree.
+
+
+
+
+    DEAD MAN'S RUN
+
+
+    He rode adown the autumn wood,
+      A man dark-eyed and brown;
+    A mountain girl before him stood
+      Clad in a homespun gown.
+
+    'To ride this road is death for you!
+      My father waits you there;
+    My father and my brother, too,--
+      You know the oath they swear.'
+
+    He holds her by one berry-brown wrist,
+      And by one berry-brown hand;
+    And he hath laughed at her and kissed
+      Her cheek the sun hath tanned.
+
+    'The feud is to the death, sweetheart;
+      But forward will I ride.'--
+    'And if you ride to death, sweetheart,
+      My place is at your side.'
+
+    Low hath he laughed again and kissed
+      And helped her with his hand;
+    And they have ridd'n into the mist
+      That belts the autumn land.
+
+    And they had passed by Devil's Den,
+      And come to Dead Man's Run,
+    When in the brush rose up two men,
+      Each with a levelled gun.
+
+    'Down! down! my sister!' cries the one;--
+      She gives the reins a twirl.--
+    The other shouts, 'He shot my son!
+      And now he steals my girl!'
+
+    The rifles crack: she will not wail:
+      He will not cease to ride:
+    But, oh! her face is pale, is pale,
+      And the red blood stains her side.
+
+    'Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart!
+      The road is rough to ride!'--
+    The road is rough by gulch and bluff,
+      And her hair blows wild and wide.
+
+    'Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart!
+      The bank is steep to ride!'--
+    The bank is steep for a strong man's leap,
+      And her eyes are staring wide.
+
+    'Sit fast, sit fast by me, sweetheart!
+      The Run is swift to ride!'--
+    The Run is swift with mountain drift,
+      And she sways from side to side.
+
+    Is it a wash of the yellow moss,
+      Or drift of the autumn's gold,
+    The mountain torrent foams across
+      For the dead pine's roots to hold?
+
+    Is it the bark of the sycamore,
+      Or peel of the white birch-tree,
+    The mountaineer on the other shore
+      Hath followed and still can see?
+
+    No mountain moss or leaves, dear heart!
+      No bark of birchen gray!--
+    Young hair of gold and a face death-cold
+      The wild stream sweeps away.
+
+
+
+
+    AUGUST
+
+
+    I
+
+    Clad on with glowing beauty and the peace,
+      Benign, of calm maturity, she stands
+      Among her meadows and her orchard-lands,
+    And on her mellowing gardens and her trees,
+      Out of the ripe abundance of her hands
+              Bestows increase
+    And fruitfulness, as, wrapped in sunny ease,
+        Blue-eyed and blonde she goes
+    Upon her bosom Summer's richest rose.
+
+
+    II
+
+    And he who follows where her footsteps lead,
+      By hill and rock, by forest-side and stream,
+      Shall glimpse the glory of her visible dream,
+    In flower and fruit, in rounded nut and seed:
+      She, in whose path the very shadows gleam;
+              Whose humblest weed
+    Seems lovelier than June's loveliest flower, indeed,
+        And sweeter to the smell
+    Than April's self within a rainy dell.
+
+
+    III
+
+    Hers is a sumptuous simplicity
+      Within the fair Republic of her flowers,
+      Where you may see her standing hours on hours,
+    Breast-deep in gold, soft-holding up a bee
+      To her hushed ear; or sitting under bowers
+              Of greenery,
+    A butterfly a-tilt upon her knee;
+        Or lounging on her hip,
+    Dancing a cricket on her finger-tip.
+
+
+    IV
+
+    Ay, let me breathe hot scents that tell of you;
+      The hoary catnip and the meadow-mint,
+      On which the honour of your touch doth print
+    Itself as odour. Let me drink the hue
+      Of iron-weed and mist-flow'r here that hint,
+              With purple and blue,
+    The rapture that your presence doth imbue
+        Their inmost essence with,
+    Immortal though as transient as a myth.
+
+
+    V
+
+    Yea, let me feed on sounds that still assure
+      Me where you hide: the brooks', whose happy din
+      Tells where, the deep retired woods within,
+    Disrobed, you bathe; the birds', whose drowsy lure
+      Tells where you slumber, your warm nestling chin
+              Soft on the pure,
+    Pink cushion of your palm.... What better cure
+        For care and memory's ache
+    Than to behold you so, and watch you wake!
+
+
+
+
+    THE BUSH-SPARROW
+
+
+    I
+
+    Ere wild-haws, looming in the glooms,
+    Build bolted drifts of breezy blooms;
+    And in the whistling hollow there
+    The red-bud bends, as brown and bare
+    As buxom Roxy's up-stripped arm;
+    From some gray hickory or larch,
+    Sighed o'er the sodden meads of March,
+    The sad heart thrills and reddens warm
+    To hear you braving the rough storm,
+    Frail courier of green-gathering powers;
+    Rebelling sap in trees and flowers;
+    Love's minister come heralding--
+    O sweet saint-voice among bleak bowers!
+    O brown-red pursuivant of Spring!
+
+
+    II
+
+    'Moan' sob the woodland waters still
+    Down bloomless ledges of the hill;
+    And gray, gaunt clouds like harpies hang
+    In harpy heavens, and swoop and clang
+    Sharp beaks and talons of the wind:
+    Black scowl the forests, and unkind
+    The far fields as the near: while song
+    Seems murdered and all beauty wrong.
+    One weak frog only in the thaw
+    Of spawny pools wakes cold and raw,
+    Expires a melancholy bass
+    And stops as if bewildered: then
+    Along the frowning wood again,
+    Flung in the thin wind's vulture face,
+    From woolly tassels of the proud,
+    Red-bannered maples, long and loud,
+    'The Spring is come! is here! her Grace! her Grace!'
+
+
+    III
+
+    'Her Grace, the Spring! her Grace! her Grace!
+    Climbs, beautiful and sunny browed,
+    Up, up the kindling hills and wakes
+    Blue berries in the berry brakes:
+    With fragrant flakes, that blow and bleach,
+    Deep-powders smothered quince and peach:
+    Eyes dogwoods with a thousand eyes:
+    Teaches each sod how to be wise
+    With twenty wild-flowers to one weed,
+    And kisses germs that they may seed.
+    In purest purple and sweet white
+    Treads up the happier hills of light,
+    Bloom, cloudy-borne, song in her hair
+    And balm and beam of odorous air.
+    Winds, her retainers; and the rains
+    Her yeomen strong that sweep the plains:
+    Her scarlet knights of dawn, and gold
+    Of eve, her panoply unfold:
+    Her herald tabarded behold!
+    Awake to greet! prepare to sing!
+    She comes, the darling Duchess, Spring!'
+
+
+
+
+    QUIET
+
+
+    A log-hut in the solitude,
+      A clapboard roof to rest beneath!
+    This side, the shadow-haunted wood;
+      That side, the sunlight-haunted heath.
+
+    At daybreak Morn shall come to me
+      In raiment of the white winds spun;
+    Slim in her rosy hand the key
+      That opes the gateway of the sun.
+
+    Her smile shall help my heart enough
+      With love to labour all the day,
+    And cheer the road, whose rocks are rough,
+      With her smooth footprints, each a ray.
+
+    At dusk a voice shall call afar,
+      A lone voice like the whippoorwill's;
+    And, on her shimmering brow one star,
+      Night shall descend the western hills.
+
+    She at my door till dawn shall stand,
+      With gothic eyes, that, dark and deep,
+    Are mirrors of a mystic land,
+      Fantastic with the towns of sleep.
+
+
+
+
+    MUSIC
+
+
+    Thou, oh, thou!
+    Thou of the chorded shell and golden plectrum, thou
+    Of the dark eyes and pale pacific brow!
+    Music, who by the plangent waves,
+    Or in the echoing night of labyrinthine caves,
+    Or on God's mountains, lonely as the stars,
+    Touchest reverberant bars
+    Of immemorial sorrow and amaze;--
+    Keeping regret and memory awake,
+    And all the immortal ache
+    Of love that leans upon the past's sweet days
+    In retrospection!--now, oh, now,
+    Interpreter and heart-physician, thou
+    Who gazest on the heaven and the hell
+    Of life, and singest each as well,
+    Touch with thy all-mellifluous finger-tips,
+    Or thy melodious lips,
+    This sickness named my soul,
+    Making it whole
+    As is an echo of a chord,
+    Or some symphonic word,
+    Or sweet vibrating sigh,
+    That deep, resurgent still doth rise and die
+    On thy voluminous roll;
+    Part of the beauty and the mystery
+    That axles Earth with music; as a slave,
+    Swinging it round and round on each sonorous pole,
+    'Mid spheric harmony,
+    And choral majesty,
+    And diapasoning of wind and wave;
+    Speeding it on its far elliptic way
+    'Mid vasty anthemings of night and day.--
+    O cosmic cry
+    Of two eternities, wherein we see
+    The phantasms, Death and Life,
+    At endless strife
+    Above the silence of a monster grave.
+
+
+
+
+    THE PURPLE VALLEYS
+
+
+    Far in the purple valleys of illusion
+    I see her waiting, like the soul of music,
+    With deep eyes, lovelier than cerulean pansies,
+    Shadow and fire, yet merciless as poison;
+    With red lips sweeter than Arabian storax,
+    Yet bitterer than myrrh. O tears and kisses!
+    O eyes and lips, that haunt my soul for ever!
+
+    Again Spring walks transcendent on the mountains:
+    The woods are hushed: the vales are blue with shadows:
+    Above the heights, steeped in a thousand splendours,
+    Like some vast canvas of the gods, hangs burning
+    The sunset's wild sciography: and slowly
+    The moon treads heaven's proscenium,--night's stately
+    White queen of love and tragedy and madness.
+
+    Again I know forgotten dreams and longings;
+    Ideals lost; desires dead and buried
+    Beside the altar sacrifice erected
+    Within the heart's high sanctuary. Strangely
+    Again I know the horror and the rapture,
+    The utterless awe, the joy akin to anguish,
+    The terror and the worship of the spirit.
+
+    Again I feel her eyes pierce through and through me;
+    Her deep eyes, lovelier than imperial pansies,
+    Velvet and flame, through which her fierce will holds me,
+    Powerless and tame, and draws me on and onward
+    To sad, unsatisfied and animal yearnings,
+    Wild, unrestrained--the brute within the human--
+    To fling me panting on her mouth and bosom.
+
+    Again I feel her lips like ice and fire,
+    Her red lips, odorous as Arabian storax,
+    Fragrance and fire, within whose kiss destruction
+    Lies serpent-like. Intoxicating languors
+    Resistlessly embrace me, soul and body;
+    And we go drifting, drifting--she is laughing--
+    Outcasts of God, into the deep's abysm.
+
+
+
+
+    A DREAM SHAPE
+
+
+    With moon-white hearts that held a gleam
+    I gathered wild-flowers in a dream,
+    And shaped a woman, whose sweet blood
+    Was odour of the wildwood bud.
+
+    From dew, the starlight arrowed through,
+    I wrought a woman's eyes of blue;
+    The lids that on her eyeballs lay,
+    Were rose-pale petals of the May.
+
+    Out of a rosebud's veins I drew
+    The fragrant crimson beating through
+    The languid lips of her, whose kiss
+    Was as a poppy's drowsiness.
+
+    Out of the moonlight and the air
+    I wrought the glory of her hair,
+    That o'er her eyes' blue heaven lay
+    Like some gold cloud o'er dawn of day.
+
+    I took the music of the breeze
+    And water, whispering in the trees,
+    And shaped the soul that breathed below
+    A woman's blossom breasts of snow.
+
+    A shadow's shadow in the glass
+    Of sleep, my spirit saw her pass:
+    And thinking of it now, meseems
+    We only live within our dreams.
+
+    For in that time she was to me
+    More real than our reality;
+    More real than Earth, more real than I--
+    The unreal things that pass and die.
+
+
+
+
+    THE OLD BARN
+
+
+    Low, swallow-swept and gray,
+    Between the orchard and the spring,
+    All its wide windows overflowing hay,
+    And crannied doors a-swing,
+    The old barn stands to-day.
+
+    Deep in its hay the Leghorn hides
+    A round white nest; and, humming soft
+    On roof and rafter, or its log-rude sides,
+    Black in the sun-shot loft,
+    The building hornet glides.
+
+    Along its corn-crib, cautiously
+    As thieving fingers, skulks the rat;
+    Or in warped stalls of fragrant timothy,
+    Gnaws at some loosened slat,
+    Or passes shadowy.
+
+    A dream of drouth made audible
+    Before its door, hot, smooth, and shrill
+    All day the locust sings.... What other spell
+    Shall hold it, lazier still
+    Than the long day's, now tell:--
+
+    Dusk and the cricket and the strain
+    Of tree-toad and of frog; and stars
+    That burn above the rich west's ribbed stain;
+    And dropping pasture bars,
+    And cow-bells up the lane.
+
+    Night and the moon and katydid,
+    And leaf-lisp of the wind-touched boughs;
+    And mazy shadows that the fireflies thrid;
+    And sweet breath of the cows,
+    And the lone owl here hid.
+
+
+
+
+    THE WOOD WITCH
+
+
+    There is a woodland witch who lies
+    With bloom-bright limbs and beam-bright eyes,
+    Among the water-flags that rank
+    The slow brook's heron-haunted bank.
+    The dragon-flies, brass-bright and blue,
+    Are signs she works her sorcery through;
+    Weird, wizard characters she weaves
+    Her spells by under forest leaves,--
+    These wait her word, like imps, upon
+    The gray flag-pods; their wings, of lawn
+    And gauze; their bodies, gleaming green.
+    While o'er the wet sand,--left between
+    The running water and the still,--
+    In pansy hues and daffodil,
+    The fancies that she doth devise
+    Take on the forms of butterflies,
+    Rich-coloured.--And 'tis she you hear,
+    Whose sleepy rune, hummed in the ear
+    Of silence, bees and beetles purr,
+    And the dry-droning locusts whirr;
+    Till, where the wood is very lone,
+    Vague monotone meets monotone,
+    And slumber is begot and born,
+    A faery child beneath the thorn.
+    There is no mortal who may scorn
+    The witchery she spreads around
+    Her din demesne, wherein is bound
+    The beauty of abandoned time,
+    As some sweet thought 'twixt rhyme and rhyme.
+    And through her spells you shall behold
+    The blue turn gray, the gray turn gold
+    Of hollow heaven; and the brown
+    Of twilight vistas twinkled down
+    With fireflies; and in the gloom
+    Feel the cool vowels of perfume
+    Slow-syllabled of weed and bloom.
+    But, in the night, at languid rest,--
+    When like a spirit's naked breast
+    The moon slips from a silver mist,--
+    With star-bound brow, and star-wreathed wrist,
+    If you should see her rise and wave
+    You welcome--ah! what thing could save
+    You then? for evermore her slave!
+
+
+
+
+    AT SUNSET
+
+
+    Into the sunset's turquoise marge
+    The moon dips, like a pearly barge
+    Enchantment sails through magic seas
+    To fairyland Hesperides,
+          Over the hills and away.
+
+    Into the fields, in ghost-gray gown,
+    The young-eyed Dusk comes slowly down;
+    Her apron filled with stars she stands,
+    And one or two slip from her hands
+          Over the hills and away.
+
+    Above the wood's black caldron bends
+    The witch-faced Night and, muttering, blends
+    The dew and heat, whose bubbles make
+    The mist and musk that haunt the brake
+          Over the hills and away.
+
+    Oh, come with me, and let us go
+    Beyond the sunset lying low,
+    Beyond the twilight and the night
+    Into Love's kingdom of long light
+          Over the hills and away.
+
+
+
+
+    MAY
+
+
+    The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed,
+      That spangle the woods and dance--
+    No gleam of gold that the twilights hold
+      Is strong as their necromance:
+    For, under the oaks where the woodpaths lead,
+    The golden discs of the rattlesnake-weed
+      Are the May's own utterance.
+
+    The azure stars of the bluet bloom,
+      That sprinkle the woodland's trance--
+    No blink of blue that a cloud lets through
+      Is sweet as their countenance:
+    For, over the knolls that the woods perfume,
+    The azure stars of the bluet bloom
+      Are the light of the May's own glance.
+
+    With her wondering words and her looks she comes,
+      In a sunbeam of a gown;
+    She needs but think and the blossoms wink,
+      But look, and they shower down.
+    By orchard ways, where the wild bee hums,
+    With her wondering words and her looks she comes
+      Like a little maid to town.
+
+
+
+
+    RAIN
+
+
+    I
+
+    Around, the stillness deepened; then the grain
+    Went wild with wind; and every briery lane
+    Was swept with dust; and then, tempestuous black,
+    Hillward the tempest heaved a monster back,
+    That on the thunder leaned as on a cane;
+    And on huge shoulders bore a cloudy pack,
+    That gullied gold from many a lightning-crack:
+    One great drop splashed and wrinkled down the pane,
+    And then field, hill, and wood were lost in rain.
+
+
+    II
+
+    At last, through clouds,--as from a cavern hewn
+    Into night's heart,--the sun burst, angry roon;
+    And every cedar, with its weight of wet,
+    Against the sunset's fiery splendour set,
+    Frightened to beauty, seemed with rubies strewn:
+    Then in drenched gardens, like sweet phantoms met,
+    Dim odours rose of pink and mignonette;
+    And in the East a confidence, that soon
+    Grew to the calm assurance of the moon.
+
+
+
+
+    TO FALL
+
+
+    Sad-hearted spirit of the solitudes,
+    Who comest through the ruin-wedded woods!
+    Gray-gowned with fog, gold-girdled with the gloom
+    Of tawny twilights; burdened with perfume
+    Of rain-wet uplands, chilly with the mist;
+    And all the beauty of the fire-kissed
+    Cold forests crimsoning thy indolent way,
+    Odorous of death and drowsy with decay.
+    I think of thee as seated 'mid the showers
+    Of languid leaves that cover up the flowers,--
+    The little flower-sisterhoods, whom June
+    Once gave wild sweetness to, as to a tune
+    A singer gives her soul's wild melody,--
+    Watching the squirrel store his granary.
+    Or, 'mid old orchards I have pictured thee:
+    Thy hair's profusion blown about thy back;
+    One lovely shoulder bathed with gypsy black;
+    Upon thy palm one nestling cheek, and sweet
+    The rosy russets tumbled at thy feet.
+    Was it a voice lamenting for the flowers?
+    A heart-sick bird that sang of happier hours?
+    A cricket dirging days that soon must die?
+    Or did the ghost of Summer wander by?
+
+
+
+
+    SUNSET IN AUTUMN
+
+
+    Blood-coloured oaks, that stand against a sky of gold and brass;
+    Gaunt slopes, on which the bleak leaves glow of brier and sassafras,
+    And broom-sedge strips of smoky-pink and pearl-gray clumps of grass
+    In which, beneath the ragged sky, the rain pools gleam like glass.
+
+    From West to East, from wood to wood, along the forest-side,
+    The winds,--the sowers of the Lord,--with thunderous footsteps
+          stride;
+    Their stormy hands rain acorns down; and mad leaves, wildly dyed,
+    Like tatters of their rushing cloaks, stream round them far and
+          wide.
+
+    The frail leaf-cricket in the weeds rings a faint fairy bell;
+    And like a torch of phantom ray the milkweed's windy shell
+    Glimmers; while, wrapped in withered dreams, the wet autumnal smell
+    Of loam and leaf, like some sad ghost, steals over field and dell.
+
+    The oaks, against a copper sky--o'er which, like some black lake
+    Of Dis, bronze clouds, like surges fringed with sullen fire, break--
+    Loom sombre as Doom's citadel above the vales that make
+    A pathway to a land of mist the moon's pale feet shall take.
+
+    Now, dyed with burning carbuncle, a limbo-litten pane,
+    Within its walls of storm, the West opens to hill and plain,
+    On which the wild-geese ink themselves, a far triangled train,
+    And then the shuttering clouds close down--and night is here again.
+
+
+
+
+    THE HILLS
+
+
+    There is no joy of earth that thrills
+    My bosom like the far-off hills!
+    Th' unchanging hills, that, shadowy,
+    Beckon our mutability
+    To follow and to gaze upon
+    Foundations of the dusk and dawn.
+    Meseems the very heavens are massed
+    Upon their shoulders, vague and vast
+    With all the skyey burden of
+    The winds and clouds and stars above.
+    Lo, how they sit before us, seeing
+    The laws that give all Beauty being!
+    Behold! to them, when dawn is near,
+    The nomads of the air appear,
+    Unfolding crimson camps of day
+    In brilliant bands; then march away;
+    And under burning battlements
+    Of twilight plant their tinted tents.
+    The truth of olden myths, that brood
+    By haunted stream and haunted wood,
+    They see; and feel the happiness
+    Of old at which we only guess:
+    The dreams, the ancients loved and knew,
+    Still as their rocks and trees are true:
+    Not otherwise than presences
+    The tempest and the calm to these:
+    One, shouting on them all the night,
+    Black-limbed and veined with lambent light;
+    The other with the ministry
+    Of all soft things that company
+    With music--an embodied form,
+    Giving to solitude the charm
+    Of leaves and waters and the peace
+    Of bird-begotten melodies--
+    And who at night doth still confer
+    With the mild moon, that telleth her
+    Pale tale of lonely love, until
+    Wan images of passion fill
+    The heights with shapes that glimmer by
+    Clad on with sleep and memory.
+
+
+
+
+    CONTENT
+
+
+    When I behold how some pursue
+    Fame, that is Care's embodiment
+    Or fortune, whose false face looks true,--
+    An humble home with sweet content
+    Is all I ask for me and you.
+
+    An humble home, where pigeons coo,
+    Whose path leads under breezy lines
+    Of frosty-berried cedars to
+    A gate, one mass of trumpet-vines,
+    Is all I ask for me and you.
+
+    A garden, which all summer through,
+    The roses old make redolent,
+    And morning-glories, gay of hue,
+    And tansy, with its homely scent,
+    Is all I ask for me and you.
+
+    An orchard, that the pippins strew,
+    From whose bruised gold the juices spring;
+    A vineyard, where the grapes hang blue,
+    Wine-big and ripe for vintaging,
+    Is all I ask for me and you.
+
+    A lane that leads to some far view
+    Of forest or of fallow-land,
+    Bloomed o'er with rose and meadow-rue,
+    Each with a bee in its hot hand,
+    Is all I ask for me and you.
+
+    At morn, a pathway deep with dew,
+    And birds to vary time and tune;
+    At eve, a sunset avenue,
+    And whippoorwills that haunt the moon,
+    Is all I ask for me and you.
+
+    Dear heart, with wants so small and few,
+    And faith, that's better far than gold,
+    A lowly friend, a child or two,
+    To care for us when we are old,
+    Is all I ask for me and you.
+
+
+
+
+    HEART OF MY HEART
+
+
+    Here where the season turns the land to gold,
+    Among the fields our feet have known of old,--
+    When we were children who would laugh and run,
+    Glad little playmates of the wind and sun,--
+    Before came toil and care and years went ill,
+    And one forgot and one remembered still;
+    Heart of my heart, among the old fields here,
+    Give me your hands and let me draw you near,
+              Heart of my heart.
+
+    Stars are not truer than your soul is true--
+    What need I more of heaven then than you?
+    Flowers are not sweeter than your face is sweet--
+    What need I more to make my world complete?
+    O woman nature, love that still endures,
+    What strength has ours that is not born of yours?
+    Heart of my heart, to you, whatever come,
+    To you the lead, whose love hath led me home.
+              Heart of my heart.
+
+
+
+
+    OCTOBER
+
+
+    Long hosts of sunlight, and the bright wind blows
+      A tourney-trumpet on the listed hill;
+    Past is the splendour of the royal rose
+              And duchess daffodil.
+
+    Crowned queen of beauty, in the garden's space,
+      Strong daughter of a bitter race and bold,
+    A ragged beggar with a lovely face,
+              Reigns the sad marigold.
+
+    And I have sought June's butterfly for days,
+      To find it--like a coreopsis bloom--
+    Amber and seal, rain-murdered 'neath the blaze
+              Of this sunflower's plume.
+
+    Here drones the bee; and there sky-daring wings
+      Voyage blue gulfs of heaven; the last song
+    The red-bird flings me as adieu, still rings
+              Upon yon pear-tree's prong.
+
+    No angry sunset brims with rubier red
+      The bowl of heaven than the days, indeed,
+    Pour in each blossom of this salvia-bed,
+              Where each leaf seems to bleed.
+
+    And where the wood-gnats dance, like some slight mist,
+      Above the efforts of the weedy stream,
+    The girl, October, tired of the tryst,
+              Dreams a diviner dream.
+
+    One foot just dipping the caressing wave,
+      One knee at languid angle; locks that drown
+    Hands nut-stained; hazel-eyed, she lies, and grave,
+              Watching the leaves drift down.
+
+
+
+
+    MYTH AND ROMANCE
+
+
+    I
+
+    When I go forth to greet the glad-faced Spring,
+      Just at the time of opening apple-buds,
+    When brooks are laughing, winds are whispering,
+      On babbling hillsides or in warbling woods,
+      There is an unseen presence that eludes:--
+    Perhaps a dryad, in whose tresses cling
+      The loamy odours of old solitudes,
+    Who, from her beechen doorway, calls, and leads
+      My soul to follow; now with dimpling words
+      Of leaves; and now with syllables of birds;
+    While here and there--is it her limbs that swing?
+    Or restless sunlight on the moss and weeds?
+
+
+    II
+
+    Or, haply, 'tis a Naiad now who slips,
+      Like some white lily, from her fountain's glass,
+    While from her dripping hair and breasts and hips
+      The moisture rains cool music on the grass.
+      Her have I heard and followed, yet, alas!
+    Have seen no more than the wet ray that dips
+      The shivered waters, wrinkling where I pass;
+    But in the liquid light where she doth hide,
+      I have beheld the azure of her gaze
+      Smiling; and, where the orbing ripple plays,
+    Among her minnows I have heard her lips,
+    Bubbling, make merry by the waterside.
+
+
+    III
+
+    Or now it is an Oread--whose eyes
+      Are constellated dusk--who stands confessed,
+    As naked as a flow'r; her heart's surprise,
+      Like morning's rose, mantling her brow and breast:
+      She, shrinking from my presence, all distressed
+    Stands for a startled moment ere she flies,
+      Her deep hair blowing, up the mountain crest,
+    Wild as a mist that trails along the dawn.
+      And is't her footfalls lure me? or the sound
+      Of airs that stir the crisp leaf on the ground?
+    And is't her body glimmers on yon rise?
+    Or dogwood blossoms snowing on the lawn?
+
+
+    IV
+
+    Now 'tis a satyr piping serenades
+      On a slim reed. Now Pan and Faun advance
+    Beneath green-hollowed roofs of forest glades,
+      Their feet gone mad with music: now, perchance,
+      Sylvanus sleeping, on whose leafy trance
+    The nymphs stand gazing in dim ambuscades
+      Of sun-embodied perfume.--Myth, Romance,
+    Where'er I turn, reach out bewildering arms,
+      Compelling me to follow. Day and night
+      I hear their voices and behold the light
+    Of their divinity that still evades,
+    And still allures me in a thousand forms.
+
+
+
+
+    GENIUS LOCI
+
+
+    I
+
+    What wood-god, on this water's mossy curb,
+      Lost in reflections of earth's loveliness,
+    Did I, just now, unconsciously disturb?
+      I who haphazard, wandering at a guess,
+    Came on this spot, wherein with gold and flame
+    Of buds and blooms the season writes its name.--
+    Ah me! could I have seen him ere alarm
+      Of my approach aroused him from his calm!
+      As he, part Hamadryad and, mayhap,
+    Part Faun, lay here; who left the shadow warm
+      As a wood-rose, and filled the air with balm
+      Of his wild breath as with ethereal sap.
+
+
+    II
+
+    Does not the moss retain some slight impress,
+      Green-dented down, of where he lay or trod?
+    Do not the flow'rs, so reticent, confess
+      With conscious looks the contact of a god?
+    Does not the very water garrulously
+    Boast the indulgence of a deity?
+    And, hark! in burly beech and sycamore
+      How all the birds proclaim it! and the leaves
+      Rejoice with clappings of their myriad hands!
+    And shall not I believe, too, and adore,
+      With such wide proof?--Yea, though my soul perceives
+      No evident presence, still it understands.
+
+
+    III
+
+    And for a while it moves me to lie down
+      Here on the spot his god-head sanctified:
+    Mayhap some dream he dreamed may linger, brown
+      And young as joy, around the forest side;
+    Some dream within whose heart lives no disdain
+    For such as I whose love is sweet and sane;
+    That may repeat, so none but I may hear--
+      As one might tell a pearl-strung rosary--
+      Some epic that the leaves have learned to croon,
+    Some lyric whispered in the wild-flow'r's ear,
+      Whose murmurous lines are sung by bird and bee,
+      And all the insects of the night and noon.
+
+
+    IV
+
+    For, all around me, upon field and hill,
+      Enchantment lies as of mysterious flutes;
+    As if the music of a god's goodwill
+      Had taken on material attributes
+    In blooms, like chords; and in the water-gleam,
+    That runs its silvery scales on every stream;
+    In sunbeam bars, up which the butterfly,
+      A golden note, vibrates then flutters on--
+      Inaudible tunes, blown on the pipes of Pan,
+    That have assumed a visible entity,
+      And drugged the air with beauty so, a Faun,
+      Behold, I seem, and am no more a man.
+
+
+
+
+    DISCOVERY
+
+
+    What is it now that I shall seek
+    Where woods dip downward, in the hills;
+    A mossy nook, a ferny creek,
+    And May among the daffodils.
+
+    Or in the valley's vistaed glow,
+    Past rocks of terraced trumpet-vines,
+    Shall I behold her coming slow,
+    Sweet May, among the columbines?
+
+    With red-bud cheeks and bluet eyes,
+    Big eyes, the homes of happiness,
+    To meet me with the old surprise,
+    Her hoiden hair all bonnetless.
+
+    Who waits for me, where, note for note,
+    The birds make glad the forest trees?
+    A dogwood blossom at her throat,
+    My May among th' anemones.
+
+    As sweetheart breezes kiss the blooms,
+    And dewdrops drink the moonlight's gleam,
+    My soul shall kiss her lips' perfumes,
+    And drink the magic of her dreams.
+
+
+
+
+    THE OLD SPRING
+
+
+    I
+
+    Under rocks whereon the rose
+    Like a strip of morning glows;
+    Where the azure-throated newt
+    Drowses on the twisted root;
+    And the brown bees, humming homeward,
+    Stop to suck the honey-dew;
+    Fern and leaf-hid, gleaming gloamward,
+    Drips the wildwood spring I knew,
+    Drips the spring my boyhood knew.
+
+
+    II
+
+    Myrrh and music everywhere
+    Haunt its cascades;--like the hair
+    That a naiad tosses cool,
+    Swimming strangely beautiful,
+    With white fragrance for her bosom,
+    For her mouth a breath of song:--
+    Under leaf and branch and blossom
+    Flows the woodland spring along,
+    Sparkling, singing flows along.
+
+
+    III
+
+    Still the wet wan mornings touch
+    Its gray rocks, perhaps; and such
+    Slender stars as dusk may have
+    Pierce the rose that roofs its wave;
+    Still the thrush may call at noontide
+    And the whippoorwill at night;
+    Nevermore, by sun or moontide,
+    Shall I see it gliding white,
+    Falling, flowing, wild and white.
+
+
+
+
+    THE FOREST SPRING
+
+
+    Push back the brambles, berry-blue:
+    The hollowed spring is full in view:
+    Deep-tangled with luxuriant fern
+    Its rock-embedded, crystal urn.
+
+    Not for the loneliness that keeps
+    The coigne wherein its silence sleeps;
+    Not for wild butterflies that sway
+    Their pansy pinions all the day
+    Above its mirror; nor the bee,
+    Nor dragonfly, that passing see
+    Themselves reflected in its spar;
+    Not for the one white liquid star,
+    That twinkles in its firmament;
+    Nor moon-shot clouds, so slowly sent
+    Athwart it when the kindly night
+    Beads all its grasses with the light
+    Small jewels of the dimpled dew;
+    Not for the day's inverted blue
+    Nor the quaint, dimly coloured stones
+    That dance within it where it moans:
+    Not for all these I love to sit
+    In silence and to gaze in it.
+    But, know, a nymph with merry eyes
+    Looks at me from its laughing skies;
+    A graceful glimmering nymph who plays
+    All the long fragrant summer days
+    With instant sights of bees and birds,
+    And speaks with them in water words,
+    And for whose nakedness the air
+    Weaves moony mists, and on whose hair,
+    Unfilleted, the night will set
+    That lone star as a coronet.
+
+
+
+
+    TRANSMUTATION
+
+
+    To me all beauty that I see
+    Is melody made visible:
+    An earth-translated state, may be,
+    Of music heard in Heaven or Hell.
+
+    Out of some love-impassioned strain
+    Of saints, the rose evolved its bloom;
+    And, dreaming of it here again,
+    Perhaps re-lives it as perfume.
+
+    Out of some chant that demons sing
+    Of hate and pain, the sunset grew;
+    And, haply, still remembering,
+    Re-lives it here as some wild hue.
+
+
+
+
+    DEAD CITIES
+
+
+    Out of it all but this remains:--
+    I was with one who crossed wide chains
+    Of the Cordilleras, whose peaks
+    Lock in the wilds of Yucatan,
+    Chiapas and Honduras. Weeks--
+    And then a city that no man
+    Had ever seen; so dim and old,
+    No chronicle has ever told
+    The history of men who piled
+    Its temples and huge teocallis
+    Among mimosa-blooming valleys;
+    Or how its altars were defiled
+    With human blood; whose idols there
+    With eyes of stone still stand and stare.
+
+    So old the moon can only know
+    How old, since ancient forests grow
+    On mighty wall and pyramid.
+    Huge ceibas, whose trunks were scarred
+    With ages, and dense yuccas, hid
+    Fanes 'mid the cacti, scarlet-starred.
+    I looked upon its paven ways,
+    And saw it in its kingliest days;
+    When from the lordly palace one,
+    A victim, walked with prince and priest,
+    Who turned brown faces toward the east
+    In worship of the rising sun:
+    At night ten hundred temples' spires
+    On gold burnt everlasting fires.
+
+    Uxmal? Palenque? or Copan?
+    I know not. Only how no man
+    Had ever seen; and still my soul
+    Believes it vaster than the three.
+    Volcanic rock walled in the whole,
+    Lost in the woods as in some sea.
+    _I only_ read its hieroglyphs,
+    Perused its monster monoliths
+    Of death, gigantic heads; and read
+    The pictured codex of its fate,
+    The perished Toltec; while in hate
+    Mad monkeys cursed me, as if dead
+    Priests of its past had taken form
+    To guard its ruined shrines from harm.
+
+
+
+
+    FROST
+
+
+    Magician he, who, autumn nights,
+      Down from the starry heavens whirls;
+    A harlequin in spangled tights,
+      Whose wand's touch carpets earth with pearls.
+
+    Through him each pane presents a scene,
+      A Lilliputian landscape, where
+    The world is white instead of green,
+      And trees and houses hang in air.
+
+    Where Elfins gambol and delight,
+      And haunt the jewelled bells of flowers;
+    Where upside-down we see the night
+      With many moons and starry showers.
+
+    And surely in his wand or hand
+      Is Midas magic, for, behold,
+    Some morn we wake and find the land,
+      Both field and forest, turned to gold.
+
+
+
+
+    A NIGHT IN JUNE
+
+
+    I
+
+    White as a lily moulded of Earth's milk
+      That eve the moon bloomed in a hyacinth sky;
+      Soft in the gleaming glens the wind went by,
+    Faint as a phantom clothed in unseen silk:
+    Bright as a naiad's leap, from shine to shade
+      The runnel twinkled through the shaken brier;
+      Above the hills one long cloud, pulsed with fire,
+    Flashed like a great enchantment-welded blade.
+    And when the western sky seemed some weird land,
+      And night a witching spell at whose command
+      One sloping star fell green from heav'n; and deep
+    The warm rose opened for the moth to sleep;
+      Then she, consenting, laid her hands in his,
+      And lifted up her lips for their first kiss.
+
+
+    II
+
+    There where they part, the porch's steps are strewn
+      With wind-blown petals of the purple vine;
+      Athwart the porch the shadow of a pine
+    Cleaves the white moonlight; and like some calm rune
+    Heaven says to Earth, shines the majestic moon;
+      And now a meteor draws a lilac line
+      Across the welkin, as if God would sign
+    The perfect poem of this night of June.
+    The wood-wind stirs the flowering chestnut-tree,
+      Whose curving blossoms strew the glimmering grass
+      Like crescents that wind-wrinkled waters glass;
+    And, like a moonstone in a frill of flame,
+      The dewdrop trembles on the peony,
+      As in a lover's heart his sweetheart's name.
+
+
+
+
+    THE DREAMER
+
+
+    Even as a child he loved to thrid the bowers,
+      And mark the loafing sunlight's lazy laugh;
+      Or, on each season, spell the epitaph
+    Of its dead months repeated in their flowers;
+    Or list the music of the strolling showers,
+      Whose vagabond notes strummed through a twinkling staff,
+      Or read the day's delivered monograph
+    Through all the chapters of its daedal hours.
+    Still with the same child-faith and child regard
+      He looks on Nature, hearing at her heart,
+      The Beautiful beat out the time and place,
+    Through which no lesson of this life is hard,
+      No struggle vain of science or of art,
+      That dies with failure written on its face.
+
+
+
+
+    WINTER
+
+
+    The flute, whence Summer's dreamy finger-tips
+      Drew music,--ripening the pinched kernels in
+      The burly chestnut and the chinquapin,
+    Red-rounding-out the oval haws and hips,--
+    Now Winter crushes to his stormy lips,
+      And surly songs whistle around his chin;
+      Now the wild days and wilder nights begin
+    When, at the eaves, the crooked icicle drips.
+    Thy songs, O Summer, are not lost so soon!
+      Still dwells a memory in thy hollow flute,
+      Which unto Winter's masculine airs doth give
+    Thy own creative qualities of tune,
+      Through which we see each bough bend white with fruit,
+      Each bush with bloom, in snow commemorative.
+
+
+
+
+    MID-WINTER
+
+
+    All day the clouds hung ashen with the cold;
+      And through the snow the muffled waters fell;
+      The day seemed drowned in grief too deep to tell,
+    Like some old hermit whose last bead is told.
+    At eve the wind woke, and the snow clouds rolled
+      Aside to leave the fierce sky visible;
+      Harsh as an iron landscape of wan hell
+    The dark hills hung framed in with gloomy gold.
+    And then, towards night, the wind seemed some one at
+      My window wailing: now a little child
+      Crying outside my door; and now the long
+    Howl of some starved beast down the flue. I sat
+      And knew 'twas Winter with his madman song
+      Of miseries on which he stared and smiled.
+
+
+
+
+    SPRING
+
+
+    First came the rain, loud, with sonorous lips;
+      A pursuivant who heralded a prince:
+      And dawn put on her livery of tints,
+    And dusk bound gold about her hair and hips:
+    And, all in silver mail, the sunlight came,
+      A knight, who bade the winter let him pass;
+      And freed imprisoned beauty, naked as
+    The Court of Love, in all her wildflower shame.
+    And so she came, in breeze-borne loveliness,
+      Across the hills; and heav'n bent down to bless:
+      Above her head the birds were as a lyre;
+    And at her feet, like some strong worshipper,
+      The shouting water paean'd praise of her
+      Who, with blue eyes, set the wild world on fire.
+
+
+
+
+    TRANSFORMATION
+
+
+    It is the time when, by the forest falls,
+      The touch-me-nots hang fairy folly-caps;
+      When ferns and flowers fill the lichened laps
+    Of rocks with colour, rich as orient shawls:
+    And in my heart I hear a voice that calls
+      Me woodward, where the hamadryad wraps
+      Her limbs in bark, and, bubbling in the saps,
+    Sings the sweet Greek of Pan's old madrigals:
+    There is a gleam that lures me up the stream--
+      A Naiad swimming with wet limbs of light?
+      Perfume that leads me on from dream to dream--
+    An Oread's footprints fragrant with her flight?
+      And, lo! meseems I am a Faun again,
+      Part of the myths that I pursue in vain.
+
+
+
+
+    RESPONSE
+
+
+    There is a music of immaculate love,
+      That beats within the virgin veins of Spring,--
+      And trillium blossoms, like the stars that cling
+    To fairies' wands; and, strung on sprays above,
+    White-hearts and mandrake blooms--that look enough
+      Like the elves' washing--white with laundering
+      Of May-moon dews; and all pale-opening
+    Wild-flowers of the woods are born thereof.
+    There is no sod Spring's white foot brushes but
+      Must feel the music that vibrates within,
+      And thrill to the communicated touch
+    Responsive harmonies, that must unshut
+      The heart of Beauty for Song's concrete kin,
+      Emotions--that are flowers--born of such.
+
+
+
+
+    THE SWASHBUCKLER
+
+
+    Squat-nosed and broad, of big and pompous port;
+      A tavern visage, apoplexy haunts,
+      All pimple-puffed: the Falstaff-like resort
+    Of fat debauchery, whose veined cheek flaunts
+    A flabby purple: rusty-spurred he stands
+      In rakehell boots and belt, and hanger that
+    Claps when, with greasy gauntlets on his hands,
+      He swaggers past in cloak and slouch-plumed hat.
+    Aggression marches armies in his words;
+      And in his oaths great deeds ride cap-a-pie;
+    His looks, his gestures breathe the breath of swords;
+      And in his carriage camp all wars to be:--
+      With him of battles there shall be no lack
+    While buxom wenches are and stoops of sack.
+
+
+
+
+    SIMULACRA
+
+
+    Dark in the west the sunset's sombre wrack
+      Unrolled vast walls the rams of war had split,
+      Along whose battlements the battle lit
+    Tempestuous beacons; and, with gates hurled back,
+    A mighty city, red with ruin and sack,
+      Through burning breaches, crumbling bit by bit,
+      Showed where the God of Slaughter seemed to sit
+    With Conflagration glaring at each crack.--
+    Who knows? perhaps as sleep unto us makes
+      Our dreams as real as our waking seems
+      With recollections time can not destroy,
+    So in the mind of Nature now awakes,
+      Haply, some wilder memory, and she dreams
+      The stormy story of the fall of Troy.
+
+
+
+
+    CAVERNS
+
+    WRITTEN OF COLOSSAL CAVE, KENTUCKY
+
+
+    Aisles and abysses; leagues no man explores,
+      Of rock that labyrinths and night that drips;
+      Where everlasting silence broods, with lips
+    Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors.
+    Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores,
+      Laborious water carves; whence echo slips
+      Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips
+    Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.--
+    Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits
+      Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth,
+      I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,--
+    Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits,
+      'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,--
+      An ancient causeway of forgotten Hell.
+
+
+
+
+    THE BLUE BIRD
+
+
+    From morn till noon upon the window-pane
+      The tempest tapped with rainy finger-nails,
+      And all the afternoon the blustering gales
+    Beat at the door with furious feet of rain.
+    The rose, near which the lily bloom lay slain,
+      Like some red wound dripped by the garden rails,
+      On which the sullen slug left slimy trails--
+    Meseemed the sun would never shine again.
+    Then in the drench, long, loud and full of cheer,--
+      A skyey herald tabarded in blue,--
+      A bluebird bugled ... and at once a bow
+    Was bent in heaven, and I seemed to hear
+      God's sapphire spaces crystallising through
+      The strata'd clouds in azure tremolo.
+
+
+
+
+    QUATRAINS
+
+
+    POETRY
+
+    Who hath beheld the goddess face to face,
+    Blind with her beauty, all his days shall go
+    Climbing lone mountains towards her temple's place,
+    Weighed with song's sweet, inexorable woe.
+
+
+    THE UNIMAGINATIVE
+
+    Each form of beauty's but the new disguise
+    Of thoughts more beautiful than forms can be;
+    Sceptics, who search with unanointed eyes,
+    Never the Earth's wild fairy-dance shall see.
+
+
+    MUSIC
+
+    God-born before the Sons of God, she hurled,
+    With awful symphonies of flood and fire,
+    God's name on rocking Chaos--world by world
+    Flamed as the universe rolled from her lyre.
+
+
+    THE THREE ELEMENTS
+
+    They come as couriers of Heaven: their feet
+    Sonorous-sandalled with majestic awe;
+    In raiment of swift foam and wind and heat,
+    Blowing the trumpets of God's wrath and law.
+
+
+    ROME
+
+    Above the circus of the world she sat,
+    Beautiful and base, a harlot crowned with pride:
+    Fierce nations, upon whom she sneered and spat,
+    Shrieked at her feet and for her pastime died.
+
+
+    ON READING THE LIFE OF HAROUN ER RESHID
+
+    Down all the lanterned Bagdad of our youth
+    He steals, with golden justice for the poor:
+    Within his palace--you shall know the truth!--
+    A blood-smeared headsman hides behind each door.
+
+
+    MNEMOSYNE
+
+    In classic beauty, cold, immaculate,
+    A voiceful sculpture, stern and still she stands,
+    Upon her brow deep-chiselled love and hate,
+    That sorrow o'er dead roses in her hands.
+
+
+    BEAUTY
+
+    High as a star, yet lowly as a flower,
+    Unknown she takes her unassuming place
+    At Earth's proud masquerade--the appointed hour
+    Strikes, and, behold! the marvel of her face.
+
+
+    THE STARS
+
+    These--the bright symbols of man's hope and fame,
+    In which he reads his blessing or his curse--
+    Are syllables with which God speaks his name
+    In the vast utterance of the universe.
+
+
+    ECHO
+
+    Dweller in hollow places, hills and rocks,
+    Daughter of Silence and old Solitude,
+    Tip-toe she stands within her cave or wood,
+    Her only life the noises that she mocks.
+
+
+
+
+    ADVENTURERS
+
+
+    Seemingly over the hill-tops,
+      Possibly under the hills,
+    A tireless wing that never drops,
+      And a song that never stills.
+
+    Epics heard on the stars' lips?
+      Lyrics read in the dew?--
+    To sing the song at our finger-tips,
+      And live the world anew!
+
+    Cavaliers of the Cortes kind,
+      Bold and stern and strong,--
+    And, oh, for a fine and muscular mind
+      To sing a new-world's song!
+
+    Sailing seas of the silver morn,
+      Winds of the balm and spice,
+    To put the old-world art to scorn
+      At the price of any price!
+
+    Danger, death, but the hope high!
+      God's, if the purpose fail!
+    Into the deeds of a vaster sky
+      Sailing a dauntless sail.
+
+
+
+
+    EPILOGUE
+
+
+    I
+
+    O Life! O Death! O God!
+      Have we not striven?
+    Have we not known Thee, God
+      As Thy stars know Heaven?
+    Have we not held Thee true,
+      True as thy deepest,
+    Sweet and immaculate blue
+    Heaven that feels Thy dew!
+    Have we not _known_ Thee true,
+      O God who keepest.
+
+
+    II
+
+    O God, our Father, God!--
+      Who gav'st us fire,
+    To soar beyond the sod,
+      To rise, aspire--
+    What though we strive and strive,
+    And all our soul says 'live'?
+    The empty scorn of men
+    Will sneer it down again.
+    And, O sun-centred high,
+      Who, too, art Poet,
+    Beneath Thy tender sky
+    Each day new Keatses die,
+    Calling all life a lie;
+    Can this be so--and why?--
+      And canst Thou know it?
+
+
+    III
+
+    We know Thee beautiful,
+      We know Thee bitter!
+    Help Thou!--Men's eyes are dull,
+    O God most beautiful!
+    Make thou their souls less full
+      Of things mere glitter.
+    Dost Thou not see our tears?
+    Dost Thou not hear the years
+    Treading our hearts to shards,
+    O Lord of all the Lords?--
+    Arouse Thee, God of Hosts,
+    There 'mid Thy glorious ghosts,
+      So high and holy!
+    Have mercy on our tears!
+    Have mercy on our years!
+    Our strivings and our fears,
+    O Lord of lordly peers,
+      On us, so lowly!
+
+
+    IV
+
+    On us, so fondly fain
+    To tell what mother-pain
+    Of Nature makes the rain.
+    On us, so glad to show
+    The sorrow of her snow,
+    And all her winds that blow.
+
+    Us, who interpret right
+    Her mystic rose of light,
+    Her moony rune of night.
+
+    Us, who have utterance for
+    Each warm, flame-hearted star
+    That stammers from afar.
+
+    Who hear the tears and sighs
+    Of every bud that dies
+    While heav'n's dew on it lies.
+
+    Who see the power that dowers
+    The wildwood bosks and bowers
+    With musk of sap and flowers.
+
+    Who see what no man sees
+    In water, earth, and breeze,
+    And in the hearts of trees.
+
+    Turn not away Thy light,
+    O God!--Our strength is slight!
+    Help us who breast the height!
+    Have mercy, Infinite!
+      Have mercy!
+
+
+  Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty
+                at the Edinburgh University Press
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Kentucky Poems, by Madison J. Cawein
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