When Winter encamps on our borders,
And dips his white beard in the rills,
And lays his shield over highway, and field,
And pitches his tents on the hills,--
In the wan light I wake, and see on the lake,
Like a glove by the night-winds blown,
With fingers that crook up creek and brook,
His shining gauntlet thrown.
Then over the lonely harbor,
In the quiet and deadly cold
Of a single night, when only the bright,
Cold constellations behold,
Without trestle or beam, without mortise or seam,
It swiftly and silently spread
A bridge as of steel, which a Titan's heel
In the early light might tread.
Where Morning over the waters
Her web of splendor spun,
Till the wave, all a-twinkle with ripple and wrinkle,
Hung shimmering in the sun,--
Where the liquid lip at the breast of the ship
Whispered and laughed and kissed,
And the long, dark streamer of smoke from the steamer
Trailed off in the rose-tinted mist,--
Now all is gray desolation,
As up from the hoary coast,
Over snow-fields and islands her white arms in silence
Outspreading like a ghost,
Her feet in shroud, her forehead in cloud,
Pale walks the sheeted Dawn:
The sea's blue rim lies shorn and dim,
In the purple East withdrawn.
Where floated the fleets of commerce,
With proud breasts cleaving the tide,--
Like emmet or bug with its burden, the tug
Hither and thither plied,--
Where the quick paddles flashed, where the dropped anchor plashed,
And rattled the running chain,
Where the merchantman swung in the current, where sung
The sailors their far refrain,--
Behold! when ruddy Aurora
Peeps from her opening door,
Faint gleams of the sun like fairies run
And sport on a crystal floor;
Upon the river's bright panoply quivers
The noon's resplendent lance;
And by night through the narrows the moon's slanted arrows
Icily sparkle and glance.
Flown are the flocks of commerce,
Like wild swans hurrying south;
The lighter, belated, is frozen, full-freighted,
Within the harbor's mouth;
The brigantine, homeward bringing
Sweet spices from afar,
All night must wait with her fragrant freight
Below the lighthouse star.
The ships at their anchors are frozen,
From rudder to sloping chain:
Rock-like they rise: the low sloop lies
An oasis in the plain.
Like reeds here and there, the tall masts bare
Upspring: as on the edge
Of a lawn smooth-shaven, around the haven
The shipping grows like sedge.
Here, weaving the union of cities,
With hoar wakes belting the blue,
From slip to slip, past schooner and ship,
The ferry's shuttles flew:--
Now, loosed from its stall, on the yielding wall
The steamboat paws and rears;
The citizens pass on a pavement of glass,
And climb the frosted piers.
Where, in the November twilight,
To the ribs of the skeleton bark
That stranded lay in the bend of the bay,
Motionless, low, and dark,
Came ever three shags, like three lone hags,
And sat o'er the troubled water,
Each nursing apart her shrivelled heart,
With her mantle wrapped about her,--
Now over the ancient timbers
Is built a magic deck;
Children run out with laughter and shout
And dance around the wreck;
The fisherman near his long eel-spear
Thrusts in through the ice, or stands
With fingers on lips, and now and then whips
His sides with mittened hands.
Alone and pensive I wander
Far out from the city-wharf
To the buoy below in its cap of snow,
Low stooping like a dwarf;
In the fading ray of the dull, brief day
I wander and muse apart,--
For this frozen sea is a symbol to me
Of many a human heart.
I think of the hopes deep sunken
Like anchors under the ice,--
Of souls that wait for Love's sweet freight
And the spices of Paradise:
Far off their barks are tossing
On the billows of unrest,
And enter not in, for the hardness and sin
That close the secret breast.
I linger, until, at evening,
The town-roofs, towering high,
Uprear in the dimness their tall, dark chimneys,
Indenting the sunset sky,
And the pendent spear on the edge of the pier
Signals my homeward way,
As it gleams through the dusk like a walrus's tusk
On the floes of a polar bay.
Then I think of the desolate households
On which the day shuts down,--
What misery hides in the darkened tides
Of life in yonder town!
I think of the lonely poet
In his hours of coldness and pain,
His fancies full-freighted, like lighters belated,
All frozen within his brain.
And I hearken to the moanings
That come from the burdened bay:
As a camel, that kneels for his lading, reels,
And cannot bear it away,
The mighty load is slowly
Upheaved with struggle and pain
From centre to side, then the groaning tide
Sinks heavily down again.
So day and night you may hear it
Panting beneath its pack,
Till sailor and saw, till south wind and thaw,
Unbind it from its back.
O Sun! will thy beam ever gladden the stream
And bid its burden depart?
O Life! all in vain do we strive with the chain
That fetters and chills the heart?
Already in vision prophetic
On yonder height I stand:
The gulls are gay upon the bay,
The swallows on the land;--
'Tis spring-time now; like an aspen-bough
Shaken across the sky,
In the silvery light with twinkling flight
The rustling plovers fly.
Aloft in the sunlit cordage
Behold the climbing tar,
With his shadow beside on the sail white and wide,
Climbing a shadow-spar!
Up the glassy stream with issuing steam
The cutter crawls again,
All winged with cloud and buzzing loud,
Like a bee upon the pane.
The brigantine is bringing
Her cargo to the quay,
The sloop flits by like a butterfly,
The schooner skims the sea.
O young heart's trust, beneath the crust
Of a chilling world congealed!
O love, whose flow the winter of woe
With its icy hand hath sealed!
Learn patience from the lesson!
Though the night be drear and long,
To the darkest sorrow there comes a morrow,
A right to every wrong.
And as, when, having run his low course, the red Sun
Comes charging gayly up here,
The white shield of Winter shall shiver and splinter
At the touch of his golden spear,--
Then rushing under the bridges,
And crushing among the piles,
In gray mottled masses the drift-ice passes,
Like seaward-floating isles;--
So Life shall return from its solstice, and burn
In trappings of gold and blue,
The world shall pass like a shattered glass,
And the Heaven of Love shine through.