(1918)
Full tired of war and worry do I turn
To nature in her sweet midwinter dreams,
To purple twilights, when the day’s last beams
Like flick’ring candles on the snowdrifts burn,
While star and crescent, in the deepest blue,
Shed peace on fields and woods and frozen lakes;
And from the creeping shadows soon awakes
Life’s fairy-world, the one as boy I knew
In unfeigned joy that varied with each scene
Of winter’s whiteness, or midsummer’s green.
The dormant earth dreams of the life to be,
When spring returns to call it from the grave,
When through its breast shall rush the ardent wave
Of love and hope, and songs of ecstasy;--
But in the moonlight and the shadows dun
The dreams appear in emblems vague and frore,
Like wandering spectres from a mystic shore
Which track the glory of the setting sun
Like love, that plays behind a rosy screen,
Because ’tis yet too modest to be seen.
The winter heavy hangs on humankind--
In homes, and camps, and on the stormy seas,
On Europe’s battlefields, whose miseries
Appall with horrors every normal mind;
Its million graves, decked with the covering
Of jewelled purity, where heroes sleep,
At whose low crosses countless hearts must weep,--
Is holy ground, where life shall take its wing
To truer freedom and a larger love,
With peace on earth and good will from above.
Our country’s dream: that when the southwind’s
breath
Shall wake to life and gladness all the land,
Like risen pow’r our chosen youth shall stand
Around the flag which means the tyrant’s death,--
That like the life which quickens everything,
Our hosts from South and North and East and West
Shall fare rejoicing o’er the ocean’s crest,
And Freedom’s victory to Europe bring,--
Midwinter’s dream in every loyal heart,
Who dreams it not, in Freedom has no part.