And with it, like a bit of spar,
Sinks down the large white evening-star,
Beneath which earth seems crystal-hewn.
Slim o’er the tree-tops, weighed with white,
The country church’s spire doth swell,
A scintillating icicle;
While fitfully the village light
Stabs, stains with sallow stars the dark:
Homeward the creaking wagons strain:
The smithy glares: the tavern’s vane
Points northward in its ghostly sark.
And from the north, with stinging lash,
Driving his herds of snow and sleet,
Upon his steed of wind, whose feet
Hurl through the iron woods and crash
Along the hills, with blow on blow,
The tempest sweeps; before his shout
The moon and stars are blotted out,
And fold on fold rolls down the snow.
DREAMS
My thoughts have borne me far away
To beauties of an older day,
Where, crowned with roses, stands the Dawn,
Striking her seven-stringed barbiton
Of flame, whose chords give being to
The seven colors, hue for hue;
The music of the color-dream
She builds the day from, beam by beam.
My thoughts have borne me far away
To myths of a diviner day,
Where, sitting on the mountain, Noon
Sings to the pines a sun-soaked tune
Of rest and shade and clouds and skies,
Wherein her calm dreams idealize
Light as a presence, heavenly fair,
Sleeping with all her beauty bare.
My thoughts have borne me far away
To visions of a wiser day,
Where, stealing through the wilderness,
Night walks, a sad-eyed votaress,
And prays with mystic words she hears
Behind the thunder of the spheres,
The starry utterance that is hers
With which she fills the universe.
THE BROOK
To it the forest tells
The mystery that haunts its heart and folds
Its form in cogitation deep, that holds
The shadow of each myth that dwells
In nature--be it Nymph or Fay or Faun--
And whispering of them to the dales and dells,
It wanders on and on.
To it the heaven shows
The secret of its soul; true images
Of dreams that form its aspect; and with these
Reflected in its countenance it goes,
With pictures of the skies, the dusk and dawn,
Within its breast, as every blossom knows,
For them to gaze upon.
Through it the world-soul sends
Its heart’s creating pulse that beats and sings
The music of maternity whence springs
All life; and shaping earthly ends,--
From the deep sources of the heavens drawn,--
Planting its ways with beauty, on it wends,
On and for ever on.
THE OLD SWING
Under the boughs of spring
She swung in the old rope-swing.
Her cheeks, with their happy blood,
Glowed pink as the apple-bud.
Her eyes, with their deep delight,
Shone glad as the stars of night.
Her curls, with their romp and fun,
Tossed hoiden to wind and sun.
Her lips, with their laughter shrill,
Rippled like some wild rill.
Under the boughs of spring
She swung in the old rope-swing.
And I,--who leaned on the fence,
Watching her innocence,
As, under the boughs that bent,
Now high, now low, she went,
In her soul the ecstasies
Of the stars, the brooks, the breeze,--
Had given the rest of my years,
With their, blessings, and hopes, and fears,
To have been as she was then;
And, just for a moment, again
A boy in the old rope-swing
Under the boughs of spring.
TO AUTUMN
I feel thee as one feels a flower’s,
A dead flower’s fragrance in a room,--
A dim, gray grief that haunts the hours
With sad perfume.
Thou charm’st me as a ghostly lily
Might charm a garden’s withered space,
With the pale pathos and the chilly
Hush of thy face.
I hearken in thy fogs; I hearken
When, like the phantom of dead Night,
With immaterial limbs they darken
The day with white.
With wrecks of rain and mad winds, heaping
Red ruins of riven rose and leaf,
Make sad my heart, O Autumn! sweeping
The world with grief.
WINTER DREAMS
How does it come that now I go
Down ways made blue with bluets’ eyes?
Along the creek-road as the crow
With mocking laughter flies?
A wild bird beats a crippled wing
To lure me from its brush-built nest;
Then, like a brook, I hear it sing
Its wildwood happiest.
Beyond the orchard hills are dells
Of knee-deep huckleberries, white
With little bell-blooms, May-time swells
With sweetness and delight.
The faun wakes in me, wild and keen,
And, with the joy the rathe months hold,
Kicks happy heels in deeps of green
And rolls in deeper gold.
My Shakespeare falls: I wake: and frost
And ice seam every flower-bed:
Where once each stalk, an Edgar, tossed,
Poor Tom now shakes instead.
Where once th’ gladiole, gleaming, shook
A wand of folly at the sun,
The humped stock hath a withered look--
The poor, pale Fool is done.
A great, gray beard the rose-bush hath,--
An old king’s,--where hangs many a tear,
Near the dead lily by the path--
Cordelia and Lear.
TANSY AND SWEET-ALYSSUM
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 the seed’s
Pink pulp and honey blackly stung.
The orchard-path, which wound 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 pygmy 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-hot 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 flavor 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
Gaunt-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.
ON STONY-RUN
O cheerly, cheerly by the road,
And merrily down the hillet,
And where the bottom-lands are sowed
With bristle-bearded millet;
Then o’er a pebbled path it goes
Through woodland dale and dingle,
Unto a farmstead’s windowed rose,
And roof of moss and shingle.
Then darkly, darkly through the brush,
And dimly round the boulder,
Where cane and water-weeds grow lush,
Its current clear flows colder.
Then by the cedared way that leads,
Through burr and bramble-thickets,
Unto a burial-ground of weeds
Fenced in with broken pickets.
Then slowly, slowly down the vale,
And wearily through the rushes,
Where sunlight of the noon is pale,
Its shadowy water hushes.
For oft her young face smiled upon
Its deeps here, willow-shaded;
And oft with bare feet in the sun
Its shallows there she waded.
No more beneath the twinkling leaves
Shall stand the farmer’s daughter!--
softly past the cottage eaves,
O memory-haunted water!
No more shall bend her laughing face
Above it where the rose is!--
Sigh softly past the burial-place
Where all her youth reposes.
HOME
Among the fields the camomile
Seems blown mist in the lightning’s glare:
Cool, rainy odors drench the air;
Night speaks above; the angry smile
Of storm within her stare.
The way that I shall take to-night
Is through the wood whose branches fill
The road with double darkness, till,
Between the boughs, a window’s light
Shines out upon the hill.
The fence; and then the path that goes
Around a trailer-tangled rock,
Through puckered pink and hollyhock,
Unto a latch-gate’s unkempt rose,
And door whereat I knock.
Bright on the old-time flower-place
The lamp streams through the foggy pane
The door is opened to the rain:
And in the door--her happy face
And outstretched hands again.
DUSK IN THE WOODS
Three miles of trees it is: and I
Came through the woods that waited, dumb,
For the cool summer dusk to come;
And lingered there to watch the sky
Up which the gradual sunset clomb.
A tree-toad quavered in a tree;
And then a sudden whippoorwill
Called overhead, so wildly shrill
The sleeping wood, it seemed to me,
Cried out and then again was still.
Then through dark boughs its stealthy flight
An owl took; and, at drowsy strife,
The cricket tuned its fairy fife;
And like a ghostflower, silent white,
The wood-moth glimmered into life.
And in the punk-wood everywhere
The insects ticked, or bored below
The rotted bark; and, glow on glow,
The lambent fireflies here and there
Lit up their jack-o’-lantern show.
I heard a vesper-sparrow sing,
Withdrawn, it seemed, into the far
Slow sunset’s tranquil cinnabar;
The crimson, softly smouldering
Behind gaunt trunks, with its one star.
A dog barked: and down ways that gleamed,
Through dew and clover, faint the noise
Of cow-bells moved. And then a voice,
That sang a-milking, so it seemed,
Made glad my heart as some glad boy’s.
And then the lane: and, full in view,
A farm-house with a rose-grown gate,
And honeysuckle paths, await
For night, the moon, and love and you--
These are the things that made me late.
COMRADES
Down through the woods, along the way
That fords the stream; by rock and tree,
Where in the bramble-bell the bee
Swings; and through twilights green and gray
The red-bird flashes suddenly,
My thoughts went wandering to-day.
I found the fields where, row on row,
The blackberries hang black their fruit;
Where, nesting at the elder’s root,
The partridge whistles soft and low;
The fields, that billow to the foot
Of those old hills we used to know.
There lay the pond, still willow-bound,
On whose bright surface, when the hot
Noon burnt above, we chased the knot
Of water-striders; while around
Our heads, like bits of rainbow, shot
The dragon-flies without a sound.
The pond, above which evening bent
To gaze upon her gypsy face;
Wherein the twinkling night would trace
A vague, inverted firmament;
In which the green frogs tuned their bass,
And firefly sparkles came and went.
The old-time woods we often ranged,
When we were playmates, you and I;
The old-time fields, with boyhood’s sky
Still blue above them!--Naught was changed!
Nothing!--Alas! then tell me why
Should we be? whom the years estranged.
THE ROCK
Here, at its base, in dingled deeps
Of spice-bush, where the ivy creeps,
The cold spring scoops its hollow;
And there, three mossy stepping-stones
Make ripple murmurs; undertones
Of foam, whose low falls follow
A voice far in the wood that drones.
The quail pipes here when noons are hot;
And here, in coolness sunlight-shot,
Beneath a roof of briers,
The red fox skulks at close of day;
And here, at night, the shadows gray
Stand like Franciscan friars,
With moonbeam beads whereon they pray.
Here yawns the woodchuck’s dark-dug hole;
And there the tunnel of the mole
Heaves under weed and flower;
A sandy pit-fall here and there
The ant-lion digs and lies a-lair
And here, for sun and shower,
The spider weaves a silvery snare.
The poison-oak’s rank tendrils twine
The rock’s south side; the trumpet-vine,
With crimson bugles sprinkled,
Makes green its eastern side; the west
Is rough with lichens; and, gray-pressed
Into an angle wrinkled,
The hornets hang an oblong nest.
The north is hid from sun and star,
And here,--like an Inquisitor
Of Faëry Inquisition,
Who roots out Elfland heresy,--
Deep in the rock, cowled shadowy
And grave as his commission,
The owl sits magisterially.
STANDING-STONE CREEK
A weed-grown slope, whereon the rain
Has washed the brown rocks bare,
Leads tangled from a lonely lane
Down to a creek’s broad stair
Of stone, that, through the solitude,
Winds onward to a quiet wood.
An intermittent roof of shade
The beech above it throws;
Along its steps a balustrade
Of beauty builds the rose;
In which, a stately lamp of green,
At intervals, the cedar’s seen.
The water, carpeting each ledge
Of rock that runs across,
Glints ’twixt a flow’r-embroidered edge
Of ferns and grass and moss;
And in its deeps the wood and sky
Seem patterns of the softest dye.
Long corridors of pleasant dusk
Within the house of leaves
It reaches; where, on looms of musk,
The ceaseless locust weaves
A web of summer; and perfume
Trails a sweet gown from room to room.
Green windows of the boughs, that swing,
It passes, where the notes
Of birds are glad thoughts entering,
And butterflies are motes;
And now a vista where the day
Opens a door of wind and ray.
It is a stairway for all sounds
That haunt the woodland sides;
On which, boy-like, the Southwind bounds,
Girl-like, the sunbeam glides;
And, like fond parents, following these,
The old-time dreams of rest and peace.
“CLOUDS OF THE AUTUMN NIGHT”
Clouds of the autumn night,
Under the hunter’s-moon,--
Ghostly and windy white,--
Whither, like leaves wild strewn,
Take ye your stormy flight?
Out of the west, where dusk,
From her red window-sill,
Leaned with a wand of tusk,
Witch-like, and wood and hill
Phantomed with mist and musk
Into the east, where morn
Sleeps in a shadowy close,
Shut with a gate of horn,
Round which the dreams she knows
Flutter with rose and thorn.
Blow from the west! oh, blow,
Clouds that the tempest steers!
And with your rain and snow
Bear of my heart the tears,
And of my soul the woe.
Into the east then pass,
Clouds that the night-winds sweep!
And on her grave’s sere grass,
There where she lies asleep,
There let them fall, alas!
[Illustration:
Ghostly and windy white Page 168
_Clouds of the Autumn Night_]
THEN AND NOW
When my old heart was young, my dear,
The earth and heaven were so near
That in my dreams I oft could hear
The steps of airy races;
In woodlands, where bright waters ran,
On hills, God’s rainbows used to span,
I followed voices not of man,
And smiled in spirit faces.
Now my old heart is old, my sweet,
No longer earth and heaven meet;
All life is grown to one dull street
Where fact with fancy clashes;
The voices now that speak to me
Are prose instead of poetry;
And in the faces now I see
Is less of flame than ashes.
BY THE TRYSTING-BEECH
Deep in the west a berry-colored bar
Of sunset gleams; against which one tall fir
Stands outlined dark; above which--courier
Of dew and dreams--burns dusk’s appointed star.
And flash on flash, as when the elves wage war
In Goblinland, the fireflies bombard
The silence; and, like spirits, o’er the sward
The twilight winds bring fragrance from afar.
And now, withdrawn into the hill-wood belts,
A whippoorwill; while, with attendant states
Of pearl and silver, slow the great moon melts
Into the night--to show me where _she_ waits,--
Like some slim moonbeam,--by the old beech-tree,
Who keeps her lips, fresh as a flower, for me.
AFTER LONG GRIEF AND PAIN
There is a place hung o’er of summer boughs
And dreamy skies wherein the gray hawk sleeps;
Where waters flow, within whose lazy deeps,
Like silvery prisms where the sunbeams drowse,
The minnows twinkle; where the bells of cows
Tinkle the stillness; and the bob-white keeps
Calling from meadows where the reaper reaps,
And children’s laughter haunts an old-time house:
A place where life wears ever an honest smell
Of hay and honey, sun and elder-bloom--
Like some sweet, modest girl--within her hair;
Where, with our love for comrade, we may dwell
Far from the city’s strife, whose cares consume--
Oh, take my hand and let me lead you there.
THE HAUNTED WOODLAND
Here in the golden darkness
And green night of the woods,
A flitting form I follow,
A shadow that eludes--
Or is it but the phantom
Of former forest moods?
The phantom of some fancy
I knew when I was young,
And in my dreaming boyhood,
The wildwood flow’rs among,
Young face to face with Faëry
Spoke in no unknown tongue.
Blue were her eyes, and golden
The nimbus of her hair;
And scarlet as a flower
Her mouth that kissed me there;
That kissed and bade me follow,
And smiled away my care.
A magic and a marvel
Lived in her word and look,
As down among the blossoms
She sate me by the brook,
And read me wonder-legends
In Nature’s Story Book.
Loved fairy-tales forgotten,
She never reads again,
Of beautiful enchantments
That haunt the sun and rain,
And, in the wind and water,
Chant a mysterious strain.
And so I search the forest,
Wherein my spirit feels,
In stream, or tree, or flower
Herself she still conceals--
But now she flies who followed,
Whom Earth no more reveals.
COMRADERY
With eyes hand-arched he looks into
The morning’s face, then turns away
With school-boy feet, all wet with dew,
Out for a holiday.
The hill brook sings; incessant stars,
Foam-fashioned, on its restless breast;
And where he wades its water-bars
Its song is happiest.
A comrade of the chinquapin,
He looks into its knotty eyes
And sees its heart; and, deep within,
Its soul that makes him wise.
The wood-thrush knows and follows him,
Who whistles up the birds and bees;
And round him all the perfumes swim
Of woodland loam and trees.
Where’er he pass the supple springs’
Foam-people sing the flowers awake;
And sappy lips of bark-clad things
Laugh ripe each fruited brake.
His touch is a companionship;
His word, an old authority:
He comes, a lyric on his lip,
Unstudied Poesy.
OCCULT
Unto the soul’s companionship
Of things that only seem to be,
Earth points with magic finger-tip
And bids thee see
How Fancy keeps thee company.
For oft at dawn hast not beheld
A spirit of prismatic hue
Blow wide the buds, which night hath swelled?
And stain them through
With heav’n’s ethereal gold and blue?
While at her side another went
With gleams of enigmatic white?
A spirit who distributes scent,
To vale and height,
In footsteps of the rosy light?
And oft at dusk hast thou not seen
The star-fays bring their caravans
Of dew, and glitter all the green,
Night’s shadow tans,
With drops the rain-hung cobweb spans?
Nor watched with these the elfins go
Who tune faint instruments--that sound
Like that moon-music insects blow?--
Then haunted ground
Thou hast not trodden, never found!
WOOD-WORDS
I
The spirits of the forest,
That to the winds give voice--
I lie the livelong April day
And wonder what it is they say
That makes the leaves rejoice.
The spirits of the forest,
That breathe in bud and bloom--
I walk within the haw-tree brake
And wonder how it is they make
The bubbles of perfume.
The spirits of the forest,
That dwell in every spring--
I lean above the brook’s bright blue
And wonder what it is they do
That makes the water sing.
The spirits of the forest,
That haunt the sun’s green glow--
Down fungus ways of fern I steal
And would surprise what they conceal,
In dew, that twinkles so.
O spirits of the forest,
Here are my heart and hand!--
Oh, send a gleam or glow-worm ray
To guide my soul the firefly way
That leads to Fairyland.
II
The time when dog-tooth violets
Hold up inverted horns of gold,--
The elvish cups that Spring upsets
With dripping feet, when April wets
The sun-and-shadow-marbled wold,--
Is come. And by each leafing way
The sorrel drops pale blots of pink;
And, like an angled star a fay
Sets on her forehead’s pallid day,
The blossoms of the trillium wink.
Within the vale, by rock and stream,--
A fragile, fairy porcelain,--
Blue as a baby’s eyes a-dream,
The bluets blow; and gleam in gleam
The sun-shot dogwoods flash with rain.
It is the time to cast off care;
To make glad intimates of these:--
The frank-faced sunbeam laughing there:
The great-heart wind, that bids us share
The optimism of the trees.
III
The white ghosts of the flowers,
The gray ghosts of the trees,
Rise when the April showers,
And haunt the wildwood bowers,
And trail along the breeze:
The white ghosts of the flowers,
The gray ghosts of the trees.
Oft in the woodless places
I feel their dim control;
The wildflowers’ perished faces,
The great trees’ vanished races,
That meet me soul to soul:
Oft in the woodless places
I feel their dim control.
IV
Crab-apple buds, whose bells
The mouth of April kissed;
That hang,--like rosy shells
Around a Naiad’s wrist,--
Pink as dawn-tinted mist.
And paw-paw buds, whose dark
Deep auburn blossoms shake
On boughs,--as ’neath the bark
A dryad’s eyes awake,--
Brown as a midnight lake.
These, with symbolic blooms
Of wind-flower and wild-phlox,
I found among the glooms
Of hill-lost woods and rocks,
Lairs of the hare and fox.
The beetle in the brush,
The bird about the creek,
The bee within the hush,
And I, whose love was meek,
Stood still to hear these speak
The language that records,
In flower-syllables,
The hieroglyphic words
Of beauty, who enspells
The world and aye compels.
THE WIND AT NIGHT
I
Not till the wildman wind is shrill,
Howling upon the hill
In every wolfish tree, whose boisterous boughs,
Like desperate arms, gesture and beat the night,
And down huge clouds, in chasms of stormy white,
The frightened moon hurries above the house,
Shall I lie down; and, deep,--
Letting the mad wind keep
Its shouting revel round me,--fall asleep.
II
Not till its dark halloo is hushed,
And where wild waters rushed,--
Like some hoof’d terror underneath its whip
And spur of foam,--remains
A ghostly glass, hill-framed; whereover stains
Of moony mists and rains,
And stealthy starbeams, still as spectres, slip;
Shall I--with thoughts that take
Unto themselves the ache
Of silence as a sound--from sleep awake.
AIRY TONGUES
I
There is a song the wet leaves lisp
When Morn comes down the woodland way;
And misty as a thistle-wisp
Her gown gleams, windy gray:
A song that seems to say,
“Awake! ’tis day!”
There is a sigh when Day sits down
Beside the sunlight-lulled lagoon;
While on her glistening hair and gown
The rose of rest is strew:
A sigh, that seems to croon,
“Come rest! ’tis noon!”
There is a whisper when the stars,
Above an evening-purpled height,
Crown the dead Day with nenuphars
Of fire, gold and white:
A voice, that seems t’ invite,
“Come love! ’tis night!”
II
Before the rathe song-sparrow sings
Among the haw-trees in the lane,
And to the wind the locust flings
Its early clusters fresh with rain;
Beyond the morning-star, that swings
Its rose of fire above the spire,
Between the morning’s watchet wings,
A wild voice rings o’er brooks and boughs--
“Arouse! arouse!”
Before the first brown owlet cries
Among the grape-vines on the hill,
And in the dam with half-shut eyes
The lilies rock above the mill;
Beyond the oblong moon, that flies,
A pearly flower, above the tower,
Between the twilight’s primrose skies,
A soft voice sighs, from east to west--
“To rest! to rest!”
RAIN AND WIND
I hear the hoofs of horses
Galloping over the hill,
Galloping on and galloping on,
When all the night is shrill
With wind and rain that beats the pane--
And my soul with awe is still.
For every dripping window
Their headlong rush makes bound,
Galloping up, and galloping by,
Then back again and around,
Till the gusty roofs ring with their hoofs,
And the draughty cellars sound.
And then I hear black horsemen
Hallooing in the night;
Hallooing and hallooing,
They ride o’er vale and height,
And the branches snap and the shutters clap
With the fury of their flight.
Then at each door a horseman,--
With burly bearded lip
Hallooing through the keyhole,--
Pauses with cloak a-drip;
And the door-knob shakes and the panel quakes
’Neath the anger of his whip.
All night I hear their gallop,
And their wild halloo’s alarm;
The tree-tops sound and the vanes go round
In forest and on farm;
But never a hair of a thing is there--
Only the wind and storm.
UNDER ARCTURUS
I
“I belt the morn with ribboned mist;
With baldricked blue I gird the noon,
And dusk with purple, crimson-kissed,
White-buckled with the hunter’s-moon.
“These follow me,” the Season says:
“Mine is the frost-pale hand that packs
Their scrips, and speeds them on their ways,
With gipsy gold that weighs their backs.”
II
A daybreak horn the Autumn blows,
As with a sun-tanned hand he parts
Wet boughs whereon the berry glows;
And at his feet the red fox starts.