Is loosed; and all the noonday hush
Is startled; and the hillside sounds
Behind the fox’s bounding brush.
When red dusk makes the western sky
A fire-lit window through the firs,
He stoops to see the red fox die
Among the chestnut’s broken burrs.
Then fanfaree and fanfaree,
His bugle sounds; the world below
Grows hushed to hear; and two or three
Soft stars dream through the afterglow.
III
Like some black host the shadows fall,
And blackness camps among the trees;
Each wildwood road, a Goblin Hall,
Grows populous with mysteries.
Night comes with brows of ragged storm,
And limbs of writhen cloud and mist;
The rain-wind hangs upon his arm
Like some wild girl who cries unkissed.
By his gaunt hands the leaves are shed
In headlong troops and nightmare herds;
And, like a witch who calls the dead,
The hill-stream whirls with foaming words.
Then all is sudden silence and
Dark fear--like his who can not see,
Yet hears, lost in a haunted land,
Death rattling on a gallow’s-tree.
IV
The days approach again; the days
Whose mantles stream, whose sandals drag
When in the haze by puddled ways
The gnarled thorn seems a crookéd hag.
When rotting orchards reek with rain;
And woodlands crumble, leaf and log;
And in the drizzling yard again
The gourd is tagged with points of fog.
Now let me seat my soul among
The woods’ dim dreams, and come in touch
With melancholy, sad of tongue
And sweet, who says so much, so much.
BARE BOUGHS
O heart,--that beat the bird’s blithe blood,
The blithe bird’s strain, and understood
The song it sang to leaf and bud,--
What dost thou in the wood?
O soul,--that kept the brook’s glad flow,
The glad brook’s word to sun and moon,--
What dost thou here where song lies low,
Dead as the dreams of June?
Where once was heard a voice of song,
The hautboys of the mad winds sing;
Where once a music flowed along,
The rain’s wild bugles ring.
The weedy water frets and ails,
And moans in many a sunless fall;
And, o’er the melancholy, trails
The black crow’s eldritch call.
Unhappy brook! O withered wood!
O days, whom death makes comrades of!
Where are the birds that thrilled the blood
When Life struck hands with Love?
A song, one soared against the blue;
A song, one bubbled in the leaves:
A song, one threw where orchards grew
Red-appled to the eaves.
The birds are flown; the flowers are dead;
And sky and earth are bleak and gray;
The wild winds hang i’ the boughs instead,
And wild leaves strew the way.
A THRENODY
I
The rainy smell of a ferny dell,
Whose shadow no sun-ray flaws,
When Autumn sits in the wayside weeds
Telling her beads
Of haws.
II
The phantom mist, that is moonbeam-kissed,
On hills where the trees are thinned,
When Autumn leans at the oak-root’s scarp,
Touching a harp
Of wind.
III
The cricket’s chirr ’neath brier and burr,
By leaf-strewn pools and streams,
When Autumn stands ’mid the dropping nuts,
With the book, she shuts,
Of dreams.
IV
The gray “Alas” of the days that pass,
And the hope that says “Adieu,”
A parting sorrow, a shriveled flower,
And one ghost’s hour
With you.
SNOW
The moon, like a round device
On a shadowy shield of war,
Hangs white in a heaven of ice
With a solitary star.
The wind is sunk to a sigh,
And the waters are steeled with frost;
And gray in the eastern sky
The last snow-cloud is lost.
White fields, that are winter-starved;
Black woods, that are winter-fraught;
And Earth like a face death-carved
With the iron of some black thought.
AN OLD SONG
I
It’s, Oh, for the hills, where the wind’s some one
With a vagabond foot that follows!
And a cheer-up hand that he claps upon
Your arm with the hearty words, “Come on!
We’ll soon be out of the hollows,
My heart!
We’ll soon be out of the hollows!”
II
It’s, Oh, for the songs, where the hope’s some one
With a renegade foot that doubles!
And a kindly look that he turns upon
Your face with the friendly laugh, “Come on!
We’ll soon be out of the troubles,
My heart!
We’ll soon be out of the troubles!”
BABY MARY
Deep in baby Mary’s eyes,
Baby Mary’s sweet blue eyes,
Dwell the golden memories
Of the music once her ears
Heard in far-off Paradise:
So she has no time for tears,--
Baby Mary,--
Listening to the songs she hears.
Soft in baby Mary’s face,
Baby Mary’s lovely face,
If you watch, you, too, may trace
Dreams her spirit-self hath seen
In some far-off Eden-place,
Whence her soul she can not wean,--
Baby Mary,--
Dreaming in a world between.
A SUNSET FANCY
Wide in the west a lake
Of flame that seems to shake
As if the Midgard snake
Deep down did breathe:
An isle of purple glow,
Where rosy rivers flow
Down peaks of cloudy snow
With fire beneath.
And there the Tower-of-Night,
With windows all a-light,
Frowns on a burning height,
Wherein she sleeps,--
Young through the years of doom,--
Veiled with her hair’s gold gloom,
She, the Valkyrie, whom
Enchantment keeps.
THE FEN-FIRE
The misty rain makes dim my face,
The night’s black cloak is o’er me;
I tread the dripping cypress-place,
A flickering light before me.
Out of the death of leaves that rot
And ooze and weedy water,
My form was breathed to haunt this spot,
Death’s immaterial daughter.
The owl that whoops upon the yew,
The snake that lairs within it,
Have seen my wild face flashing blue
For one fantastic minute.
But should you follow where my eyes
Like some pale lamp decoy you,
Beware! lest suddenly I rise
With love that shall destroy you.
THE WOOD
Witch-hazel, dogwood, and the maple here;
And there the oak and hickory;
Linn, poplar, and the beech-tree, far and near
As the eased eye can see.
Wild-ginger; wahoo, with its flat balloons;
And brakes of briers of a twilight green;
And fox-grapes plumed with summer; and strung moons
Of mandrake flowers between.
Deep gold-green ferns, and mosses green and gray,--
Mats for what naked myth’s white feet?--
And, cool and calm, a cascade far away
With ever-even beat.
Old logs, made sweet with death; rough bits of bark;
And tangled twig and knotted root;
And sunshine splashes and great pools of dark;
And many a wild-bird’s flute.
Here let me sit until the Indian, Dusk,
With copper-colored face, comes down;
Sowing the wildwood with star-fire and musk,
And shadows blue and brown.
Then side by side with some magician Dream,
I’ll take the owlet-haunted lane,--
Half-roofed with vines,--led by a firefly gleam,
That brings me home again.
WOOD NOTES
I
There is a flute that follows me
From tree to tree:
A water flute a spirit sets
To silver lips in waterfalls,
And through the breath of violets
A sparkling music calls:--
“Hither! halloo! Oh, follow!
Down leafy hill and hollow,
Where, through clear swirls,
With feet like pearls,
Wade down the blue-eyed country girls.
Hither! halloo! Oh, follow!”
II
There is a pipe that plays to me
From tree to tree:
A bramble pipe an elfin holds
To golden lips in berry brakes,
And, swinging o’er the elder wolds,
A flickering music makes:--
“Come over! Come over
The new-mown clover!
Come over the fresh-cut hay!
Where, there by the berries,
With cheeks like cherries,
And locks with which the warm wind merries,
Brown girls are hilling the hay,
All day!
Come over the fields and away!--
Come over! Come over!”
HILLS OF THE WEST
Hills of the west, that gird
Forest and farm,
Home of the nesting bird,
Housing from harm,
When, on your tops, is heard
Storm.
Hills of the west, that bar
Belts of the gloam,
Under the twilight’s star,
Where the mists roam,
Take ye the wanderer
Home.
Hills of the west, that dream
Under the moon,
Making of wind and stream,
Late heard and soon,
Parts of your lives that seem
Tune.
Hills of the west, that take
Silence to ye,
Be it for sorrow’s sake
Or memory,
Part of such silence make
Me.
THE WIND OF SPRING
The wind that breathes of columbines
And celandines that crowd the rocks;
That shakes the balsam of the pines
With music from his airy locks,
Stops at my city door and knocks.
He calls me far a-forest, where
The twin-leaf and the blood-root bloom;
And, circled by the amber air,
Life sits with beauty and perfume
Weaving the new web of her loom.
He calls me where the waters run
Through fronding fern where wades the hern;
And, sparkling in the equal sun,
Song leans beside her brimming urn,
And dreams the dreams that love shall learn.
The wind has summoned, and I go:
To con God’s meaning in each line
The wildflow’rs write; and, walking slow,
God’s purpose, of which song is sign,--
The wind’s great, gusty hand in mine.
THE WILLOW BOTTOM
Lush green the grass that grows between
The willows of the bottom-land;
Edged by the careless water, tall and green
The brown-topped cat-tails stand.
The cows come gently here to browse,
Slow through the great-leafed sycamores:
You hear a dog bark from a low-roofed house
With cedars round its doors.
Then all is quiet as the wings
Of the one buzzard floating there:
Anon a woman’s high-pitched voice that sings
An old camp-meeting air.
A cock that flaps and crows; and then--
Heard drowsy through the rustling corn--
A flutter, and the cackling of a hen
Within a hay-sweet barn.
How still again! no water stirs:
No wind is heard: although the weeds
Are waved a little: and from silk-filled burrs
Drift by a few soft seeds.
So drugged with dreams the place, that you
Expect to see her gliding by,--
Hummed round of bees, through blossoms spilling dew,--
The Spirit of July.
THE RED-BIRD
Red clouds and reddest flowers,
And now two redder wings
Swim through the rosy hours;
Red wings among the flowers;
And now the red-bird sings.
God makes the red clouds ripples
Of flame that seem to split
In rubies and in dripples
Of rose where rills and ripples
The singing flame that lit.
Red clouds of sundered splendor;
God whispered one small word,
Rich, sweet, and wild and tender--
Straight, in the vibrant splendor,
The word became a bird.
He flies beneath the garnet
Of clouds that flame and float,--
When summer hears the hornet
Hum round the plum, turned garnet,--
Heaven’s music in his throat.
CLEARING
Before the wind, with rain-drowned stocks,
The pleated, crimson hollyhocks
Are bending;
And, smouldering in the breaking brown,
Above the hills that rim the town,
The day is ending.
The air is heavy with the damp;
And, one by one, each cottage lamp
Is lighted;
Infrequent passers of the street
Stroll on or stop to talk or greet,
Benighted.
I look beyond my city yard,
And watch the white moon struggling hard,
Cloud-buried;
The wind is driving toward the east,
A wreck of pearl, all cracked and creased
And serried.
At times the moon, erupting, streaks
Some long cloud, raised in mountain peaks
Of shadow,--
That, seamed with silver, vein on vein,
Grows to a far volcano chain
Of Eldorado.
The wind, that blows from out the hills,
Is like a woman’s touch that stills
A sorrow:
The moon sits high with many a star
In the deep calm: and fair and far
Abides to-morrow.
AUTUMN SORROW
Ah me! too soon the Autumn comes
Among these purple-plaintive hills!
Too soon among the forest gums
Premonitory flame she spills,
Bleak, melancholy flame that kills.
Her white fogs veil the morn, that rims
With wet the moon-flow’r’s elfin moons;
And, like exhausted starlight, dims
The last slim lily-disk; and swoons
With scents of hazy afternoons.
Her gray mists haunt the sunset skies,
And build the west’s cadaverous fire,
Where Sorrow sits with lonely eyes,
And hands that wake her ancient lyre,
Beside the ghost of dead Desire.
A DARK DAY OF SUMMER
Though Summer walks the world to-day
With corn-crowned hours for her guard,
Her thoughts have clad themselves in gray,
And wait in Autumn’s weedy yard.
And where the larkspur and the phlox
Spread carpets for her feet to pass,
She stands with sombre, dripping locks
Bound bleak with fog-washed zinnias.
Sad terra-cotta-colored flowers,
Whose disks the trickling wet has tinged
With dingy lustre, like the bowers,
Flame-flecked with leaves, the frost has singed.
She, with slow feet,--’mid gaunt gold blooms
Of marigolds her fingers twist,--
Passes, dim-swathed in Fall’s perfumes
And dreams of sullen rain and mist.
DAYS AND DAYS
The days that clothed white limbs with heat,
And rocked the red rose on their breast,
Have passed with amber-sandaled feet,
Into the ruby-gated west.
These were the days that filled the heart
With overflowing riches of
Life; in whose soul no dream shall start
But hath its origin in love.
Now come the days gray-huddled in
The haze; whose foggy footsteps drip;
Who pin beneath a gypsy chin
The frosty marigold and hip.--
The days, whose forms fall shadowy
Athwart the heart; whose misty breath
Shapes saddest sweets of memory
Out of the bitterness of death.
DROUTH IN AUTUMN
Gnarled acorn-oaks against a west
Of copper, cavernous with fire;
A wind of frost that gives no rest
To such lean leaves as haunt the brier,
And hide the cricket’s vibrant wire.
Sere, shivering shocks, and stubble blurred
With bramble-blots of dull maroon;
And creekless hills whereon no herd
Finds pasture, and whereo’er the loon
Flies, haggard as the rainless moon.
IN SUMMER
When in dry hollows, hilled with hay,
The vesper-sparrow sings afar;
And golden gray dusk dies away
Beneath the amber evening-star:
There, where a warm and shadowy arm
The woodland lays around the farm,
I’ll meet you at the tryst, the tryst!
And kiss your lips no man hath kissed!
I’ll meet you at the twilight tryst,--
With a hey and a ho!--
Sweetheart!
I’ll kiss you at the tryst!
When clover fields smell cool with dew,
And crickets cry, and roads are still;
And faint and few the fireflies strew
The dark where calls the whippoorwill;
There, in the lane, where sweet again
The petals of the wild-rose rain,
I’ll take in mine your hand, your hand!
And say the words you’ll understand!
Your soft hand nestling in my hand,--
With a hey and a ho!--
Sweetheart!
All loving hand in hand!
IN WINTER
I
When black frosts pluck the acorns down,
And in the lane the waters freeze;
And ’thwart red skies the wild-fowl flies,
And death sits grimly in the trees;
When home-lights glitter through the brown
Of dusk like shaggy eyes,--
Before the door his feet, sweetheart,
And two white arms that greet, sweetheart,
And two white arms that greet.
II
When ways are drifted with the leaves,
And winds make music in the thorns;
And lone and lost above the frost
The new-moon shows its silver horns;
When underneath the lamplit eaves
The opened door is crossed,--
A happy heart and light, sweetheart,
And lips that kiss good night, sweetheart,
And lips that kiss good night.
ON THE FARM
I
He sang a song as he sowed the field,
Sowed the field at break of day:
“When the pursed-up leaves are as lips that yield
Balm and balsam, and Spring,--concealed
In the odorous green,--is so revealed,
Halloo and oh!
Hallo for the woods and the far away!”
II
He trilled a song as he mowed the mead,
Mowed the mead as noon begun:
“When the hills are gold with the ripened seed,
As the sunset stairs of the clouds that lead
To the sky where Summer knows naught of need,
Halloo and oh!
Hallo for the hills and the harvest sun!”
III
He hummed a song as he swung the flail,
Swung the flail in the afternoon:
“When the idle fields are a wrecker’s tale,
That the Autumn tells to the twilight pale,
As the Year turns seaward a crimson sail,
Halloo and oh!
Hallo for the fields and the hunter’s-moon!”
IV
He whistled a song as he shouldered his axe,
Shouldered his axe in the evening storm:
“When the snow of the road shows the rabbit’s tracks,
And the wind is a whip that the Winter cracks,
With a herdsman’s cry, o’er the clouds black backs,
Halloo and oh!
Hallo for home and a fire to warm!”
PATHS
I
What words of mine can tell the spell
Of garden ways I know so well?--
The path that takes me, in the spring,
Past quince-trees where the bluebirds sing,
Where peonies are blossoming,
Unto a porch, wistaria-hung,
Around whose steps May-lilies blow,
A fair girl reaches down among,
Her arm more white than their sweet snow.
II
What words of mine can tell the spell
Of garden ways I know so well?--
Another path that leads me, when
The summer-time is here again,
Past hollyhocks that shame the west
When the red sun has sunk to rest;
To roses bowering a nest,
A lattice, ’neath which mignonette
And deep geraniums surge and sough,
Where, in the twilight, starless yet,
A fair girl’s eyes are stars enough.
III
What words of mine can tell the spell
Of garden ways I know so well?--
A path that takes me, when the days
Of autumn wrap the hills in haze,
Beneath the pippin-pelting tree,
’Mid flitting butterfly and bee;
Unto a door where, fiery,
The creeper climbs; and, garnet-hued,
The cock’s-comb and the dahlia flare,
And in the door, where shades intrude,
Gleams bright a fair girl’s sunbeam hair.
IV
What words of mine can tell the spell
Of garden ways I know so well?--
A path that brings me through the frost
Of winter, when the moon is tossed
In clouds; beneath great cedars, weak
With shaggy snow; past shrubs blown bleak
With shivering leaves; to eaves that leak
The tattered ice, whereunder is
A fire-flickering window-space;
And in the light, with lips to kiss,
A fair girl’s welcome-giving face.
A SONG IN SEASON
I
When in the wind the vane turns round,
And round, and round;
And in his kennel whines the hound:
When all the gable eaves are bound
With icicles of ragged gray,
A tattered gray;
There is little to do, and much to say,
And you hug your fire and pass the day
With a thought of the springtime, dearie.
II
When late at night the owlet hoots,
And hoots, and hoots;
And wild winds make of keyholes flutes:
When to the door the goodman’s boots
Stamp through the snow the light strains red,
The firelight’s red;
There is nothing to do, and all is said,
And you quaff your cider and go to bed
And dream of the summer, dearie.
III
When, nearing dawn, the black cock crows,
And crows, and crows;
And from the barn the milch-cow lows:
And the milkmaid’s cheeks have each a rose,
And the still skies show a star or two,
Or one or two;
There is little to say, and much to do,
And the heartier done the happier you,
With a song of the winter, dearie.
BEFORE THE END
How does the Autumn in her mind conclude
The tragic masque her frosty pencil writes,
Broad on the pages of the days and nights,
In burning lines of orchard, wold, and wood?
What lonelier forms--that at the year’s door stood
At spectral wait--with wildly wasted lights
Shall enter? and with melancholy rites
Inaugurate their sadder sisterhood?--
Sorrow, who lifts a signal hand, and slow
The green leaf fevers, falling ere it dies;
Regret, whose pale lips summon: and gaunt Woe
Wakes the wild wind-harps with sonorous sighs;
And Sleep, who sits with poppied eyes and sees
The earth and sky grow dream-accessories.
HOAR-FROST
The frail eidolons of all blossoms Spring,
Year after year, about the forest tossed,
The magic touch of the enchanter, Frost,
Back from the Heaven of the Flow’rs doth bring;
Each branch and bush in silence visiting
With phantom beauty of its blooms long lost:
Each dead weed bends, white-haunted of its ghost,
Each dead flower stands ghostly with blossoming.
This is the wonder-legend Nature tells
To the gray moon and mist a winter’s night;
The fairy-tale which from her fancy wells
With all the glamour of her soul’s delight:
Before the summoning sorcery of her eyes
Rising, as might a dream materialize.
COLD
A mist that froze beneath the moon and shook
Minutest frosty crystals in the air.
All night the wind was still as lonely Care
Who sighs before her shivering inglenook.
The face of Winter wore a cruder look
Than when he shakes the icicles from his hair,
And, in the boisterous pauses, lets his stare
Freeze through the forest, fettering bough and brook.
He is the despot now who sits and dreams
Of desolation and despair, and smiles
At poverty, who hath no place to rest,
Who wanders o’er Life’s snow-made-pathless miles,
And sees the Home-of-Comfort’s window gleams,
Hugging her rag-wrapped baby to her breast.
THE WINTER MOON
Deep in the dell I watched her as she rose,
A face of icy fire, o’er the hills;
With snow-sad eyes that froze the forest rills,
And snow-sad feet that bleached the meadow snows:
Pale as some young witch who, a-listening, goes
To her first meeting with the Fiend; whose fears
Fix demon eyes behind each bush she nears;
Stops, yet must on, fearful of following foes.
And so I chased her, startled in the wood
Like a discovered oread, who flies
The faun who found her sleeping, each nude limb
Glittering betrayal through the solitude;
Till in a frosty cloud I saw her swim
Like a drowned face, a blur beneath the ice.
THE HILLSIDE GRAVE
Ten-thousand deep the drifted daisies break
Here at the hill’s foot; on its top, the wheat
Hangs meagre-bearded; and, in vague retreat,
The wisp-like blooms of the moth-mulleins shake.
And where the wild-pink drops a crimson flake,
And morning-glories, like young lips, make sweet
The shadowed hush, low in the honeyed heat,
The wild-bees hum--as if afraid to wake
One sleeping here, with no white stone to tell
If it be youth or maiden. Just the stem
Of one wild rose, towering o’er brier and weed,
Where all the day the wild-birds requiem;
Within whose shade the timid violets spell
An epitaph, the stars alone can read.
THE COVERED BRIDGE
There, from its entrance, lost in matted vines,--
Where in the valley foams a waterfall,--
Is glimpsed a ruined mill’s remaining wall;
Here, by the road, the black-eyed Susan mines
Hot brass and bronze; the trumpet-trailer shines
Red as the plumage of the cardinal.
Faint from the forest comes the rain-crow’s call
Where dusty Summer dreams among the pines.
This is the spot where Spring writes wildflower verses
In primrose pink, while, drowsing o’er his reins,
The ploughman, all unnoticing, plods along:
And where the Autumn opens weedy purses
Of sleepy silver, while the corn-piled wains
Rumble the bridge like some deep throat of song.
THE CREEK-ROAD
Calling, the heron flies athwart the blue
That sleeps above it; reach on rocky reach
Of water sings by sycamore and beech,
In whose warm shade bloom lilies not a few.
It is a page whereon the sun and dew
Scrawl sparkling words in dawn’s delicious speech;
A laboratory where the wood-winds teach,
Dissect each scent and analyze each hue.
Not otherwise than beautiful, doth it
Record the happenings of each summer day;
Where we may read, as in a catalogue,
When passed a thresher; when a load of hay;
Or when a rabbit; or a bird, that lit;
And now a barefoot truant and his dog.
ABANDONED
The hornets build in plaster dropping rooms,
And on its mossy porch the lizard lies;
Around its chimneys slow the swallow flies,
And on its roof the locusts snow their blooms.
Like some sad thought that broods here, old perfumes
Haunt its dim stairs; the cautious zephyr tries
Each gusty door, like some dead hand, then sighs
With ghostly lips among the attic glooms.
And now a heron, now a kingfisher,
Flits in the willows where the riffle seems
At each faint fall to hesitate to leap,
Fluttering the silence with a little stir.
Here Summer seems a placid face asleep,
And the near world a figment of her dreams.
OMENS
Sad on the hills the poppied sunset died.
Slow as a fungus breaking through the crusts
Of forest leaves, the waning half-moon thrusts
Through gray-brown clouds one milky silver side;
In her vague light the dogwoods, dim-descried,
Seem dying torches flourished by the gusts;
The apple-orchards seem the restless dusts
Of wind-thinned mists upon the hills they hide.
It is a night of omens whom late May
Meets, like a wraith, among her train of hours;
An apparition with appealing eye
And hesitant foot, that walks a willowed way,
And, speaking through the fading moon and flowers,
Bids her prepare her gentle soul to die.
IMPERFECTION
Not as the eye hath seen shall we behold
Romance and beauty when we’ve passed away;
That robed the dull facts of the intimate day
In life’s wild raiment of unusual gold:
Not as the ear hath heard shall we be told,
Hereafter, myth and legend once that lay
Warm at the heart of Nature, clothing clay
In attributes of no material mold.
These were imperfect of necessity,
That wrought through imperfection for far ends
Of perfectness--as calm philosophy,
Teaching a child, from his high heaven descends
To earth’s familiar things; informingly
Vesting his thoughts in that it comprehends.
ARCANA