When the boughs blow bare and the dead leaves fly?
Who walks all night with her wailing cry,
“O my children, come home!”
Who, strange of look, and wild of tongue,
With wan feet wounded and hands wild-wrung,
Sweeps on and on with her cry, far-flung,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”
V
’Tis the Spirit of Autumn, no man sees,
The mother of Death and of Mysteries,
Who cries on the wind all night to these,
“O my children, come home!”
The Spirit of Autumn, pierced with pain,
Calling her children home again,
Death and Dreams, through ruin and rain,--
“O my children, come home, come home!
O my children, come home!”
THE LAND OF HEARTS MADE WHOLE
Do you know the way that goes
Over fields of rue and rose,--
Warm of scent and hot of hue,
Roofed with heaven’s bluest blue,--
To the Vale of Dreams Come True?
Do you know the path that twines,
Banked with elder bosks and vines,
Under boughs that shade a stream,
Hurrying, crystal as a gleam,
To the Hills of Love a-Dream?
Tell me, tell me, have you gone
Through the fields and woods of dawn,
Meadowlands and trees that roll,
Great of grass and huge of bole,
To the Land of Hearts Made Whole?
On the way, among the fields,
Poppies lift vermilion shields,
In whose hearts the golden Noon,
Murmuring her drowsy tune,
Rocks the sleepy bees that croon.
On the way, amid the woods,
Mandrakes muster multitudes,
’Mid whose blossoms, white as tusk,
Glides the glimmering Forest-Dusk,
With her moths of fluttering musk.
Here you hear the stealthy stir
Of shy lives of hoof and fur;
Harmless things that hide and peer,
Hearts that sucked the milk of fear--
Fox and rabbit, squirrel and deer.
Here you see the mossy flight
Of faint forms that love the night--
Whippoorwill and owlet-things,
Whose weird call before you brings
Wonder-worlds of happenings.
Now in sunlight, now in shade,
Water, like a brandished blade,
Foaming forward, wild of flight,
Startles, then arrests the sight,
Whirling steely loops of light.
Through the tree-tops, down the vale,
Breezes roam, and leave a trail
Of cool music that the birds,--
Following in happy herds,--
Gather up in twittering words.
Blossoms, frail and manifold,
Shower the way with pearl and gold;
Blurs, that seem the darling print
Of the Springtime’s feet, or glint
Of her twinkling gown’s torn tint.
There the Myths of old endure:
Dreams that are the world-soul’s cure;
Things that have no place or play
In the facts of Everyday
Round your presence smile and sway.
Suddenly your eyes may see,
Stepping softly from a tree,--
Slim of form and wet with dew,--
The brown Dryad; lips the hue
Of a berry bit into.
You may mark the Naiad rise
From her pool’s reflected skies;
In her gaze the heaven that dreams,
Starred, in twilight-haunted streams,
Mixed with water’s grayer gleams.
You may see the laurel’s girth,
Big with bloom, give fragrant birth
To the Oread whose hair,--
Musk and darkness, light and air,--
Fills the hush with wonder there.
You may mark the rocks divide,
And the Faun before you glide,
Piping on a magic reed,
Sowing many a music-seed,
From which bloom and mushroom bead.
Of the rain and sunlight born,
Young of beard and young of horn,
You may see the Satyr lie,
With a very knowing eye,
Teaching fledgeling birds to fly.
These shall cheer and follow you
Through the Vale of Dreams Come True:
Wind-like voices, leaf-like feet;
Forms of mist and hazy heat,
In whose pulses sunbeams beat.
Lo! you tread enchanted ground!
From the hollows all around
Elf and spirit, gnome and fay,
Guide your feet along the way
Till the dewy close of day.
Then beside you, jet on jet,
Emerald-hued and violet,
Flickering, floats a firefly light,
Aye to guide your steps aright
From the valley to the height.
Steep the way is; when at last,
Vale and wood and stream are passed,
From the heights you shall behold
Panther heavens of spotted gold
Tiger-tawny deeps unfold.
You shall see on stocks and stones
Sunset’s bell-deep color tones
Fallen; and the valleys filled
With dusk’s purple music, spilled
On the silence, rapture-thrilled.
Then, as answering bell greets bell,
Night ring in her miracle
Of the doméd dark, o’er-rolled,
Note on note, with starlight cold,
’Twixt the moon’s broad peal of gold.
On the hill-top Love-a-Dream
Shows you then her window-gleam;
Brings you home and folds your soul
In the peace of vale and knoll,
In the Land of Hearts Made Whole.
THE WIND OF SUMMER
From the hills and far away
All the long, warm summer day
Comes the Wind and seems to say:
“Come, oh, come! and let us go
Where the meadows bend and blow,
Waving with the white-tops’ snow.
“’Neath the hyssop-colored sky
’Mid the meadows we will lie
Watching the white clouds roll by;
“While your hair my hands shall press
With a cooling tenderness
Till your grief grows less and less:
“Come, oh, come! and let us roam
Where the rock-cut waters comb
Flowing crystal into foam.
“Under trees whose trunks are brown,
On the banks that violets crown,
We will watch the fish flash down;
“While my voice your ear shall soothe
With a whisper soft and smooth
Till your care shall wax uncouth.
“Come! where forests, line on line,--
Armies of the oak and pine,--
Scale the hills and shout and shine.
“We will wander, hand in hand,
Ways where tall the toadstools stand,
Mile-stones white of Fairyland.
“While your eyes my lips shall kiss,
Dewy as a wild-rose is,
Till they gaze on naught but bliss.
“On the meadows you will hear,
Leaning low your spirit ear,
Cautious footsteps drawing near.
“You will deem it but a bee,
Murmuring soft and sleepily,
Till your inner sight shall see
“’Tis a presence passing slow,
All its shining hair ablow,
Through the white-tops’ tossing snow.
“By the waters, if you will,
And your inmost soul is still,
Melody your ears shall fill.
“You will deem it but the stream
Rippling onward in a dream,
Till upon your gaze shall gleam
“Arm of spray and throat of foam--
’Tis a spirit there a-roam
Where the radiant waters comb.
“In the forest, if you heed,
You shall hear a magic reed
Sow sweet notes like silver seed.
“You will deem your ears have heard
Stir of tree or song of bird,
Till your startled eyes are blurred
“By a vision, instant seen,
Naked gold and naked green,
Glimmering the boughs between.
“Follow me! and you shall see
Wonder-worlds of mystery
That are only known to me!”
Thus outside my city door
Speaks the Wind its wildwood lore,
Speaks, and lo! I go once more.
THE WIND OF WINTER
The Winter Wind, the wind of death,
Who knocked upon my door,
Now through the key-hole entereth,
Invisible and hoar:
He breathes around his icy breath
And treads the flickering floor.
I heard him, wandering in the night,
Tap at my window pane,
With ghostly fingers, snowy white,
I heard him tug in vain,
Until the shuddering candle-light
Did cringe with fear and strain.
The fire, awakened by his voice,
Leapt up with frantic arms,
Like some wild babe that greets, with noise,
Its father home who storms,
With rosy gestures that rejoice
And crimson kiss that warms.
Now in the hearth he sits and, drowned
Among the ashes, blows;
Or through the room goes stealing round
On cautious-stepping toes,
Deep-mantled in the drowsy sound
Of night that sleets and snows.
And oft, like some thin fairy-thing,
The stormy hush amid,
I hear his captive trebles ring
Beneath the kettle’s lid;
Or now a harp of elfland string
In some dark cranny hid.
Again I hear him, imp-like, whine,
Cramped in the gusty flue;
Or knotted in the resinous pine
Raise goblin cry and hue,
While through the smoke his eyeballs shine,
A sooty red and blue.
At last I hear him, nearing dawn,
Take up his roaring broom,
And sweep wild leaves from wood and lawn,
And from the heavens the gloom,
To show the gaunt world lying wan,
And morn’s cold rose a-bloom.
THE LEAF-CRICKET
I
Small twilight singer
Of dew and mist: thou ghost-gray, gossamer winger
Of dusk’s dim glimmer,
How cool thy note sounds; how thy wings of shimmer
Vibrate, soft-sighing,
Meseems, for Summer that is dead or dying.
I stand and listen,
And at thy song the garden-beds, that glisten
With rose and lily,
Seem touched with sadness; and the tuberose chilly,
Breathing around its cold and colorless breath,
Fills the pale evening with wan hints of death.
II
I see thee quaintly
Beneath the leaf; thy shell-shaped winglets faintly--
As thin as spangle
Of cobwebbed rain--held up at airy angle;
I hear thy tinkle,
Thy fairy notes, the silvery stillness sprinkle;
Investing wholly
The moonlight with divinest melancholy:
Until, in seeming,
I see the Spirit of the Summer dreaming
Amid her ripened orchards, apple-strewn,
Her great, grave eyes fixed on the harvest-moon.
III
As dewdrops beady,
As mist minute, thy notes ring low and reedy:
The vaguest vapor
Of melody, now near; now, like some taper
Of sound, far fading--
Thou will-o’-wisp of music aye evading.
Among the bowers,
The fog-washed stalks of Autumn’s weeds and flowers,
By hill and hollow,
I hear thy murmur and in vain I follow--
Thou jack-o’-lantern voice, thou elfin cry,
Thou dirge, that tellest Beauty she must die.
IV
And when the frantic
Wild winds of Autumn with the dead leaves antic;
And walnuts scatter
The mire of lanes; and dropping acorns patter
In grove and forest,
Like some frail grief, with the rude blast thou warrest,
Sending thy slender
Far cry against the gale, that, rough, untender,
Untouched of sorrow,
Sweeps thee aside, where, haply, I to-morrow
Shall find thee lying, tiny, cold and crushed,
Thy weak wings folded and thy music hushed.
THE OWLET
I
When dusk is drowned in drowsy dreams,
And slow the hues of sunset die;
When firefly and moth go by,
And in still streams the new-moon gleams,
A sickle in the sky:
Then from the hills there comes a cry,
The owlet’s cry:
A shivering voice that sobs and screams,
That, frightened, screams:--
“Who is it, who is it, who?
Who rides through the dusk and dew,
With a pair of horns,
As thin as thorns,
And face a bubble-blue?
Who, who, who!
Who is it, who is it, who?”
II
When night has dulled the lily’s white,
And opened wide the moonflower’s eyes,
When pale mists rise and veil the skies,
And round the height in whispering flight
The night wind sounds and sighs:
Then in the woods again it cries,
The owlet cries:
A shivering voice that calls in fright,
In maundering fright:--
“Who is it, who is it, who?
Who walks with a shuffling shoe,
’Mid the gusty trees,
With a face none sees,
And a form as ghostly too?
Who, who, who!
Who is it, who is it, who?”
III
When midnight leans a listening ear
And tinkles on her insect lutes;
When ’mid the roots the cricket flutes,
And marsh and mere, now far, now near,
A jack-o’-lantern foots:
Then o’er the pool again it hoots,
The owlet hoots:
A voice that shivers as with fear,
That cries in fear:--
“Who is it, who is it, who?
Who creeps with his glow-worm crew
Above the mire
With a corpse-light fire,
As only dead men do?
Who, who, who!
Who is it, who is it, who?”
THE POET
He stands above all worldly schism,
And, gazing over life’s abysm,
Beholds, within the starry range
Of heaven, laws of death and change,
That, through his soul’s prophetic prism,
Are turned to rainbows wild and strange.
Through nature is his hope made surer
Of that ideal, his allurer,
By whom his life is upward drawn
To mount pale pinnacles of dawn,
’Mid which all that is fairer, purer
Of love and lore it comes upon.
An alkahest, that makes gold metal
Of dross, his mind is--where one petal
Of one wild-rose will well outweigh
The piled-up facts of every-day--
Where commonplaces, there that settle,
Are changed to things of heavenly ray.
He climbs by steps of stars and flowers,
Companioned of the spirit Hours,
And sets his feet in pastures where
No merely mortal feet may fare;
And higher than the stars he towers
Though lowly as the flowers there.
His comrades are his own high fancies
And thoughts in which his soul romances;
And every part of heaven or earth
He visits, lo, assumes new worth;
And touched with loftier traits and trances
Reshines as with a lovelier birth.
He is the play, also the player;
The word that’s said, likewise the sayer;
And in the books of heart and head
There is no thing he has not read;
Of time and tears he is the weigher,
And mouthpiece ’twixt the quick and dead.
He dies: but, mounting ever higher,
Wings Phœnix-like from out his pyre
Above our mortal day and night,
Clothed on with sempiternal light;
And raimented in thought’s fine fire
Flames on in everlasting flight.
Unseen, yet seen, on heights of visions,
Above all praise and world derisions,
His spirit and his deathless brood
Of dreams fare on, a multitude,
While on the pillar of great missions
His name and place are granite-hewed.
SUMMER NOONTIDE
The slender snail clings to the leaf
Gray on its silvered underside;
And slowly, slowlier than the snail, with brief
Bright steps, whose ripening touch foretells the sheaf,
Her warm hands berry-dyed,
Comes down the tanned Noontide.
The pungent fragrance of the mint
And pennyroyal drench her gown,
That leaves long shreds of trumpet-blossom tint
Among the thorns, and everywhere the glint
Of gold and white and brown
Her flowery steps waft down.
The leaves, like hands with emerald veined,
Along her way try their wild best
To reach the jewel--whose hot hue was drained
From some rich rose that all the June contained--
The butterfly, soft pressed
Upon her sunny breast.
Her shawl, the lace-like elder bloom,
She hangs upon the hillside brake,
Smelling of warmth and of her breast’s perfume,
And, lying in the citron-colored gloom
Beside the lilied lake,
She stares the buds awake.
Or, with a smile, through watery deeps
She leads the oaring turtle’s legs;
Or guides the crimson fin, that swims and sleeps,
From pad to pad, from which the young frog leaps;
And to its nest’s green eggs
The reed-bird there that begs.
Then ’mid the fields of unmown hay
She shows the bees where sweets are found;
And points the butterflies, at airy play,
And dragon-flies, along the water-way,
Where honeyed flowers abound
For them to flicker round.
Or where ripe apples pelt with gold
Some barn--around which, coned with snow,
The wild-potato blooms--she mounts its old
Mossed roof, and through warped sides, the knots have holed,
Lets her long glances glow
Into the loft below.
To show the mud-wasp at its cell
Slenderly busy: swallows, too,
Packing against a beam their nest’s clay shell;
And crouching in the dark the owl as well
With all her downy crew
Of owlets gray of hue.
These are her joys; and until dusk
Lounging she walks where reapers reap,
From sultry raiment shaking scents of musk,
Rustling the corn within its silken husk,
And driving down heav’n’s deep
White herds of clouds like sheep.
TO THE LOCUST
Thou pulse of hotness, who, with reed-like breast,
Makest meridian music, long and loud,
Accentuating summer!--dost thy best
To make the sunbeams fiercer, and to crowd
With lonesomeness the long, close afternoon--
When Labor leans, swart-faced and beady-browed,
Upon his sultry scythe--thou tangible tune
Of heat, whose waves incessantly arise
Quivering and clear beneath the cloudless skies.
Thou singest, and upon his haggard hills
Drouth yawns and rubs his heavy eyes and wakes;
Brushes the hot hair from his face; and fills
The land with death as sullenly he takes
Downward his dusty way: ’midst woods and fields
At every pool his burning thirst he slakes;
No grove so deep, no bank so high it shields
A spring from him; no creek evades his eye;
He needs but look and they are withered dry.
Thou singest, and thy song is as a spell
Of somnolence to charm the land with sleep;
A thorn of sound that pierces dale and dell,
Diffusing slumber over vale and steep.
Sleepy the forest, nodding sleepy boughs;
Sleepy the pastures with their sleepy sheep;
Sleepy the creek where sleepily the cows
Stand knee-deep, and the very heaven seems
Sleepy and lost in undetermined dreams.
Art thou a rattle that Monotony,
Summer’s dull nurse, old sister of slow Time,
Shakes for Day’s peevish pleasure, who in glee
Takes its discordant music for sweet rhyme?
Or oboe that the Summer Noontide plays,
Sitting with Ripeness ’neath the orchard-tree,
Trying repeatedly the same shrill phrase,
Until the musky peach with weariness
Drops, and the hum of murmuring bees grows less?
JULY
Now ’tis the time when, tall,
The long blue torches of the bellflower gleam
Among the trees; and, by the wooded stream,
In many a fragrant ball,
Blooms of the button-bush fall.
Let us go forth and seek
Woods where the wild plums redden and the beech
Plumps its stout burrs; and, swelling, just in reach,
The pawpaw, emerald-sleek,
Ripens along the creek.
Now ’tis the time when ways
Of glimmering green flaunt white the giant plumes
Of the black-cohosh; and through bramble glooms,--
A blur of orange rays,--
The butterfly-blossoms blaze.
Let us go forth and hear
The spiral music that the locusts beat,
And that small spray of sound, so grassy sweet,
Dear to a country ear,
The cricket’s summer cheer.
Now golden celandine
Is hairy hung with silvery sacs of seeds,
And bugled o’er with freckled gold, like beads,
Beneath the fox-grape vine,
The jewel-weed’s blossoms shine.
Let us go forth and see
The dragon-and the butterfly, like gems,
Spangling the sunbeams; and the clover stems,
Weighed down with many a bee,
Nodding mellifluously.
Now morns are full of song;
The cat-bird and the red-bird and the jay
Upon the hilltops rouse the ruddy day,
Who, dewy, blithe, and strong,
Lures their wild wings along.
Now noons are full of dreams;
The clouds of heaven and the wandering breeze
Follow a vision; and the flowers and trees,
The hills and fields and streams,
Are lapped in mystic gleams.
The nights are full of love;
The stars and moon take up the golden tale
Of the sunk sun, and passionate and pale,
Mixing their fires above,
Grow eloquent thereof.
Such days are like a sigh
That beauty heaves from a full heart of bliss:
Such nights are like the sweetness of a kiss
On lips that half deny--
The warm lips of July.
EVENING ON THE FARM
From out the hills where twilight stands,
Above the shadowy pasture-lands,
With strained and strident cry,
Beneath pale skies that sunset bands,
The bull-bats fly.
A cloud hangs over, strange of shape,
And, colored like the half-ripe grape,
Seems some uneven stain
On heaven’s azure, thin as crape,
And blue as rain.
By ways, that sunset’s sardonyx
O’erflares, and gates the farm-boy clicks,
Through which the cattle came,
The mullein stalks seem giant wicks
Of downy flame.
From woods no glimmer enters in,
Above the streams that, wandering, win
From out the violet hills,
Those haunters of the dusk begin,
The whippoorwills.
Adown the dark the firefly marks
Its flight in golden-emerald sparks;
And, loosened from his chain,
The shaggy watch-dog bounds and barks,
And barks again.
Each breeze brings scents of hill-heaped hay;
And now an owlet, far away,
Cries twice or thrice, “T-o-o-w-h-o-o”;
And cool dim moths of mottled gray
Flit through the dew.
The silence sounds its frog-bassoon,
Where, on the woodland creek’s lagoon,
Pale as a ghostly girl
Lost ’mid the trees, looks down the moon
With face of pearl.
Within the shed where logs, late hewed,
Smell forest-sweet, and chips of wood
Make blurs of white and brown,
The brood-hen cuddles her warm brood
Of teetering down.
The clattering guineas in the tree
Din for a time; and quietly
The hen-house, near the fence,
Sleeps, save for some brief rivalry
Of cocks and hens.
A cow-bell tinkles by the rails,
Where, streaming white in foaming pails,
Milk makes an uddery sound;
While overhead the black bat trails
Around and round.
The night is still. The slow cows chew
A drowsy cud. The bird that flew
And sang is in its nest.
It is the time of falling dew,
Of dreams and rest.
The brown bees sleep; and round the walk,
The garden path, from stalk to stalk
The bungling beetle booms,
Where two soft shadows stand and talk
Among the blooms.
The stars are thick: the light is dead
That dyed the west: and Drowsyhead,
Tuning his cricket-pipe,
Nods, and some apple, round and red,
Drops over-ripe.
Now down the road, that shambles by,
A window, shining like an eye
Through climbing rose and gourd,
Shows where Toil sups and these things lie--
His heart and hoard.
UNDER THE HUNTER’S MOON
White from her chrysalis of cloud,
The moth-like moon swings upward through the night;
And all the bee-like stars that crowd
Heav’n’s hollow hive wane in her silvery light.
Along the distance folds of mist
Hang frost-pale, ridging all the dark with gray;
Tinting the trees with amethyst,
Touching with pearl and purple every spray.
All night the stealthy frost and fog
Conspire to slay the rich-robed weeds and flowers;
To strip the woods of wealth, and clog
With piled-up gold of leaves the creek that cowers.
I seem to see their Spirits stand,
Molded of moonlight, faint of form and face,
Now reaching high a chilly hand
To pluck some walnut from its spicy place:
Now with fine fingers, phantom-cold,
Splitting the wahoo’s pods of rose, and thin
The bittersweet’s globes of gold,
To show the coal-red berries packed within:
Now on frail threads of gossamer
Stringing slim pearls of moisture; necklacing
The flow’rs; and spreading cobweb fur,
Crystalled with stardew, over everything;
While ’neath the moon, with moon-white feet,
They wander and a moon-chill music draw
From thin leaf-cricket flutes--the sweet,
Dim dirge of Autumn dying in the shaw.
IN THE LANE
When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock,
And the brown bee drones i’ the rose,
And the west is a red-streaked four-o’-clock,
And summer is near its close--
It’s--Oh, for the gate and the locust lane
And dusk and dew and home again!
When the katydid sings and the cricket cries,
And ghosts of the mists ascend,
And the evening-star is a lamp i’ the skies,
And summer is near its end--
It’s--Oh, for the fence and the leafy lane,
And the twilight peace and the tryst again!
When the owlet hoots in the dogwood-tree,
That leans to the rippling Run,
And the wind is a wildwood melody,
And summer is almost done--
It’s--Oh, for the bridge and the bramble lane,
And the fragrant hush and her hands again!
When fields smell moist with the dewy hay,
And woods are cool and wan,
And a path for dreams is the Milky-way,
And summer is nearly gone--
It’s--Oh, for the rock and the woodland lane,
And the silence and stars and her lips again!
When the weight of the apples breaks down the limbs,
And musk-melons split with sweet,
And the moon’s broad boat in the heaven swims,
And summer has spent its heat--
It’s--Oh, for the lane, the trysting lane,
And the deep-mooned night and her love again!
EPIPHANY
There is nothing that eases my heart so much
As the wind that blows from the great green hills;
’Tis a hand of balsam whose healing touch
Unburdens my bosom of ills.
There is nothing that maketh my soul to rejoice
Like the sunset flaming without a flaw:
’Tis a burning bush whence God’s own voice
Addresses my spirit with awe.
There is nothing that hallows my mind, meseems,
Like the night with its moon and its starry slope:
’Tis a mystical lily whose golden gleams
Fulfill my being with hope.
There is nothing, no, nothing, we see and feel,
That speaks to our souls some beautiful thought,
That was not created to help us and heal
Our lives that are overwrought.
LIFE
I
_Pessimist_
There is never a thing we dream or do
But was dreamed and done in the ages gone;
Everything’s old; there is nothing that’s new,
And so it will be while the world goes on.
The thoughts we think have been thought before;
The deeds we do have long been done;
We pride ourselves on our love and lore
And both are as old as the moon and sun.
We strive and struggle and swink and sweat,
And the end for each is one and the same;
Time and the sun and the frost and wet
Will wear from its pillar the greatest name.
No answer comes for our prayer or curse,
No word replies though we shriek in air;
Ever the taciturn universe
Stretches unchanged for our curse or prayer.
With our mind’s small light in the dark we crawl,--
Glow-worm glimmers that creep about,--
Till the Power that made us, over us all
Poises His foot and treads us out.
Unasked He fashions us out of clay,
A little water, a little dust,
And then in our holes He thrusts us away,
With never a word, to rot and rust.
’Tis a sorry play with a sorry plot,
This life of hate and of lust and pain,
Where we play our parts and are soon forgot,
And all that we do is done in vain.
II
_Optimist_