If I could unravel
The music of the grass,
Beyond those confines travel
Which mortals cannot pass,
I think that I should capture all
The secret of things musical—
All music ever will be, and all it ever was.
Ear close to earth inclining
I hear her wordless song
Of threads past man's divining
Woven the grass among.
Beneath these fragrant, tangled weeds
She sings the strain to which her seeds
March into life, push upward to heaven, and grow strong.
Then like a voice replying
Follows her cradle-croon
Lulling tired things that, dying,
Back to their Mother swoon.
For where the worlds of grasses spring
Both life and death their choral sing,
The spheres' eternal roundel circling an afternoon.
The music of existence
Moves underneath my ear—
From how remote a distance
Comes that which sounds so near!
Could I the human barrier pass
By the fine measure of one grass
I then might comprehend what now I only hear.
There's such melodious stirring
Of hidden, secret things,
There's such harmonious whirring
Of faint mysterious wings;
And underneath this leaf is curled
The song, I think, of all the world—
Up-turned, should I discover the seed from which it springs?
If I could unravel
The music of the grass,
Beyond those confines travel
Which mortals cannot pass,
I think that I should capture all
The secret of things musical—
All music ever will be, and all it ever was.
V
Hark!
It is afternoon,
Yet that must be a lark.
No other bird flies up so high
And shakes its sparkling spray of song
Through the grey clouds in the sky,
No other bird has just that thrilling
Note in trilling,
Or can sustain so long
Its liquid flood of mirth:
As rare a boon
To thirsty ears as God's dew is to earth.
Yet it is afternoon.
I thought the larks, all scorning
The jaded hours, sang only in the morning.
And I, whose first flushed youth is going,
Who watch the swift noon growing
Upon me, hour by hour,
Feeling that I must always stand apart
From earth's sweet singers, because I lacked the pow'r
To loose the morning song-burst from my heart—
Oh, songster of the mellowing hour of day,
Shall I, too, late or soon,
Learn from your throat the way
To loose my power of song even in my afternoon?