(_For E. V. Branford_)
The shepherd sings:
"_Way down in Dixie,
Way down in Dixie,
Where the hens are dog-gone glad to lay..._"
With shaded eyes he stands to look
Across the hills where the clouds swoon,
He singing, leans upon his crook,
He sings, he sings no more.
The wind is muffled in the tangled hair
Of sheep that drift along the noon.
The mild sheep stare
With amber eyes about the pearl-flecked June.
Two skylarks soar
With singing flame
Into the sun whence first they came.
All else is only grasshoppers
Or a brown wing the shepherd stirs,
Who, like a slow tree moving, goes
Where the pale tide of sheep-drift flows.
See! the sun smites
With molten lights
The turned wing of a gull that glows
Aslant the violet, the profound
Dome of the mid-June heights.
Alas! again the grasshoppers,
The birds, the slumber-winging bees,
Alas! again for those and these
Demure things drowned;
Drowned in vain raucous words men made
Where no lark rose with swift and sweet
Ascent and where no dim sheep strayed
About the stone immensities,
Where no sheep strayed and where no bees
Probed any flowers nor swung a blade
Of grass with pollened feet.
He sings
"_In Dixie,
Way down in Dixie,
Where the hens are dog-gone glad to lay
Scrambled eggs in the new-mown hay..._"
The herring-gulls with peevish cries
Rebuke the man who sings vain words;
His sheep-dog growls a low complaint,
Then turns to chasing butterflies.
But when the indifferent singing-birds
From midmost down to dimmest shore
Innumerably confirm their songs,
And grasshoppers make summer rhyme
And solemn bees in the wild thyme
Clash cymbals and beat gongs,
The shepherd's words once more are faint,
Once more the alien song is thinned
Upon the long course of the wind,
He sings, he sings no more.
Ah now the dear monotonies
Of bells that jangle on the sheep
To the low limit of the hills!
Till the blue cup of music spills
Into the boughs of lowland trees;
Till thence the lowland singings creep
Into the dreamful shepherd's head,
Creep drowsily through his blood;
The young thrush fluting all he knows,
The ring dove moaning his false woes,
Almost the rabbit's tiny tread,
The last unfolding bud.
But now,
Now a cool word spreads out along the sea.
Now the day's violet is cloud-tipped with gold.
Now dusk most silently
Fills the hushed day with other wings than birds'.
Now where on foam-crest waves the seagulls rock,
To their cliff-haven go the seagulls thence.
So too the shepherd gathers in his flock,
Because birds journey to their dens,
Tired sheep to their still fold.
A dark first bat swoops low and dips
About the shepherd who now sings
A song of timeless evenings;
For dusk is round him with wide wings,
Dusk murmurs on his moving lips.
_There is not mortal man who knows
From whence the shepherd's song arose:
It came a thousand years ago._
_Once the world's shepherds woke to lead
The folded sheep that they might feed
On green downs where winds blow._
_One shepherd sang a golden word.
A thousand miles away one heard.
One sang it swift, one sang it slow._
_Two skylarks heard, two skylarks told
All shepherds this same song of gold
On all downs where winds blow._
_This is the song that shepherds must
Sing till the green downlands be dust
And tide of sheep-drift no more flow;_
_The song two skylarks told again
To all the sheep and shepherd men
On green downs where winds blow._