Kitabı oku: «The House of the Trees & Other Poems», sayfa 4

In the Crowd

 
HERE in the crowded city’s busy street,
Swayed by the eager, jostling, hasting throng,
Where Traffic’s voice grows harsher and more strong,
I see within the stream of hurrying feet
A company of trees in their retreat,
Dew-bathed, dream-wrapped, and with a thrush’s song
Emparadising all the place, along
Whose paths I hear the pulse of Beauty beat.
 
 
’Twas yesterday I walked beneath the trees,
To-day I tread the city’s stony ways;
And still the spell that o’er my spirit came
Turns harshest sounds to shy bird ecstasies,
Pours scent of pine through murky chimney haze,
And gives each careworn face a woodland frame.
 

By Fields of Grass

 
BY fields of grass and woodland silences
The city’s tumult is encamped around;
The jingling, clanging, shrieking fiends of sound
Expire within the wide world-circling breeze.
The soul amid a multitude of trees,
Or grass enveloped on the fragrant ground,
Is lifted to its utmost starry round,
And listens to celestial harmonies.
 
 
From this unspeakably divine rebirth,
Its sordid life returning shows through rifts
How purely spreads the sky, how musical
The streams and breezes flow across the earth,
How light the tree its fruity load uplifts,
How easily the weed is beautiful.
 

October

 
AGAINST the winter’s heav’n of white the blood
Of earth runs very quick and hot to-day;
A storm of fiery leaves are out at play
Around the lingering sunset of the wood.
Where rows of blackberries unnoticed stood,
Run streams of ruddy color wildly gay;
The golden lane half dreaming picks its way
Through ’whelming vines, as through a gleaming flood.
 
 
O warm, outspoken earth, a little space
Against thy beating heart my heart shall beat,
A little while they twain shall bleed and burn,
And then the cold touch and the gray, gray face,
The frozen pulse, the drifted winding-sheet,
And speechlessness, and the chill burial urn.
 

Winter

 
NOW that the earth has hid her lovely brood
Of green things in her breast safe out of sight,
And all the trees have stripped them for the fight,
The winter comes with wild winds singing rude
Hoarse battle songs—so furious in feud
That nothing lives that has not felt their bite.
They sound a trumpet in the dead of night
That makes more solitary solitude.
 
 
Against the forest doors how fierce they beat!
Against the porch, against the school-bound boy
With crimson cheek bent to his shaggy coat.
The earth is pale but steadfast, hearing sweet
But far—how far away! the stream of joy
Outpouring from a bluebird’s tender throat.
 

The Snow-Storm

 
THE great, soft, downy snow-storm like a cloak
Descends to wrap the lean world head to feet;
It gives the dead another winding-sheet,
It buries all the roofs until the smoke
Seems like a soul that from its clay has broke;
It broods moon-like upon the Autumn wheat,
And visits all the trees in their retreat,
To hood and mantle that poor shiv’ring folk.
 
 
With wintry bloom it fills the harshest grooves
In jagged pine stump fences. Every sound
It hushes to the footstep of a nun.
Sweet Charity! that brightens where it moves,
Inducing darkest bits of churlish ground
To give a radiant answer to the sun.
 

To February

 
O MASTER-BUILDER, blustering as you go
About your giant work, transforming all
The empty woods into a glittering hall,
And making lilac lanes and footpaths grow
As hard as iron under stubborn snow,
Though every fence stand forth a marble wall,
And windy hollows drift to arches tall,
There comes a might that shall your might o’erthrow.
 
 
Build high your white and dazzling palaces,
Strengthen your bridges, fortify your towers,
Storm with a loud and a portentous lip;
And April with a fragmentary breeze,
And half a score of gentle, golden hours,
Shall leave no trace of your stern workmanship.
 

Rest

 
FROM the depths of dreams I am drawn
To the inner depth of a pine,
That near my window keeps the dawn—
A dawn that is wholly mine.
Dream-rest and pine-rest,
And a cool, gray path between—
A cool, gray path from the night’s breast
To the heart of the living green.
 
 
To the depths of dreams I go
On the sounds of falling rain,
That in the night-time gently flow
In a stream on my window-pane.
Stream-rest and dream-rest,
And a cool, dark path between—
A cool, dark path from the rain’s breast
To the heart of the soft unseen.
 

The Shy Sun

 
THE sun went with me to the wood,
And lingered at the door;
One glance he gave from where he stood,
But dared not venture more,
 
 
Nor knew that in the heart of her
Who felt his presence nigh,
His love was all the lovelier
Because his look was shy.
 

In April

 
WHEN Spring unbound comes o’er us like a flood,
My spirit slips its bars,
And thrills to see the trees break into bud
As skies break into stars;
 
 
And joys that earth is green with eager grass,
The heavens gray with rain,
And quickens when the spirit breezes pass,
And turn and pass again;
 
 
And dreams upon frog melodies at night,
Bird ecstasies at dawn,
And wakes to find sweet April at her height
And May still beck’ning on;
 
 
And feels its sordid work, its empty play,
Its failures and its stains
Dissolved in blossom dew, and washed away
In delicate spring rains.
 

Apple Blossoms

 
AMID the young year’s breathing hopes,
When eager grasses wrap the earth,
I see on greening orchard slopes
The blossoms trembling into birth.
They open wide their rosy palms
To feel the hesitating rain,
Or beg a longed-for golden alms
From skies that deep in clouds have lain.
 
 
They mingle with the bluebird’s songs,
And with the warm wind’s reverie;
To sward and stream their snow belongs,
To neighboring pines in flocks they flee.
O doubly crowned, with breathing hopes
The branches bending down to earth,
That feel on greening orchard slopes
Their blossoms trembling into birth.