Kitabı oku: «Poems», sayfa 3

UNREQUITED

 
  Passion? not hers! who held me with pure eyes:
    One hand among the deep curls of her brow,
  I drank the girlhood of her gaze with sighs:
    She never sighed, nor gave me kiss or vow.
 
 
  So have I seen a clear October pool,
    Cold, liquid topaz, set within the sere
  Gold of the woodland, tremorless and cool,
    Reflecting all the heartbreak of the year.
 
 
  Sweetheart? not she! whose voice was music-sweet;
    Whose face loaned language to melodious prayer.
  Sweetheart I called her.—When did she repeat
    Sweet to one hope, or heart to one despair!
 
 
  So have I seen a wildflower's fragrant head
    Sung to and sung to by a longing bird;
  And at the last, albeit the bird lay dead,
    No blossom wilted, for it had not heard.
 

THE SOLITARY

 
  Upon the mossed rock by the spring
    She sits, forgetful of her pail,
  Lost in remote remembering
    Of that which may no more avail.
 
 
  Her thin, pale hair is dimly dressed
    Above a brow lined deep with care,
  The color of a leaf long pressed,
    A faded leaf that once was fair.
 
 
  You may not know her from the stone
    So still she sits who does not stir,
  Thinking of this one thing alone—
    The love that never came to her.
 

A TWILIGHT MOTH

 
  Dusk is thy dawn; when Eve puts on its state
    Of gold and purple in the marbled west,
  Thou comest forth like some embodied trait,
    Or dim conceit, a lily bud confessed;
  Or of a rose the visible wish; that, white,
  Goes softly messengering through the night,
    Whom each expectant flower makes its guest.
 
 
  All day the primroses have thought of thee,
    Their golden heads close-haremed from the heat;
  All day the mystic moonflowers silkenly
    Veiled snowy faces,—that no bee might greet,
  Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed;—
  Keeping Sultana charms for thee, at last,
    Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet.
 
 
  Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day's
    Too fervid kisses; every bud that drinks
  The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays
    Nocturnes of fragrance, thy wing'd shadow links
  In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith;
  O bearer of their order's shibboleth,
    Like some pale symbol fluttering o'er these pinks.
 
 
  What dost them whisper in the balsam's ear
    That sets it blushing, or the hollyhock's,—
  A syllabled silence that no man may hear,—
    As dreamily upon its stem it rocks?
  What spell dost bear from listening plant to plant,
  Like some white witch, some ghostly ministrant,
    Some specter of some perished flower of phlox?
 
 
  O voyager of that universe which lies
    Between the four walls of this garden fair,—
  Whose constellations are the fireflies
    That wheel their instant courses everywhere,—
  Mid faery firmaments wherein one sees
  Mimic Boötes and the Pleiades,
    Thou steerest like some faery ship of air.
 
 
  Gnome-wrought of moonbeam-fluff and gossamer,
    Silent as scent, perhaps thou chariotest
  Mab or King Oberon; or, haply, her
    His queen, Titania, on some midnight quest.—
  Oh for the herb, the magic euphrasy,
  That should unmask thee to mine eyes, ah me!
    And all that world at which my soul hath guessed!
 

THE OLD FARM

 
  Dormered and verandaed, cool,
    Locust-girdled, on the hill;
  Stained with weather-wear, and dull-
    Streak'd with lichens; every sill
  Thresholding the beautiful;
 
 
  I can see it standing there,
    Brown above the woodland deep,
  Wrapped in lights of lavender,
    By the warm wind rocked asleep,
  Violet shadows everywhere.
 
 
  I remember how the Spring,
    Liberal-lapped, bewildered its
  Acred orchards, murmuring,
    Kissed to blossom; budded bits
  Where the wood-thrush came to sing.
 
 
  Barefoot Spring, at first who trod,
    Like a beggermaid, adown
  The wet woodland; where the god,
    With the bright sun for a crown
  And the firmament for rod,
 
 
  Met her; clothed her; wedded her;
    Her Cophetua: when, lo!
  All the hill, one breathing blur,
    Burst in beauty; gleam and glow
  Blent with pearl and lavender.
 
 
  Seckel, blackheart, palpitant
    Rained their bleaching strays; and white
  Snowed the damson, bent aslant;
    Rambow-tree and romanite
  Seemed beneath deep drifts to pant.
 
 
  And it stood there, brown and gray,
    In the bee-boom and the bloom,
  In the shadow and the ray,
    In the passion and perfume,
  Grave as age among the gay.
 
 
  Wild with laughter romped the clear
    Boyish voices round its walls;
  Rare wild-roses were the dear
    Girlish faces in its halls,
  Music-haunted all the year.
 
 
  Far before it meadows full
    Of green pennyroyal sank;
  Clover-dotted as with wool
    Here and there; with now a bank
  Hot of color; and the cool
 
 
  Dark-blue shadows unconfined
    Of the clouds rolled overhead:
  Clouds, from which the summer wind
    Blew with rain, and freshly shed
  Dew upon the flowerkind.
 
 
  Where through mint and gypsy-lily
    Runs the rocky brook away,
  Musical among the hilly
    Solitudes,—its flashing spray
  Sunlight-dashed or forest-stilly,—
 
 
  Buried in deep sassafras,
    Memory follows up the hill
  Still some cowbell's mellow brass,
    Where the ruined water-mill
  Looms, half-hid in cane and grass….
 
 
  Oh, the farmhouse! is it set
    On the hilltop still? 'mid musk
  Of the meads? where, violet,
    Deepens all the dreaming dusk,
  And the locust-trees hang wet.
 
 
  While the sunset, far and low,
    On its westward windows dashes
  Primrose or pomegranate glow;
    And above, in glimmering splashes,
  Lilac stars the heavens sow.
 
 
  Sleeps it still among its roses,—
    Oldtime roses? while the choir
  Of the lonesome insects dozes:
    And the white moon, drifting higher,
  O'er its mossy roof reposes—
  Sleeps it still among its roses?
 

THE WHIPPOORWILL

I

 
  Above lone woodland ways that led
  To dells the stealthy twilights tread
  The west was hot geranium red;
    And still, and still,
  Along old lanes the locusts sow
  With clustered pearls the Maytimes know,
  Deep in the crimson afterglow,
  We heard the homeward cattle low,
  And then the far-off, far-off woe
    Of "whippoorwill!" of "whippoorwill!"
 

II

 
  Beneath the idle beechen boughs
  We heard the far bells of the cows
  Come slowly jangling towards the house;
    And still, and still,
  Beyond the light that would not die
  Out of the scarlet-haunted sky;
  Beyond the evening-star's white eye
  Of glittering chalcedony,
  Drained out of dusk the plaintive cry
    Of "whippoorwill," of "whippoorwill."
 

III

 
  And in the city oft, when swims
  The pale moon o'er the smoke that dims
  Its disc, I dream of wildwood limbs;
    And still, and still,
  I seem to hear, where shadows grope
  Mid ferns and flowers that dewdrops rope,—
  Lost in faint deeps of heliotrope
  Above the clover-sweetened slope,—
  Retreat, despairing, past all hope,
    The whippoorwill, the whippoorwill.
 

REVEALMENT

 
    A sense of sadness in the golden air;
    A pensiveness, that has no part in care,
  As if the Season, by some woodland pool,
    Braiding the early blossoms in her hair,
    Seeing her loveliness reflected there,
  Had sighed to find herself so beautiful.
 
 
    A breathlessness; a feeling as of fear;
    Holy and dim, as of a mystery near,
  As if the World, about us, whispering went
    With lifted finger and hand-hollowed ear,
    Hearkening a music, that we cannot hear,
  Haunting the quickening earth and firmament.
 
 
    A prescience of the soul that has no name;
    Expectancy that is both wild and tame,
  As if the Earth, from out its azure ring
    Of heavens, looked to see, as white as flame,—
    As Perseus once to chained Andromeda came,—
  The swift, divine revealment of the Spring.
 

HEPATICAS

 
  In the frail hepaticas,—
    That the early Springtide tossed,
  Sapphire-like, along the ways
    Of the woodlands that she crossed,—
  I behold, with other eyes,
    Footprints of a dream that flies.
 
 
  One who leads me; whom I seek:
    In whose loveliness there is
  All the glamour that the Greek
    Knew as wind-borne Artemis.—
  I am mortal. Woe is me!
    Her sweet immortality!
 
 
  Spirit, must I always fare,
    Following thy averted looks?
  Now thy white arm, now thy hair,
    Glimpsed among the trees and brooks?
  Thou who hauntest, whispering,
    All the slopes and vales of Spring.
 
 
  Cease to lure! or grant to me
    All thy beauty! though it pain,
  Slay with splendor utterly!
    Flash revealment on my brain!
  And one moment let me see
    All thy immortality!
 

THE WIND OF SPRING

 
  The wind that breathes of columbines
  And celandines that crowd the rocks;
  That shakes the balsam of the pines
  With laughter 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 ferns where wades the hern;
  And, sparkling in the equal sun,
  Song leans above her brimming urn,
  And dreams the dreams that love shall learn.
 
 
  The wind has summoned, and I go:
  To read God's meaning in each line
  The wildflowers write; and, walking slow,
  God's purpose, of which song is sign,—
  The wind's great, gusty hand in mine.
 

THE CATBIRD

I

 
  The tufted gold of the sassafras,
    And the gold of the spicewood-bush,
  Bewilder the ways of the forest pass,
    And brighten the underbrush:
  The white-starred drifts of the wild-plum tree,
    And the haw with its pearly plumes,
  And the redbud, misted rosily,
    Dazzle the woodland glooms.
 

II

 
  And I hear the song of the catbird wake
    I' the boughs o' the gnarled wild-crab,
  Or there where the snows of the dogwood shake,
    That the silvery sunbeams stab:
  And it seems to me that a magic lies
    In the crystal sweet of its notes,
  That a myriad blossoms open their eyes
    As its strain above them floats.
 

III

 
  I see the bluebell's blue unclose,
    And the trillium's stainless white;
  The birdfoot-violet's purple and rose,
    And the poppy, golden-bright!
  And I see the eyes of the bluet wink,
    And the heads of the white-hearts nod;
  And the baby mouths of the woodland-pink
    And sorrel salute the sod.
 

IV

 
  And this, meseems, does the catbird say,
    As the blossoms crowd i' the sun:—
  "Up, up! and out! oh, out and away!
    Up, up! and out, each one!
  Sweethearts! sweethearts! oh, sweet, sweet, sweet!
    Come listen and hark to me!
  The Spring, the Spring, with her fragrant feet,
    Is passing this way!—Oh, hark to the beat
  Of her beelike heart!—Oh, sweet, sweet, sweet!
    Come! open your eyes and see!
      See, see, see!"
 

A WOODLAND GRAVE

 
  White moons may come, white moons may go—
  She sleeps where early blossoms blow;
  Knows nothing of the leafy June,
  That leans above her night and noon,
  Crowned now with sunbeam, now with moon,
    Watching her roses grow.
 
 
  The downy moth at twilight comes
  And flutters round their honeyed blooms:
  Long, lazy clouds, like ivory,
  That isle the blue lagoons of sky,
  Redden to molten gold and dye
    With flame the pine-deep glooms.
 
 
  Dew, dripping from wet fern and leaf;
  The wind, that shakes the violet's sheaf;
  The slender sound of water lone,
  That makes a harp-string of some stone,
  And now a wood bird's glimmering moan,
    Seem whisperings there of grief.
 
 
  Her garden, where the lilacs grew,
  Where, on old walls, old roses blew,
  Head-heavy with their mellow musk,
  Where, when the beetle's drone was husk,
  She lingered in the dying dusk,
    No more shall know that knew.
 
 
  Her orchard,—where the Spring and she
  Stood listening to each bird and bee,—
  That, from its fragrant firmament,
  Snowed blossoms on her as she went,
  (A blossom with their blossoms blent)
    No more her face shall see.
 
 
  White moons may come, white moons may go—
  She sleeps where early blossoms blow:
  Around her headstone many a seed
  Shall sow itself; and brier and weed
  Shall grow to hide it from men's heed,
    And none will care or know.
 

SUNSET DREAMS

 
  The moth and beetle wing about
    The garden ways of other days;
  Above the hills, a fiery shout
  Of gold, the day dies slowly out,
    Like some wild blast a huntsman blows:
    And o'er the hills my Fancy goes,
  Following the sunset's golden call
  Unto a vine-hung garden wall,
  Where she awaits me in the gloom,
    Between the lily and the rose,
  With arms and lips of warm perfume,
    The dream of Love my Fancy knows.
 
 
  The glowworm and the firefly glow
    Among the ways of bygone days;
  A golden shaft shot from a bow
  Of silver, star and moon swing low
    Above the hills where twilight lies:
    And o'er the hills my Longing flies,
  Following the star's far-arrowed gold,
  Unto a gate where, as of old,
  She waits amid the rose and rue,
    With star-bright hair and night-dark eyes,
  The dream, to whom my heart is true,
    My dream of Love that never dies.
 

THE OLD BYWAY

 
  Its rotting fence one scarcely sees
  Through sumac and wild blackberries,
    Thick elder and the bramble-rose,
  Big ox-eyed daisies where the bees
    Hang droning in repose.
 
 
  The little lizards lie all day
  Gray on its rocks of lichen-gray;
    And, insect-Ariels of the sun,
  The butterflies make bright its way,
    Its path where chipmunks run.
 
 
  A lyric there the redbird lifts,
  While, twittering, the swallow drifts
    'Neath wandering clouds of sleepy cream,—
  In which the wind makes azure rifts,—
    O'er dells where wood-doves dream.
 
 
  The brown grasshoppers rasp and bound
  Mid weeds and briers that hedge it round;
    And in its grass-grown ruts,—where stirs
  The harmless snake,—mole-crickets sound
    Their faery dulcimers.
 
 
  At evening, when the sad west turns
  To lonely night a cheek that burns,
    The tree-toads in the wild-plum sing;
  And ghosts of long-dead flowers and ferns
    The winds wake, whispering.
 

"BELOW THE SUNSET'S RANGE OF ROSE"

 
  Below the sunset's range of rose,
  Below the heaven's deepening blue,
  Down woodways where the balsam blows,
  And milkweed tufts hang, gray with dew,
  A Jersey heifer stops and lows—
  The cows come home by one, by two.
 
 
  There is no star yet: but the smell
  Of hay and pennyroyal mix
  With herb aromas of the dell,
  Where the root-hidden cricket clicks:
  Among the ironweeds a bell
  Clangs near the rail-fenced clover-ricks.
 
 
  She waits upon the slope beside
  The windlassed well the plum trees shade,
  The well curb that the goose-plums hide;
  Her light hand on the bucket laid,
  Unbonneted she waits, glad-eyed,
  Her gown as simple as her braid.
 
 
  She sees fawn-colored backs among
  The sumacs now; a tossing horn
  Its clashing bell of copper rung:
  Long shadows lean upon the corn,
  And slow the day dies, scarlet stung,
  The cloud in it a rosy thorn.
 
 
  Below the pleasant moon, that tips
  The tree tops of the hillside, fly
  The flitting bats; the twilight slips,
  In firefly spangles, twinkling by,
  Through which he comes: Their happy lips
  Meet—and one star leaps in the sky.
 
 
  He takes her bucket, and they speak
  Of married hopes while in the grass
  The plum drops glowing as her cheek;
  The patient cows look back or pass:
  And in the west one golden streak
  Burns as if God gazed through a glass.
 

MUSIC OF SUMMER

I

 
  Thou sit'st among the sunny silences
  Of terraced hills and woodland galleries,
  Thou utterance of all calm melodies,
  Thou lutanist of Earth's most affluent lute,—
    Where no false note intrudes
  To mar the silent music,—branch and root,—
  Charming the fields ripe, orchards and deep woods,
    To song similitudes
    Of flower and seed and fruit.
 

II

 
  Oft have I seen thee, in some sensuous air,
  Bewitch the broad wheat-acres everywhere
  To imitated gold of thy deep hair:
  The peach, by thy red lips' delicious trouble,
    Blown into gradual dyes
  Of crimson; and beheld thy magic double—
  Dark-blue with fervid influence of thine eyes—
    The grapes' rotundities,
    Bubble by purple bubble.
 

III

 
  Deliberate uttered into life intense,
  Out of thy soul's melodious eloquence
  Beauty evolves its just preëminence:
  The lily, from some pensive-smitten chord
    Drawing significance
  Of purity, a visible hush stands: starred
  With splendor, from thy passionate utterance,
    The rose writes its romance
    In blushing word on word.
 

IV

 
  As star by star Day harps in Evening,
  The inspiration of all things that sing
  Is in thy hands and from their touch takes wing:
  All brooks, all birds,—whom song can never sate,—
    The leaves, the wind and rain,
  Green frogs and insects, singing soon and late,
  Thy sympathies inspire, thy heart's refrain,
    Whose sounds invigorate
    With rest life's weary brain.
 

V

 
  And as the Night, like some mysterious rune,
  Its beauty makes emphatic with the moon,
  Thou lutest us no immaterial tune:
  But where dim whispers haunt the cane and corn,
    By thy still strain made strong,
  Earth's awful avatar,—in whom is born
  Thy own deep music,—labors all night long
    With growth, assuring Morn
    Assumes with onward song.
 

MIDSUMMER

I

 
  The mellow smell of hollyhocks
  And marigolds and pinks and phlox
  Blends with the homely garden scents
  Of onions, silvering into rods;
  Of peppers, scarlet with their pods;
  And (rose of all the esculents)
  Of broad plebeian cabbages,
  Breathing content and corpulent ease.
 

II

 
  The buzz of wasp and fly makes hot
  The spaces of the garden-plot;
  And from the orchard,—where the fruit
  Ripens and rounds, or, loosed with heat,
  Rolls, hornet-clung, before the feet,—
  One hears the veery's golden flute,
  That mixes with the sleepy hum
  Of bees that drowsily go and come.
 

III

 
  The podded musk of gourd and vine
  Embower a gate of roughest pine,
  That leads into a wood where day
  Sits, leaning o'er a forest pool,
  Watching the lilies opening cool,
  And dragonflies at airy play,
  While, dim and near, the quietness
  Rustles and stirs her leafy dress.
 

IV

 
  Far-off a cowbell clangs awake
  The noon who slumbers in the brake:
  And now a pewee, plaintively,
  Whistles the day to sleep again:
  A rain-crow croaks a rune for rain,
  And from the ripest apple tree
  A great gold apple thuds, where, slow,
  The red cock curves his neck to crow.
 

V

 
  Hens cluck their broods from place to place,
  While clinking home, with chain and trace,
  The cart-horse plods along the road
  Where afternoon sits with his dreams:
  Hot fragrance of hay-making streams
  Above him, and a high-heaped load
  Goes creaking by and with it, sweet,
  The aromatic soul of heat.
 

VI

 
  "Coo-ee! coo-ee!" the evenfall
  Cries, and the hills repeat the call:
  "Coo-ee! coo-ee!" and by the log
  Labor unharnesses his plow,
  While to the barn comes cow on cow:
  "Coo-ee! coo-ee!"—and, with his dog,
  Barefooted boyhood down the lane
  "Coo-ees" the cattle home again.
 

THE RAIN-CROW

I

 
  Can freckled August,—drowsing warm and blond
    Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead,
  In her hot hair the yellow daisies wound,—
    O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed
    To thee? when no plumed weed, no feathered seed
  Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond,
    That gleams like flint within its rim of grasses,
    Through which the dragonfly forever passes
      Like splintered diamond.
 

II

 
  Drouth weights the trees; and from the farmhouse eaves
    The locust, pulse-beat of the summer day,
  Throbs; and the lane, that shambles under leaves
    Limp with the heat—a league of rutty way—
    Is lost in dust; and sultry scents of hay
  Breathe from the panting meadows heaped with sheaves—
    Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of rain,
    In thirsty meadow or on burning plain,
      That thy keen eye perceives?
 

III

 
  But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true.
    For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecasting,
  When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue,
    Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring
    Brimming with freshness. How their dippers ring
  And flash and rumble! lavishing large dew
    On corn and forest land, that, streaming wet,
    Their hilly backs against the downpour set,
      Like giants, loom in view.
 

IV

 
  The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower,
    Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art;
  The bumblebee, within the last half-hour,
    Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart;
    While in the barnyard, under shed and cart,
  Brood-hens have housed.—But I, who scorned thy power,
    Barometer of birds,—like August there,—
    Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair,
      Like some drenched truant, cower.