Kitabı oku: «Poems», sayfa 6

A ROAD SONG

 
  It's—Oh, for the hills, where the wind's some one
  With a vagabond foot that follows!
  And a cheer-up hand that he claps upon
  Your arm with the hearty words, "Come on!
  We'll soon be out of the hollows,
    My heart!
  We'll soon be out of the hollows."
 
 
  It's—Oh, for the songs, where the hope's some one
  With a renegade foot that doubles!
  And a jolly lilt that he flings to the sun
  As he turns with the friendly laugh, "Come on!
  We'll soon be out of the troubles,
    My heart!
  We'll soon be out of the troubles!"
 

PHANTOMS

 
  This was her home; one mossy gable thrust
    Above the cedars and the locust trees:
  This was her home, whose beauty now is dust,
    A lonely memory for melodies
    The wild birds sing, the wild birds and the bees.
 
 
  Here every evening is a prayer: no boast
    Or ruin of sunset makes the wan world wroth;
  Here, through the twilight, like a pale flower's ghost,
    A drowsy flutter, flies the tiger-moth;
    And dusk spreads darkness like a dewy cloth.
 
 
  In vagabond velvet, on the placid day,
    A stain of crimson, lolls the butterfly;
  The south wind sows with ripple and with ray
    The pleasant waters; and the gentle sky
    Looks on the homestead like a quiet eye.
 
 
  Their melancholy quaver, lone and low,
    When day is done, the gray tree-toads repeat:
  The whippoorwills, far in the afterglow,
    Complain to silence: and the lightnings beat,
    In one still cloud, glimmers of golden heat.
 
 
  He comes not yet: not till the dusk is dead,
    And all the western glow is far withdrawn;
  Not till,—a sleepy mouth love's kiss makes red,—
    The baby bud opes in a rosy yawn,
    Breathing sweet guesses at the dreamed-of dawn.
 
 
  When in the shadows, like a rain of gold,
    The fireflies stream steadily; and bright
  Along the moss the glowworm, as of old,
    A crawling sparkle—like a crooked light
    In smoldering vellum—scrawls a square of night,—
 
 
  Then will he come; and she will lean to him,—
    She,—the sweet phantom,—memory of that place,—
  Between the starlight and his eyes; so dim
    With suave control and soul-compelling grace,
    He cannot help but speak her, face to face.
 

INTIMATIONS OF THE BEAUTIFUL

I

 
  The hills are full of prophecies
  And ancient voices of the dead;
  Of hidden shapes that no man sees,
  Pale, visionary presences,
  That speak the things no tongue hath said,
  No mind hath thought, no eye hath read.
 
 
  The streams are full of oracles,
  And momentary whisperings;
  An immaterial beauty swells
  Its breezy silver o'er the shells
  With wordless speech that sings and sings
  The message of diviner things.
 
 
  No indeterminable thought is theirs,
  The stars', the sunsets' and the flowers';
  Whose inexpressible speech declares
  Th' immortal Beautiful, who shares
  This mortal riddle which is ours,
  Beyond the forward-flying hours.
 

II

 
  It holds and beckons in the streams;
  It lures and touches us in all
  The flowers of the golden fall—
  The mystic essence of our dreams:
  A nymph blows bubbling music where
  Faint water ripples down the rocks;
  A faun goes dancing hoiden locks,
  And piping a Pandean air,
  Through trees the instant wind shakes bare.
 
 
  Our dreams are never otherwise
  Than real when they hold us so;
  We in some future life shall know
  Them parts of it and recognize
  Them as ideal substance, whence
  The actual is—(as flowers and trees,
  From color sources no one sees,
  Draw dyes, the substance of a sense)—
  Material with intelligence.
 

III

 
  What intimations made them wise,
  The mournful pine, the pleasant beech?
  What strange and esoteric speech?—
  (Communicated from the skies
  In runic whispers)—that invokes
  The boles that sleep within the seeds,
  And out of narrow darkness leads
  The vast assemblies of the oaks.
 
 
  Within his knowledge, what one reads
  The poems written by the flowers?
  The sermons, past all speech of ours,
  Preached by the gospel of the weeds?—
  O eloquence of coloring!
  O thoughts of syllabled perfume!
  O beauty uttered into bloom!
  Teach me your language! let me sing!
 

IV

 
  Along my mind flies suddenly
  A wildwood thought that will not die;
  That makes me brother to the bee,
  And cousin to the butterfly:
  A thought, such as gives perfume to
  The blushes of the bramble-rose,
  And, fixed in quivering crystal, glows
  A captive in the prismed dew.
 
 
  It leads the feet no certain way;
  No frequent path of human feet:
  Its wild eyes follow me all day;
  All day I hear its wild heart beat:
  And in the night it sings and sighs
  The songs the winds and waters love;
  Its wild heart lying tranced above,
  And tranced the wildness of its eyes.
 

V

 
  Oh, joy, to walk the way that goes
  Through woods of sweet-gum and of beech!
  Where, like a ruby left in reach,
  The berry of the dogwood glows:
  Or where the bristling hillsides mass,
  'Twixt belts of tawny sassafras,
  Brown shocks of corn in wigwam rows!
 
 
  Where, in the hazy morning, runs
  The stony branch that pools and drips,
  The red-haws and the wild-rose hips
  Are strewn like pebbles; and the sun's
  Own gold seems captured by the weeds;
  To see, through scintillating seeds,
  The hunters steal with glimmering guns!
 
 
  Oh, joy, to go the path which lies
  Through woodlands where the trees are tall!
  Beneath the misty moon of fall,
  Whose ghostly girdle prophesies
  A morn wind-swept and gray with rain;
  When, o'er the lonely, leaf-blown lane,
  The night-hawk like a dead leaf flies!
 
 
  To stand within the dewy ring
  Where pale death smites the boneset blooms,
  And everlasting's flowers, and plumes
  Of mint, with aromatic wing!
  And hear the creek,—whose sobbing seems
  A wild-man murmuring in his dreams,—
  And insect violins that sing.
 
 
  Or where the dim persimmon tree
  Rains on the path its frosty fruit,
  And in the oak the owl doth hoot,
  Beneath the moon and mist, to see
  The outcast Year go,—Hagar-wise,—
  With far-off, melancholy eyes,
  And lips that sigh for sympathy.
 

VI

 
  Towards evening, where the sweet-gum flung
  Its thorny balls among the weeds,
  And where the milkweed's sleepy seeds,—
  A faery Feast of Lanterns,—swung;
  The cricket tuned a plaintive lyre,
  And o'er the hills the sunset hung
  A purple parchment scrawled with fire.
 
 
  From silver-blue to amethyst
  The shadows deepened in the vale;
  And belt by belt the pearly-pale
  Aladdin fabric of the mist
  Built up its exhalation far;
  A jewel on an Afrit's wrist,
  One star gemmed sunset's cinnabar.
 
 
  Then night drew near, as when, alone,
  The heart and soul grow intimate;
  And on the hills the twilight sate
  With shadows, whose wild robes were sown
  With dreams and whispers;—dreams, that led
  The heart once with love's monotone,
  And memories of the living-dead.
 

VII

 
  All night the rain-gusts shook the leaves
  Around my window; and the blast
  Rumbled the flickering flue, and fast
  The storm streamed from the dripping eaves.
  As if—'neath skies gone mad with fear—
  The witches' Sabboth galloped past,
  The forests leapt like startled deer.
 
 
  All night I heard the sweeping sleet;
  And when the morning came, as slow
  As wan affliction, with the woe
  Of all the world dragged at her feet,
  No spear of purple shattered through
  The dark gray of the east; no bow
  Of gold shot arrows swift and blue.
 
 
  But rain, that whipped the windows; filled
  The spouts with rushings; and around
  The garden stamped, and sowed the ground
  With limbs and leaves; the wood-pool filled
  With overgurgling.—Bleak and cold
  The fields looked, where the footpath wound
  Through teasel and bur-marigold.
 
 
  Yet there's a kindness in such days
  Of gloom, that doth console regret
  With sympathy of tears, which wet
  Old eyes that watch the back-log blaze.—
  A kindness, alien to the deep
  Glad blue of sunny days that let
  No thought in of the lives that weep.
 

VIII

 
  This dawn, through which the Autumn glowers,—
  As might a face within our sleep,
  With stone-gray eyes that weep and weep,
  And wet brows bound with sodden flowers,—
  Is sunset to some sister land;
  A land of ruins and of palms;
  Rich sunset, crimson with long calms,—
  Whose burning belt low mountains bar,—
  That sees some brown Rebecca stand
  Beside a well the camel-band
  Winds down to 'neath the evening star.
 
 
  O sunset, sister to this dawn!
  O dawn, whose face is turned away!
  Who gazest not upon this day,
  But back upon the day that's gone!
  Enamored so of loveliness,
  The retrospect of what thou wast,
  Oh, to thyself the present trust!
  And as thy past be beautiful
  With hues, that never can grow less!
  Waiting thy pleasure to express
  New beauty lest the world grow dull.
 

IX

 
  Down in the woods a sorcerer,
  Out of rank rain and death, distills,—
  Through chill alembics of the air,—
  Aromas that brood everywhere
  Among the whisper-haunted hills:
  The bitter myrrh of dead leaves fills
  Wet valleys (where the gaunt weeds bleach)
  With rainy scents of wood-decay;—
  As if a spirit all the day
  Sat breathing softly 'neath the beech.
 
 
  With other eyes I see her flit,
  The wood-witch of the wild perfumes,
  Among her elfin owls,—that sit,
  A drowsy white, in crescent-lit
  Dim glens of opalescent glooms:—
  Where, for her magic, buds and blooms
  Mysterious perfumes, while she stands,
  A thornlike shadow, summoning
  The sleepy odors, that take wing
  Like bubbles from her dewy hands.
 

X

 
  Among the woods they call to me—
  The lights that haunt the wood and stream;
  Voices of such white ecstasy
  As moves with hushed lips through a dream:
  They stand in auraed radiances,
  Or flash with nimbused limbs across
  Their golden shadows on the moss,
  Or slip in silver through the trees.
 
 
  What love can give the heart in me
  More hope and exaltation than
  The hand of light that tips the tree
  And beckons far from marts of man?
  That reaches foamy fingers through
  The broken ripple, and replies
  With sparkling speech of lips and eyes
  To souls who seek and still pursue.
 

XI

 
  Give me the streams, that counterfeit
  The twilight of autumnal skies;
  The shadowy, silent waters, lit
  With fire like a woman's eyes!
  Slow waters that, in autumn, glass
  The scarlet-strewn and golden grass,
  And drink the sunset's tawny dyes.
 
 
  Give me the pools, that lie among
  The centuried forests! give me those,
  Deep, dim, and sad as darkness hung
  Beneath the sunset's somber rose:
  Still pools, in whose vague mirrors look—
  Like ragged gypsies round a book
  Of magic—trees in wild repose.
 
 
  No quiet thing, or innocent,
  Of water, earth, or air shall please
  My soul now: but the violent
  Between the sunset and the trees:
  The fierce, the splendid, and intense,
  That love matures in innocence,
  Like mighty music, give me these!
 

XII

 
  When thorn-tree copses still were bare
  And black along the turbid brook;
  When catkined willows blurred and shook
  Great tawny tangles in the air;
  In bottomlands, the first thaw makes
  An oozy bog, beneath the trees,
  Prophetic of the spring that wakes,
  Sang the sonorous hylodes.
 
 
  Now that wild winds have stripped the thorn,
  And clogged with leaves the forest-creek;
  Now that the woods look blown and bleak,
  And webs are frosty white at morn;
  At night beneath the spectral sky,
  A far foreboding cry I hear—
  The wild fowl calling as they fly?
  Or wild voice of the dying Year?
 

XIII

 
  And still my soul holds phantom tryst,
  When chestnuts hiss among the coals,
  Upon the Evening of All Souls,
  When all the night is moon and mist,
  And all the world is mystery;
  I kiss dear lips that death hath kissed,
  And gaze in eyes no man may see,
  Filled with a love long lost to me.
 
 
  I hear the night-wind's ghostly glove
  Flutter the window: then the knob
  Of some dark door turn, with a sob
  As when love comes to gaze on love
  Who lies pale-coffined in a room:
  And then the iron gallop of
  The storm, who rides outside; his plume
  Sweeping the night with dread and gloom.
 
 
  So fancy takes the mind, and paints
  The darkness with eidolon light,
  And writes the dead's romance in night
  On the dim Evening of All Saints:
  Unheard the hissing nuts; the clink
  And fall of coals, whose shadow faints
  Around the hearts that sit and think,
  Borne far beyond the actual's brink.
 

XIV

 
  I heard the wind, before the morn
  Stretched gaunt, gray fingers 'thwart my pane,
  Drive clouds down, a dark dragon-train;
  Its iron visor closed, a horn
  Of steel from out the north it wound.—
  No morn like yesterday's! whose mouth,
  A cool carnation, from the south
  Breathed through a golden reed the sound
  Of days that drop clear gold upon
  Cerulean silver floors of dawn.
 
 
  And all of yesterday is lost
  And swallowed in to-day's wild light—
  The birth deformed of day and night,
  The illegitimate, who cost
  Its mother secret tears and sighs;
  Unlovely since unloved; and chilled
  With sorrows and the shame that filled
  Its parents' love; which was not wise
  In passion as the day and night
  That married yestermorn with light.
 

XV

 
  Down through the dark, indignant trees,
  On indistinguishable wings
  Of storm, the wind of evening swings;
  Before its insane anger flees
  Distracted leaf and shattered bough:
  There is a rushing as when seas
  Of thunder beat an iron prow
  On reefs of wrath and roaring wreck:
  'Mid stormy leaves, a hurrying speck
  Of flickering blackness, driven by,
  A mad bat whirls along the sky.
 
 
  Like some sad shadow, in the eve's
  Deep melancholy—visible
  As by some strange and twilight spell—
  A gaunt girl stands among the leaves,
  The night-wind in her dolorous dress:
  Symbolic of the life that grieves,
  Of toil that patience makes not less,
  Her load of fagots fallen there.—
  A wilder shadow sweeps the air,
  And she is gone…. Was it the dumb
  Eidolon of the month to come?
 

XVI

 
  The song birds—are they flown away?
  The song birds of the summer time,
  That sang their souls into the day,
  And set the laughing hours to rhyme.
  No catbird scatters through the bush
  The sparkling crystals of its song;
  Within the woods no hermit-thrush
  Thridding with vocal gold the hush.
 
 
  All day the crows fly cawing past:
  The acorns drop: the forests scowl:
  At night I hear the bitter blast
  Hoot with the hooting of the owl.
  The wild creeks freeze: the ways are strewn
  With leaves that clog: beneath the tree
  The bird, that set its toil to tune,
  And made a home for melody,
  Lies dead beneath the snow-white moon.
 

OCTOBER

 
  Far off a wind blew, and I heard
    Wild echoes of the woods reply—
  The herald of some royal word,
    With bannered trumpet, blown on high,
      Meseemed then passed me by:
 
 
  Who summoned marvels there to meet,
    With pomp, upon a cloth of gold;
  Where berries of the bittersweet,
    That, splitting, showed the coals they hold,
      Sowed garnets through the wold:
 
 
  Where, under tents of maples, seeds
    Of smooth carnelian, oval red,
  The spice-bush spangled: where, like beads,
    The dogwood's rounded rubies—fed
      With fire—blazed and bled.
 
 
  And there I saw amid the rout
    Of months, in richness cavalier,
  A minnesinger—lips apout;
    A gypsy face; straight as a spear;
      A rose stuck in his ear:
 
 
  Eyes, sparkling like old German wine,
    All mirth and moonlight; naught to spare
  Of slender beard, that lent a line
    To his short lip; October there,
      With chestnut curling hair.
 
 
  His brown baretta swept its plume
    Red through the leaves; his purple hose,
  Puffed at the thighs, made gleam of gloom;
    His tawny doublet, slashed with rose,
      And laced with crimson bows,
 
 
  Outshone the wahoo's scarlet pride,
    The haw, in rich vermilion dressed:
  A dagger dangling at his side,
    A slim lute, banded to his breast,
      Whereon his hands were pressed.
 
 
  I saw him come…. And, lo, to hear
    The lilt of his approaching lute,
  No wonder that the regnant Year
    Bent down her beauty, blushing mute,
      Her heart beneath his foot.
 

FRIENDS

 
  Down through the woods, along the way
  That fords the stream; by rock and tree,
  Where in the bramble-bell the bee
  Swings; and through twilights green and gray
  The redbird flashes suddenly,
  My thoughts went wandering to-day.
 
 
  I found the fields where, row on row,
  The blackberries hang dark with fruit;
  Where, nesting at the elder's root,
  The partridge whistles soft and low;
  The fields, that billow to the foot
  Of those old hills we used to know.
 
 
  There lay the pond, all willow-bound,
  On whose bright face, when noons were hot,
  We marked the bubbles rise; some plot
  To lure us in; while all around
  Our heads,—like faery fancies,—shot
  The dragonflies without a sound.
 
 
  The pond, above which evening bent
  To gaze upon her gypsy face;
  Wherein the twinkling night would trace
  A vague, inverted firmament;
  In which the green frogs tuned their bass,
  And firefly sparkles came and went.
 
 
  The oldtime place we often ranged,
  When we were playmates, you and I;
  The oldtime fields, with boyhood's sky
  Still blue above them!—Naught was changed:
  Nothing.—Alas! then, tell me why
  Should we be? whom the years estranged.
 

COMRADERY

 
  With eyes hand-arched he looks into
  The morning's face; then turns away
  With truant feet, all wet with dew,
  Out for a holiday.
 
 
  The hill brook sings; incessant stars,
  Foam-fashioned, on its restless breast;
  And where he wades its water-bars
  Its song is happiest.
 
 
  A comrade of the chinquapin,
  He looks into its knotty eyes
  And sees its heart; and, deep within,
  Its soul that makes him wise.
 
 
  The wood-thrush knows and follows him,
  Who whistles up the birds and bees;
  And round him all the perfumes swim
  Of woodland loam and trees.
 
 
  Where'er he pass the silvery springs'
  Foam-people sing the flowers awake;
  And sappy lips of bark-clad things
  Laugh ripe each berried brake.
 
 
  His touch is a companionship;
  His word an old authority:
  He comes, a lyric on his lip,
  The woodboy—Poesy.
 

BARE BOUGHS

 
  O heart,—that beat the bird's blithe blood,
  The blithe bird's strain, and understood
  The song it sang to leaf and bud,—
  What dost thou in the wood?
 
 
  O soul,—that kept the brook's glad flow,
  The glad brook's word to sun and moon,—
  What dost thou here where song lies low,
  And dead the dreams of June?
 
 
  Where once was heard a voice of song,
  The hautboys of the mad winds sing;
  Where once a music flowed along,
  The rain's wild bugle's ring.
 
 
  The weedy water frets and ails,
  And moans in many a sunless fall;
  And, o'er the melancholy, trails
  The black crow's eldritch call.
 
 
  Unhappy brook! O withered wood!
  O days, whom Death makes comrades of!
  Where are the birds that thrilled the blood
  When Life struck hands with Love?
 
 
  A song, one soared against the blue;
  A song, one silvered in the leaves;
  A song, one blew where orchards grew
  Gold-appled to the eaves.
 
 
  The birds are flown; the flowers, dead;
  And sky and earth are bleak and gray:
  Where Joy once went, all light of tread,
  Grief haunts the leaf-wild way.
 

DAYS AND DAYS

 
  The days that clothed white limbs with heat,
    And rocked the red rose on their breast,
  Have passed with amber-sandaled feet
    Into the ruby-gated west.
 
 
  These were the days that filled the heart
    With overflowing riches of
  Life, in whose soul no dream shall start
    But hath its origin in love.
 
 
  Now come the days gray-huddled in
    The haze; whose foggy footsteps drip;
  Who pin beneath a gypsy chin
    The frosty marigold and hip.
 
 
  The days, whose forms fall shadowy
    Athwart the heart: whose misty breath
  Shapes saddest sweets of memory
    Out of the bitterness of death.
 

AUTUMN SORROW

 
  Ah me! too soon the autumn comes
  Among these purple-plaintive hills!
  Too soon among the forest gums
  Premonitory flame she spills,
  Bleak, melancholy flame that kills.
 
 
  Her white fogs veil the morn, that rims
  With wet the moonflower's elfin moons;
  And, like exhausted starlight, dims
  The last slim lily-disk; and swoons
  With scents of hazy afternoons.
 
 
  Her gray mists haunt the sunset skies,
  And build the west's cadaverous fires,
  Where Sorrow sits with lonely eyes,
  And hands that wake an ancient lyre,
  Beside the ghost of dead Desire.
 

THE TREE-TOAD

I

 
  Secluded, solitary on some underbough,
    Or cradled in a leaf, 'mid glimmering light,
  Like Puck thou crouchest: Haply watching how
    The slow toadstool comes bulging, moony white,
    Through loosening loam; or how, against the night,
  The glowworm gathers silver to endow
    The darkness with; or how the dew conspires
    To hang, at dusk, with lamps of chilly fires
      Each blade that shrivels now.
 

II

 
  O vague confederate of the whippoorwill,
    Of owl and cricket and the katydid!
  Thou gatherest up the silence in one shrill
    Vibrating note and send'st it where, half hid
    In cedars, twilight sleeps—each azure lid
  Drooping a line of golden eyeball still.—
    Afar, yet near, I hear thy dewy voice
    Within the Garden of the Hours apoise
      On dusk's deep daffodil.
 

III

 
  Minstrel of moisture! silent when high noon
    Shows her tanned face among the thirsting clover
  And parching meadows, thy tenebrious tune
    Wakes with the dew or when the rain is over.
    Thou troubadour of wetness and damp lover
  Of all cool things! admitted comrade boon
    Of twilight's hush, and little intimate
    Of eve's first fluttering star and delicate
      Round rim of rainy moon!
 

IV

 
  Art trumpeter of Dwarfland? does thy horn
    Inform the gnomes and goblins of the hour
  When they may gambol under haw and thorn,
    Straddling each winking web and twinkling flower?
    Or bell-ringer of Elfland? whose tall tower
  The liriodendron is? from whence is borne
    The elfin music of thy bell's deep bass,
    To summon Faeries to their starlit maze,
      To summon them or warn.