Among the Millet and Other Poems | Page 5

robin hops, and whistles, and among?The silver-tasseled poplars the brown bees?Murmur faint dreams of summer harvestries;?The creamy sun at even scatters down?A gold-green mist across the murmuring town.
By the slow streams the frogs all day and night?Dream without thought of pain or heed of ill,?Watching the long warm silent hours take flight,?And ever with soft throats that pulse and thrill,?From the pale-weeded shallows trill and trill,?Tremulous sweet voices, flute-like, answering?One to another glorying in the spring.
All day across the ever-cloven soil,?Strong horses labour, steaming in the sun,?Down the long furrows with slow straining toil,?Turning the brown clean layers; and one by one?The crows gloom over them till daylight done?Finds them asleep somewhere in duskèd lines?Beyond the wheatlands in the northern pines.
The old year's cloaking of brown leaves that bind?The forest floor-ways, plated close and true--?The last love's labour of the autumn wind--?Is broken with curled flower buds white and blue?In all the matted hollows, and speared through?With thousand serpent-spotted blades up-sprung,?Yet bloomless, of the slender adder-tongue.
In the warm noon the south wind creeps and cools,?Where the red-budded stems of maples throw?Still tangled etchings on the amber pools,?Quite silent now, forgetful of the slow?Drip of the taps, the troughs, and trampled snow,?The keen March mornings, and the silvering rime?And mirthful labour of the sugar prime.
Ah, I have wandered with unwearied feet,?All the long sweetness of an April day,?Lulled with cool murmurs and the drowsy beat?Of partridge wings in secret thickets grey,?The marriage hymns of all the birds at play,?The faces of sweet flowers, and easeful dreams?Beside slow reaches of frog-haunted streams;
Wandered with happy feet, and quite forgot?The shallow toil, the strife against the grain,?Near souls, that hear us call, but answer not,?The loneliness, perplexity and pain,?And high thoughts cankered with an earthly stain?And then the long draught emptied to the lees,?I turn me homeward in slow pacing ease,
Cleaving the cedar shadows and the thin?Mist of grey gnats that cloud the river shore,?Sweet even choruses, that dance and spin?Soft tangles in the sunset; and once more?The city smites me with its dissonant roar.?To its hot heart I pass, untroubled yet,?Fed with calm hope, without desire or fret.
So to the year's first altar step I bring?Gifts of meek song, and make my spirit free?With the blind working of unanxious spring,?Careless with her, whether the days that flee?Pale drouth or golden-fruited plenty see,?So that we toil, brothers, without distress,?In calm-eyed peace and godlike blamelessness.
AN OCTOBER SUNSET.
One moment the slim cloudflakes seem to lean?With their sad sunward faces aureoled,?And longing lips set downward brightening?To take the last sweet hand kiss of the king,?Gone down beyond the closing west acold;?Paying no reverence to the slender queen,?That like a curvèd olive leaf of gold?Hangs low in heaven, rounded toward sun,?Or the small stars that one by one unfold?Down the gray border of the night begun.
THE FROGS.
I.
Breathers of wisdom won without a quest,?Quaint uncouth dreamers, voices high and strange,?Flutists of lands where beauty hath no change,?And wintery grief is a forgotten guest,?Sweet murmurers of everlasting rest,?For whom glad days have ever yet to run,?And moments are as ?ons, and the sun?But ever sunken half-way toward the west.
Often to me who heard you in your day,?With close wrapt ears, it could not choose but seem?That earth, our mother, searching in what way,?Men's hearts might know her spirit's inmost dream,?Ever at rest beneath life's change and stir,?Made you her soul, and bade you pipe for her.
II.
In those mute days when spring was in her glee,?And hope was strong, we knew not why or how,?And earth, the mother, dreamed with brooding brow.?Musing on life, and what the hours might be,?When love should ripen to maternity,?Then like high flutes in silvery interchange?Ye piped with voices still and sweet and strange,?And ever as ye piped, on every tree
The great buds swelled; among the pensive woods?The spirits of first flowers awoke and flung?From buried faces the close fitting hoods,?And listened to your piping till they fell,?The frail spring-beauty with her perfumed bell,?The wind-flower, and the spotted adder-tongue.
III.
All the day long, wherever pools might be?Among the golden meadows, where the air?Stood in a dream, as it were moorèd there?Forever in a noon-tide reverie,?Or where the birds made riot of their glee?In the still woods, and the hot sun shone down,?Crossed with warm lucent shadows on the brown?Leaf-paven pools, that bubbled dreamily,
Or far away in whispering river meads?And watery marshes where the brooding noon,?Full with the wonder of its own sweet boon,?Nestled and slept among the noiseless reeds,?Ye sat and murmured, motionless as they,?With eyes that dreamed beyond the night and day.
IV.
And when, day passed and over heaven's height,?Thin with the many stars and cool with dew,?The fingers of the deep hours slowly drew?The wonder of the ever-healing night,?No grief or loneliness or wrapt delight?Or weight of silence ever brought to you?Slumber or rest; only your