Among the Millet and Other Poems | Page 7

moods of mine that sometime made?My heart a heaven, opening like a flower,?A sweeter world where I in wonder strayed,?Begirt with shapes of beauty and the power?Of dreams that moved through that enchanted clime?With changing breaths of rhyme,?Were all gone lifeless now like those white leaves,?That hang all winter, shivering dead and blind?Among the sinewy beeches in the wind,?That vainly calls and grieves.
Ah! I will set no more mine overtaskèd brain?To barren search and toil that beareth nought,?Forever following with sorefooted pain?The crossing pathways of unbournèd thought;?But let it go, as one that hath no skill,?To take what shape it will,?An ant slow-burrowing in the earthy gloom,?A spider bathing in the dew at morn,?Or a brown bee in wayward fancy borne?From hidden bloom to bloom.
Hither and thither o'er the rocking grass?The little breezes, blithe as they are blind,?Teasing the slender blossoms pass and pass,?Soft-footed children of the gipsy wind,?To taste of every purple-fringèd head?Before the bloom is dead;?And scarcely heed the daisies that, endowed?With stems so short they cannot see, up-bear?Their innocent sweet eyes distressed, and stare?Like children in a crowd.
Not far to fieldward in the central heat,?Shadowing the clover, a pale poplar stands?With glimmering leaves that, when the wind comes, beat?Together like innumerable small hands,?And with the calm, as in vague dreams astray,?Hang wan and silver-grey;?Like sleepy m?nads, who in pale surprise,?Half-wakened by a prowling beast, have crept?Out of the hidden covert, where they slept,?At noon with languid eyes.
The crickets creak, and through the noonday glow,?That crazy fiddler of the hot mid-year,?The dry cicada plies his wiry bow?In long-spun cadence, thin and dusty sere:?From the green grass the small grasshoppers' din?Spreads soft and silvery thin:?And ever and anon a murmur steals?Into mine ears of toil that moves alway,?The crackling rustle of the pitch-forked hay?And lazy jerk of wheels.
As so I lie and feel the soft hours wane,?To wind and sun and peaceful sound laid bare,?That aching dim discomfort of the brain?Fades off unseen, and shadowy-footed care?Into some hidden corner creeps at last?To slumber deep and fast;?And gliding on, quite fashioned to forget,?From dream to dream I bid my spirit pass?Out into the pale green ever-swaying grass?To brood, but no more fret.
And hour by hour among all shapes that grow?Of purple mints and daisies gemmed with gold?In sweet unrest my visions come and go;?I feel and hear and with quiet eyes behold;?And hour by hour, the ever-journeying sun,?In gold and shadow spun,?Into mine eyes and blood, and through the dim?Green glimmering forest of the grass shines down,?Till flower and blade, and every cranny brown,?And I are soaked with him.
FREEDOM.
Out of the heart of the city begotten?Of the labour of men and their manifold hands,?Whose souls, that were sprung from the earth in her morning, No longer regard or remember her warning,?Whose hearts in the furnace of care have forgotten?Forever the scent and the hue of her lands;
Out of the heat of the usurer's hold,?From the horrible crash of the strong man's feet;?Out of the shadow where pity is dying;?Out of the clamour where beauty is lying,?Dead in the depth of the struggle for gold;?Out of the din and the glare of the street;
Into the arms of our mother we come,?Our broad strong mother, the innocent earth,?Mother of all things beautiful, blameless,?Mother of hopes that her strength makes tameless,?Where the voices of grief and of battle are dumb,?And the whole world laughs with the light of her mirth.
Over the fields, where the cool winds sweep,
Black with the mould and brown with the loam,?Where the thin green spears of the wheat are appearing, And the high-ho shouts from the smoky clearing;?Over the widths where the cloud shadows creep;?Over the fields and the fallows we come;
Over the swamps with their pensive noises,?Where the burnished cup of the marigold gleams;?Skirting the reeds, where the quick winds shiver?On the swelling breast of the dimpled river,?And the blue of the king-fisher hangs and poises,?Watching a spot by the edge of the streams;
By the miles of the fences warped and dyed?With the white-hot noons and their withering fires, Where the rough bees trample the creamy bosoms?Of the hanging tufts of the elder blossoms,?And the spiders weave, and the grey snakes hide,?In the crannied gloom of the stones and the briers;
Over the meadow lands sprouting with thistle,?Where the humming wings of the blackbirds pass,?Where the hollows are banked with the violets flowering, And the long-limbed pendulous elms are towering,?Where the robins are loud with their voluble whistle, And the ground sparrow scurries away through the grass,
Where the restless bobolink loiters and woos?Down in the hollows and over the swells,?Dropping in and out of the shadows,?Sprinkling his music about the meadows,?Whistles and little checks and coos,?And the tinkle of glassy bells;
Into the dim woods full of the tombs?Of the dead trees soft in their sepulchres,?Where the pensive throats of