Among the Millet and Other Poems | Page 8

the shy birds hidden,?Pipe to us strangely entering unbidden,?And tenderly still in the tremulous glooms?The trilliums scatter their white-winged stars;
Up to the hills where our tired hearts rest,?Loosen, and halt, and regather their dreams;?Up to the hills, where the winds restore us,?Clearing our eyes to the beauty before us,?Earth with the glory of life on her breast,?Earth with the gleam of her cities and streams.
Here we shall commune with her and no other;?Care and the battle of life shall cease;?Men her degenerate children behind us,?Only the might of her beauty shall bind us,?Full of rest, as we gaze on the face of our mother,?Earth in the health and the strength of her peace.
MORNING ON THE LIèVRES.
Far above us where a jay?Screams his matins to the day,?Capped with gold and amethyst,?Like a vapour from the forge?Of a giant somewhere hid,?Out of hearing of the clang?Of his hammer, skirts of mist?Slowly up the woody gorge?Lift and hang.
Softly as a cloud we go,?Sky above and sky below,?Down the river, and the dip?Of the paddles scarcely breaks,?With the little silvery drip?Of the water as it shakes?From the blades, the crystal deep?Of the silence of the morn,?Of the forest yet asleep,?And the river reaches borne?In a mirror, purple grey,?Sheer away?To the misty line of light,?Where the forest and the stream?In the shadow meet and plight,?Like a dream.
From amid a stretch of reeds,?Where the lazy river sucks?All the water as it bleeds?From a little curling creek,?And the muskrats peer and sneak?In around the sunken wrecks?Of a tree that swept the skies?Long ago,?On a sudden seven ducks?With a splashy rustle rise,?Stretching out their seven necks,?One before, and two behind,?And the others all arow,?And as steady as the wind?With a swivelling whistle go,?Through the purple shadow led,?Till we only hear their whir?In behind a rocky spur,?Just ahead.
IN OCTOBER.
Along the waste, a great way off, the pines,?Like tall slim priests of storm, stand up and bar?The low long strip of dolorous red that lines?The under west, where wet winds moan afar.?The cornfields all are brown, and brown the meadows?With the blown leaves' wind-heapèd traceries,?And the brown thistle stems that cast no shadows,?And bear no bloom for bees.
As slowly earthward leaf by red leaf slips,?The sad trees rustle in chill misery,?A soft strange inner sound of pain-crazed lips,?That move and murmur incoherently;?As if all leaves, that yet have breath, were sighing,?With pale hushed throats, for death is at the door,?So many low soft masses for the dying?Sweet leaves that live no more.
Here I will sit upon this naked stone,?Draw my coat closer with my numbèd hands,?And hear the ferns sigh, and the wet woods moan,?And send my heart out to the ashen lands;?And I will ask myself what golden madness,?What balmèd breaths of dreamland spicery,?What visions of soft laughter and light sadness?Were sweet last month to me.
The dry dead leaves flit by with thin wierd tunes,?Like failing murmurs of some conquered creed,?Graven in mystic markings with strange runes,?That none but stars and biting winds may read;?Here I will wait a little; I am weary,?Not torn with pain of any lurid hue,?But only still and very gray and dreary,?Sweet sombre lands, like you.
LAMENT OF THE WINDS.
We in sorrow coldly witting,?In the bleak world sitting, sitting,?By the forest, near the mould,?Heard the summer calling, calling,?Through the dead leaves falling, falling,?That her life grew faint and old.
And we took her up, and bore her,?With the leaves that moaned before her,?To the holy forest bowers,?Where the trees were dense and serried,?And her corpse we buried, buried,?In the graveyard of the flowers.
Now the leaves, as death grows vaster,?Yellowing deeper, dropping faster,?All the grave wherein she lies?With their bodies cover, cover,?With their hearts that love her, love her,?For they live not when she dies:
And we left her so, but stay not?Of our tears, and yet we may not,?Though they coldly thickly fall,?Give the dead leaves any, any,?For they lie so many, many,?That we cannot weep for all.
BALLADE OF SUMMER'S SLEEP.
Sweet summer is gone; they have laid her away--?The last sad hours that were touched with her grace-- In the hush where the ghosts of the dead flowers play;?The sleep that is sweet of her slumbering space?Let not a sight or a sound erase?Of the woe that hath fallen on all the lands:?Gather ye, dreams, to her sunny face,?Shadow her head with your golden hands.
The woods that are golden and red for a day?Girdle the hills in a jewelled case,?Like a girl's strange mirth, ere the quick death slay?The beautiful life that he hath in chase.?Darker and darker the shadows pace?Out of the north to the southern sands,?Ushers bearing the winter's mace:?Keep them away with your woven hands.
The yellow light lies on the wide wastes gray,?More bitter and cold than the winds that race,?From the skirts of the autumn, tearing away,?This way and that way, the woodland