Among the Millet and Other Poems | Page 5

They called you sheep, the sky your sward,
A field without a reaper;

They called the shining sun your lord,
The shepherd wind your
keeper.
Your sweetest poets I will deem
The men of old for moulding
In
simple beauty such a dream,
And I could lie beholding,
Where daisies in the meadow toss,
The wind from morn till even,

Forever shepherd you across
The shining field of heaven.

APRIL.
Pale season, watcher in unvexed suspense,
Still priestess of the
patient middle day,
Betwixt wild March's humored petulence
And
the warm wooing of green kirtled May,
Maid month of sunny peace
and sober grey,
Weaver of flowers in sunward glades that ring
With
murmur of libation to the spring:
As memory of pain, all past, is peace,
And joy, dream-tasted, hath the
deepest cheer,
So art thou sweetest of all months that lease
The
twelve short spaces of the flying year.
The bloomless days are dead,
and frozen fear
No more for many moons shall vex the earth,

Dreaming of summer and fruit laden mirth.
The grey song-sparrows full of spring have sung
Their clear thin
silvery tunes in leafless trees;
The 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 æons, 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