Poems of Nature, part 3, Reminiscent Poems | Page 7

pickerel pond,?Mine the walnut slopes beyond,?Mine, on bending orchard trees,?Apples of Hesperides!?Still as my horizon grew,?Larger grew my riches too;?All the world I saw or knew?Seemed a complex Chinese toy,?Fashioned for a barefoot boy!
Oh for festal dainties spread,?Like my bowl of milk and bread;?Pewter spoon and bowl of wood,?On the door-stone, gray and rude!?O'er me, like a regal tent,?Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent,?Purple-curtained, fringed with gold,?Looped in many a wind-swung fold;?While for music came the play?Of the pied frogs' orchestra;?And, to light the noisy choir,?Lit the fly his lamp of fire.?I was monarch: pomp and joy?Waited on the barefoot boy!
Cheerily, then, my little man,?Live and laugh, as boyhood can?Though the flinty slopes be hard,?Stubble-speared the new-mown sward,?Every morn shall lead thee through?Fresh baptisms of the dew;?Every evening from thy feet?Shall the cool wind kiss the heat?All too soon these feet must hide?In the prison cells of pride,?Lose the freedom of the sod,?Like a colt's for work be shod,?Made to tread the mills of toil,?Up and down in ceaseless moil?Happy if their track be found?Never on forbidden ground;?Happy if they sink not in?Quick and treacherous sands of sin.?Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,?Ere it passes, barefoot boy!?1855.
MY PSALM.
I mourn no more my vanished years?Beneath a tender rain,?An April rain of smiles and tears,?My heart is young again.
The west-winds blow, and, singing low,?I hear the glad streams run;?The windows of my soul I throw?Wide open to the sun.
No longer forward nor behind?I look in hope or fear;?But, grateful, take the good I find,?The best of now and here.
I plough no more a desert land,?To harvest weed and tare;?The manna dropping from God's hand?Rebukes my painful care.
I break my pilgrim staff, I lay?Aside the toiling oar;?The angel sought so far away?I welcome at my door.
The airs of spring may never play?Among the ripening corn,?Nor freshness of the flowers of May?Blow through the autumn morn.
Yet shall the blue-eyed gentian look?Through fringed lids to heaven,?And the pale aster in the brook?Shall see its image given;--
The woods shall wear their robes of praise,?The south-wind softly sigh,?And sweet, calm days in golden haze?Melt down the amber sky.
Not less shall manly deed and word?Rebuke an age of wrong;?The graven flowers that wreathe the sword?Make not the blade less strong.
But smiting hands shall learn to heal,--?To build as to destroy;?Nor less my heart for others feel?That I the more enjoy.
All as God wills, who wisely heeds?To give or to withhold,?And knoweth more of all my needs?Than all my prayers have told.
Enough that blessings undeserved?Have marked my erring track;?That wheresoe'er my feet have swerved,?His chastening turned me back;
That more and more a Providence?Of love is understood,?Making the springs of time and sense?Sweet with eternal good;--
That death seems but a covered way?Which opens into light,?Wherein no blinded child can stray?Beyond the Father's sight;
That care and trial seem at last,?Through Memory's sunset air,?Like mountain-ranges overpast,?In purple distance fair;
That all the jarring notes of life?Seem blending in a psalm,?And all the angles of its strife?Slow rounding into calm.
And so the shadows fall apart,?And so the west-winds play;?And all the windows of my heart?I open to the day.?1859.
THE WAITING.
I wait and watch: before my eyes?Methinks the night grows thin and gray;?I wait and watch the eastern skies?To see the golden spears uprise?Beneath the oriflamme of day!
Like one whose limbs are bound in trance?I hear the day-sounds swell and grow,?And see across the twilight glance,?Troop after troop, in swift advance,?The shining ones with plumes of snow!
I know the errand of their feet,?I know what mighty work is theirs;?I can but lift up hands unmeet,?The threshing-floors of God to beat,?And speed them with unworthy prayers.
I will not dream in vain despair?The steps of progress wait for me?The puny leverage of a hair?The planet's impulse well may spare,?A drop of dew the tided sea.
The loss, if loss there be, is mine,?And yet not mine if understood;?For one shall grasp and one resign,?One drink life's rue, and one its wine,?And God shall make the balance good.
Oh power to do! Oh baffled will!?Oh prayer and action! ye are one.?Who may not strive, may yet fulfil?The harder task of standing still,?And good but wished with God is done!?1862.
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