Sister Songs | Page 2

sure upraise
For homage
unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways:
Those flutes do flute their vowelled
lay,
Their lovely languid language say,
For lisping to Sylvia;

Those viols' lissom bowings break the heart of May,
And harps harp
their burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
3.
Now at that music and that mirth
Rose, as 'twere, veils from earth;

And I spied
How beside
Bud, bell, bloom, an elf
Stood, or was
the flower itself
'Mid radiant air
All the fair
Frequence swayed in
irised wavers.
Some against the gleaming rims
Their bosoms prest

Of the kingcups, to the brims
Filled with sun, and their white limbs

Bathed in those golden lavers;
Some on the brown, glowing breast

Of that Indian maid, the pansy,
(Through its tenuous veils confest

Of swathing light), in a quaint fancy
Tied her knot of yellow
favours;
Others dared open draw
Snapdragon's dreadful jaw:

Some, just sprung from out the soil,
Sleeked and shook their rumpled
fans
Dropt with sheen
Of moony green;
Others, not yet extricate,

On their hands leaned their weight,
And writhed them free with
mickle toil,
Still folded in their veiny vans:
And all with an
unsought accord
Sang together from the sward;
Whence had come,
and from sprites
Yet unseen, those delights,
As of tempered musics
blent,
Which had given me such content.
For haply our best
instrument,
Pipe or cithern, stopped or strung,

Mimics but some
spirit tongue.
Their amiable voices, I bid them upraise
To Sylvia, O Sylvia, her
sweet, feat ways;
Their lovesome labours laid away,
To linger out
this holiday
In syllabling to Sylvia;
While all the birds on branches
lave their mouths with May, To bear with me this burthen,
For
singing to Sylvia.
4.

Next I saw, wonder-whist,
How from the atmosphere a mist,
So it
seemed, slow uprist;
And, looking from those elfin swarms,
I was
'ware
How the air
Was all populous with forms
Of the Hours,
floating down,
Like Nereids through a watery town.
Some, with
languors of waved arms,
Fluctuous oared their flexile way;
Some
were borne half resupine
On the aerial hyaline,
Their fluid limbs
and rare array
Flickering on the wind, as quivers
Trailing weed in
running rivers;
And others, in far prospect seen,
Newly loosed on
this terrene,
Shot in piercing swiftness came,
With hair a-stream
like pale and goblin flame.
As crystelline ice in water,
Lay in air
each faint daughter;
Inseparate (or but separate dim)
Circumfused
wind from wind-like vest,
Wind-like vest from wind-like limb.
But
outward from each lucid breast,
When some passion left its haunt,

Radiate surge of colour came,
Diffusing blush-wise, palpitant,

Dying all the filmy frame.
With some sweet tenderness they would

Turn to an amber-clear and glossy gold;
Or a fine sorrow, lovely to
behold,
Would sweep them as the sun and wind's joined flood

Sweeps a greening-sapphire sea;
Or they would glow enamouredly

Illustrious sanguine, like a grape of blood;
Or with mantling poetry

Curd to the tincture which the opal hath,
Like rainbows thawing in a
moonbeam bath.
So paled they, flushed they, swam they, sang
melodiously.
Their chanting, soon fading, let them, too, upraise
For homage unto
Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways;

Weave with suave float their waved way,

And colours take of holiday,
For syllabling to Sylvia;
And all the
birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
To bear with me this
burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
5.
Then, through those translucencies,
As grew my senses clearer clear,

Did I see, and did I hear,
How under an elm's canopy
Wheeled a
flight of Dryades
Murmuring measured melody.
Gyre in gyre their

treading was,
Wheeling with an adverse flight,
In twi-circle o'er the
grass,
These to left, and those to right;
All the band
Linked by
each other's hand;
Decked in raiment stained as
The blue-helmed
aconite.
And they advance with flutter, with grace,
To the dance

Moving on with a dainty pace,
As blossoms mince it on river swells.

Over their heads their cymbals shine,
Round each ankle gleams a
twine
Of twinkling bells -
Tune twirled golden from their cells.

Every step was a tinkling sound,
As they glanced in their
dancing-ground,
Clouds in cluster with such a sailing
Float o'er the
light of the wasting moon,
As the cloud of their gliding veiling

Swung in the sway of the dancing-tune.
There was the clash of their
cymbals clanging,
Ringing of swinging bells clinging their feet;

And the clang on wing it seemed a-hanging,
Hovering round their
dancing so fleet. -
I stirred, I rustled more than meet;
Whereat they
broke to the left and right,
With eddying robes like aconite
Blue of
helm;
And I beheld to the foot o' the elm.
They have not tripped those dances, betrayed to my gaze,
To glad the
heart of Sylvia, beholding of their maze;
Through barky walls have
slid away,
And tricked them in their holiday,
For other than for
Sylvia;
While all the birds on branches lave their mouths with May,
And bear with me this burthen,
For singing to Sylvia.
6.
Where its umbrage was enrooted,
Sat white-suited,
Sat
green-amiced, and bare-footed,
Spring amid her minstrelsy;
There
she sat amid her ladies,

Where the shade is
Sheen as Enna mead ere
Hades'
Gloom fell thwart Persephone.
Dewy buds were interstrown

Through her tresses hanging down,
And her feet
Were most
sweet,
Tinged like sea-stars, rosied brown.
A throng of children like
to flowers were sown
About the grass beside, or clomb her knee:
I
looked who were that favoured company.
And one there stood

Against the beamy flood
Of sinking day, which, pouring its

abundance,
Sublimed the illuminous and volute redundance
Of
locks that, half dissolving, floated round her face;
As see I might

Far off a