The Song of the Stone Wall | Page 3

with their crabbed muse?Are beautiful for their halting words of faith,?Their groping love that had no gift of song.?But all the broken tragedy of life?And all the yearning mystery of death?Are celebrated in sweet epitaphs of vines and violets.?Close by the wall a peristyle of pines?Sings requiem to all the dead that sleep.
Beyond the village churchyard, still and calm,?Steeped in the sweetness of eternal morn,?The wall runs down in crumbling cadence?Beside the brook which plays?Through the land like a silver harp.?A wind of ancient romance blows across the field,?A sweet disturbance thrills the air;?The silken skirts of Spring go rustling by,?And the earth is astir with joy.?Up the hill, romping and shaking their golden heads,?Come the little children of the wood.?From ecstasy to ecstasy the year mounts upward.?Up from the south come the odor-laden winds,?Angels and ministers of life,?Dropping seeds of fruitfulness?Into the bosoms of flowers.?Elusive, alluring secrets hide in wood and hedge?Like the first thoughts of love?In the breast of a maiden;?The witchery of love is in rock and tree.?Across the pasture, star-sown with daisies,?I see a young girl--the spirit of spring she seems,?Sister of the winds that run through the rippling daisies.?Sweet and clear her voice calls father and brother,?And one whose name her shy lips will not utter.?But a chorus of leaves and grasses speaks her heart?And tells his name: the birches flutter by the wall;?The wild cherry-tree shakes its plumy head?And whispers his name; the maple?Opens its rosy lips and murmurs his name;?The marsh-marigold sends the rumor?Down the winding stream, and the blue flag?Spread the gossip to the lilies in the lake:?All Nature’s eyes and tongues conspire?In the unfolding of the tale?That Adam and Eve beneath the blossoming rose-tree?Told each other in the Garden of Eden.?Once more the wind blows from the walls,?And I behold a fair young mother;?She stands at the lilac-shaded door?With her baby at her breast;?She looks across the twilit fields and smiles?And whispers to her child: “Thy father comes!”
Life triumphed over many-weaponed Death.?Sorrow and toil and the wilderness thwarted their stout invasion; But with the ship that sailed again went no retreating soul! Stubborn, unvanquished, clinging to the skirts of Hope,?They kept their narrow foothold on the land,?And the ship sailed home for more.?With yearlong striving they fought their way into the forest; Their axes echoed where I sit, a score of miles from the sea. Slowly, slowly the wilderness yielded?To smiling grass-plots and clearings of yellow corn;?And while the logs of their cabins were still moist?With odorous sap, they set upon the hill?The shrine of liberty for man’s mind,?And by it the shrine of liberty for man’s soul,?The school-house and the church.
The apple-tree by the wall sheds its blossom about me--?A shower of petals of light upon darkness.?From Nature’s brimming cup I drink a thousand scents;?At noon the wizard sun stirs the hot soil under the pines.?I take the top stone of the wall in my hands?And the sun in my heart;?I feel the rippling land extend to right and left,?Bearing up a receptive surface to my uncertain feet;?I clamber up the hill and beyond the grassy sweep;?I encounter a chaos of tumbled rocks.?Piles of shadow they seem, huddling close to the land.?Here they are scattered like sheep,?Or like great birds at rest,?There a huge block juts from the giant wave of the hill.?At the foot of the aged pines the maiden’s moccasins?Track the sod like the noiseless sandals of Spring.?Out of chinks in the wall delicate grasses wave,?As beauty grew out of the crannies of these hard souls.
Joyously, gratefully, after their long wrestling?With the bitter cold and the harsh white winter,?They heard the step of Spring on the edge of melting snow-drifts; Gladly, with courage that flashed from their life-beaten souls, As the fire-sparks fly from the hammered stone,?They hailed the fragrant arbutus;?Its sweetness trailed beside the path that they cut through the forest,?And they gave it the name of their ship Mayflower.
Beauty was at their feet, and their eyes beheld it;?The earth cried out for labor, and they gave it.?But ever as they saw the budding spring,?Ever as they cleared the stubborn field,?Ever as they piled the heavy stones,?In mystic vision they saw, the eternal spring;?They raised their hardened hands above the earth,?And beheld the walls that are not built of stone,?The portals opened by angels whose garments are of light;?And beyond the radiant walls of living stones?They dreamed vast meadows and hills of fadeless green.
In the old house across the road?With weather-beaten front, like the furrowed face of an old man, The lights are out forever, the windows are broken,?And the oaken posts are warped;?The storms beat into the rooms as the passion of the world?Racked and buffeted those who once dwelt in them.?The psalm and the morning prayer are silent.?But the walls remain visible witnesses of faith?That